Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (26 page)

If there was one luxury I had as captain of the Good Ship Body Van, it was time to think. Driving more than 350 miles a day as a long-haul corpse trucker gives one ample time to ponder. Some days I listened to books on tape (
Moby-Dick
on eighteen unabridged CDs, thank you very much). Other days it was the Christian talk radio that starts to come in clearly as soon as you leave metropolitan Los Angeles. But mostly I thought about death.

Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives. This need for meaning is why some believe in an intricate system of potential afterlives, others believe sacrificing a certain animal on a certain day leads to healthy crops, and still others believe the world will end when a ship constructed with the untrimmed nails of the dead arrives carrying a corpse army to do battle with the gods at the end of days. (Norse mythology will always be the most metal, sorry.)

But there is something deeply unsettling—or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it—about what is happening to our death values. There has
never
been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality. There have been times when humans were driven to break tradition by necessity—for example, deaths on a foreign battlefield. But for the most part, when a person dies, they are disposed of like their mother and father were, and like
their
mothers and fathers were. Hindus were cremated, elite Egyptians entombed with their organs in jars, Viking warriors buried in ships. And now, the cultural norm is that Americans are either embalmed and buried, or cremated. But culture no longer dictates that we
must
do those things, out of belief or obligation.

Historically, death rituals have, without question, been tied to religious beliefs. But our world is becoming increasingly secular. The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion”—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even those who identify as having strong religious beliefs often feel their once-strong death rituals have been commoditized and hold less meaning for them. At a time like this, there is no limit to our creativity in creating rituals relevant to our modern lives. The freedom is exciting, but it is also a burden. We cannot possibly live without a relationship to our mortality, and developing secular methods for addressing death will become more critical as each year passes. 

I started to put essays and manifestos on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death,” looking for people who shared my desire for change. One such person was Jae Rhim Lee, an MIT-trained designer and artist who created a full-body suit for a human to wear for burial. The “Infinity Burial Suit,” which might be described as ninja couture, features a dendritic pattern of white thread spreading out across the black fabric. Lee crafted the thread from mushroom spores, which she specially engineered to consume parts of the human body using her own skin, hair, and nails. This may sound like a
Soylent Green
future, but Lee is actually training the mushrooms to remove toxins from our bodies as they decompose the human corpse.

After seeing a demonstration of her work at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, we met at a taco truck and talked for hours on a bus-stop bench on Olympic and La Brea. I was grateful to talk to someone interested in pushing the boundaries of body disposal; she was grateful that someone in the traditional funeral industry was willing to listen to her ideas. We both agreed that inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition was a noble purpose. She gave me a bucket of the flesh-eating mushroom prototype, which I attempted (and failed) to keep alive in my garage. Not feeding it enough flesh, I reckon.

For years, while working at Westwind and attending mortuary school, I had been afraid to discuss cultural death denial in public. The Internet is not always the kindest of forums, especially for young women. Tucked away in the comment section of my kitschy web series “Ask a Mortician,” there are enough misogynistic comments to last a lifetime. Yes, gentlemen, I’m aware I give your penis rigor mortis. It wasn’t just the anonymous basement dwellers who took issue with me. People in the funeral industry weren’t always thrilled that I was sharing what they perceived to be privileged “behind the black curtain” knowledge. “I’m sure she’s just having some fun. But since fun has no place in the funeral industry, I wouldn’t go to her for my loved one.” To this day the National Funeral Directors Association, the industry’s largest professional association, won’t comment on me.

But as I grew bolder, people came out of the woodwork. Crawled out of the coffin, if you will. People from all different disciplines—funeral directors, hospice workers, academics, filmmakers, artists—had wanted to discover how death works in our lives.

I wrote a lot of letters, sometimes out of the blue. One such recipient was Dr. John Troyer, a professor at the University of Bath’s Center for Death and Society. Dr. Troyer, whose PhD dissertation was titled “Technologies of the Human Corpse,” is studying crematoriums that capture the excess heat from the cremation process and put it to use elsewhere—heating other buildings, or even, as one crematory in Worcestershire did, a local swimming pool, saving taxpayers £14,500 a year. It is a way to make the cremation process, which uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body, more energy efficient. Luckily Dr. Troyer was willing to talk with me, even with my crude e-mail subject line, “Fan Gurl!”

It was a relief to find others like me; it removed the stigma and alienation. These were practitioners shifting our relationship with death, pulling the shroud off our deathways and getting to the hard work of facing the inevitable.

This work drove me internally. Externally, I was just the body-van driver. Three times a week I would drive my eleven corpses up the I-5 from San Diego and pass through the immigration checkpoint. My large, unmarked white van moved slowly toward the front of the inspection line, looking far more suspicious than the Priuses and Volvos in the other lanes. I would find myself hoping to be stopped, if only as a break from the monotony. In my mind, this is how the scene would go:

“You don’t got any
inmigrantes
back there, do ya, missy?”

“No
inmigrantes
, Officer. Just eleven people,” I’d reply, and, whipping off my sunglasses, “former US citizens.”

“Former?”

“Oh, they’re dead, Officer. Real dead.”

Unfortunately, every time the van rolled up and the officer saw a young white woman at the wheel, he or she would wave us right on through. I could have smuggled hundreds of Mexicans into the country in cardboard cremation containers. I could have been a drug mule. I could be a rich woman by now.

With as much time as I was spending on the road, my main fear was getting into an accident, crashing on the freeway. I imagined the back doors of my van flying open, all eleven passengers hurling out. The police show up amid chaos and confusion. Eleven fatalities—but why are these people so cold, with no signs of bodily trauma?

Once the smoke cleared and they discovered that all these fatalities were pre-dead, I’d become an Internet meme, my little head grimacing in a Photoshopped
Wizard of Oz
–style corpse tornado.

But every day I made it back to the crematory with my eleven bodies. When I pulled up behind the warehouse, Emiliano would be playing his accordion in the parking lot along with the Norteño music blasting from the stereo in his Cadillac. The soundtrack to my body unloading.

But the day I almost died, I wasn’t in the body van. I was driving my ancient Volkswagen through Salton Sea, California. Salton Sea is a man-made saltwater lake smack dab in the middle of the Southern California desert. One idea in the 1960s had been to redesign it as a resort destination, an alternative to Palm Springs. Now, instead of martinis, Hawaiian shirts, and water-skiing, abandoned mobile homes line a morass of brown water with an unbelievable stench. Massive fish die-offs have littered the shoreline with fish and pelican corpses. The satisfying crunch of the sand beneath your feet comes courtesy of thousands of dried bones. I had made the four-hour pilgrimage from Los Angeles to visit this monument to decay. Some consider it gauche to visit so-called ruin porn, but I like to witness firsthand the way nature will declare war against our hubris, building in places unintended for human habitation.

As I drove toward the northern shore of the thirty-five-mile-long Salton Sea, I chanced upon a dead coyote by the side of the road. This wasn’t one of the petite, doglike coyotes sometimes found in urban Los Angeles—it was a beast with a blackened tongue and distended stomach. I made a U-turn and returned to inspect him, undaunted by the suspicious locals in their trucks and ATVs.

Perhaps this coyote was an omen. The coyote and/or the fish graveyard at the Salton Sea. And/or the old women riding golf carts in pink Juicy Couture tracksuits. They all might have been omens.

Darkness had fallen before I departed for Los Angeles. The four westbound lanes of the I-10 freeway passed through Palm Springs, filled with Sunday revelers heading home. I was driving my Volkswagen in the far-left lane at a steady 75 miles per hour. The back left side of the car began to shake, and I felt the dull thud of a tire blowout. I put on my blinker to move into the median, miffed at my bad luck.

But it turned out a flat tire wasn’t the problem. The bearings had slipped loose and the entire wheel had begun spinning off the axle. Finally, bolts snapped and off it came, leaving a gaping hole where the wheel once was.

With only three wheels, the car spun wildly out of control. I spiraled across four lanes, raising a rooster tail of sparks as bare metal scraped against asphalt. Time seemed to slow as the Volkswagen performed its deadly dance across the highway. There was a complete, throbbing silence inside the car. The lights from oncoming traffic whirled in a blur around me, the vehicles missing me as if blocked by some miraculous buffer.

More than the loss of control, more than the crushing loneliness of contemporary life,
this
was my worst fear, what Buddhists and medieval Christians referred to as “the bad death”—a death for which there is no preparation. In the modern era it takes the form of bodies ripped apart in a searing crunch of metal. Never to tell their loved ones how passionately they are loved. Affairs out of order. Funeral desires unknown.

Yet, as I spun and my hands pulled the wheel in some attempt at control, my mind was miles away. At first, a voice said,
Ah, here we go,
and a gentle peace descended. The “Moonlight Sonata” played and slow motion began. I had no fear. I realized as the car spun that this would not have been a bad death. My four years working with bodies and the families attached to them had made this moment a transcendent experience. My body went limp, waiting to accept the violent impact. It never came.

I slammed into a dirt hill bordering the shoulder of the highway. Facing oncoming traffic head-on, upright, and alive, cars and semis whizzed by me at dizzying speed, any (or many) of which could have hit me during my swirling journey across the highway. But they hadn’t.

Once I had been terrified at the thought of my body being fragmented. No longer. My fear of fragmentation was born from fearing the loss of control. Here was the ultimate loss of control, flung across the freeway, but in the moment there was only calm.

THE ART OF DYING

T
here is a mid-fifteenth-century German woodcut entitled
Triumph over Temptation
that depicts a man lying on his deathbed. The denizens of heaven and hell surround him, fighting over his mortal soul. Demons with twisted porcine faces, claws, and hooves reach toward the bed to drag him down to the fiery underworld; above him, a horde of angels and a floating crucified Jesus pull a tiny version of the man (presumably his soul) upward to heaven. In the midst of all this commotion, the dying man looks positively blissed-out, filled with inner Zen. The little smirk on his face tells the viewer what he is thinking: “Ah yes, death. I’ve got this.”

The question is: how do we get to be
that
guy? The one who is facing his own death with complete calm, ready to get on with the moving-on.

The woodcut represents a popular genre in the late Middle Ages: the Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying. Ars Moriendi were instruction manuals that taught Christians how to die the good death, repenting mortal sins and allowing the soul to ascend to heaven. This view of death as an “art” or “practice,” rather than an emotionless biological process, can be tremendously empowering.

There is no Art of Dying manual available in our society, so I decided to write my own. It is intended not only for the religious, but also for the growing number of atheists, agnostics, and vaguely “spiritual” among us. For me, the good death includes being prepared to die, with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware; it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain. The good death means accepting death as inevitable, and not fighting it when the time comes. This is
my
good death, but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said, “It won’t help to hear what I think about death.” Your relationship to mortality is your own.