Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (5 page)

Other than poor Superfly (and Superfly II, shortly thereafter), for most of my childhood I saw death only in cartoons and horror movies. I learned very early in life how to fast-forward videocassette tapes. With that skill I was able to skip the death scene of Bambi’s mother, the even more traumatic death scene of Little Foot’s mother in
The Land Before Time
, and the “off with her head” scene in
Alice in Wonderland
. Nothing snuck up on me. I was drunk with power, able to fast-forward through anything.

Then came the day that I lost my control over death. I was eight years old the evening of the Halloween costume contest at Windward Mall, only four blocks from my house. Intending to be a princess, I had found a blue sequined ball gown at a thrift store. When I realized that something as clichéd as “princess” was not going to win me any trophies, I decided, eyes on the prize, go scary or go home.

Out of the dress-up box came a long black wig, a prop I would later use for such vital artistic projects as a cringe-inducing rendition of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” filmed on my family’s 1980s videotape camcorder. On top of the wig sat a broken tiara. The finishing touch was fake blood—a few healthy squirts sealed it. I had transformed into a D.I.Y. dead prom queen.

When my turn came at the costume contest, I limped and shuffled down the atrium runway. The master of ceremonies asked me over the mall loudspeaker who I was supposed to be, and I answered in a zombie monotone, “He llleeefft me. Now he will paaayyy. I am the dead prom queen.” I think it was that voice that won the judges over. My prize money was $75—enough, I calculated, for an obscene amount of Pogs. If you were a third-grader living in Hawai’i in 1993, you structured your whole life around getting enough money for Pogs.

After taking off the sequined gown in a department store bathroom, I changed into a pair of neon-green leggings under a neon pink T-shirt (also very Hawai’i in 1993) and went to the mall’s haunted house with my friends. I wanted to find my father, hoping to charm him into giving me enough money for one of those giant pretzels. Like many malls, this one was two stories, with an open floor plan that allowed people on the higher floor to look down at the action below.

I spotted my father dozing on a bench at the food court. “Dad!” I yelled from the second story, “Pretzel, Dad! Pretzel!”

As I shouted and waved my arms, I saw out of the corner of my eye a little girl climb up to where the escalator met the second-story railing. As I watched, she tipped over the edge and fell thirty feet, landing face-first on a laminate counter with a sickening thud.

“My baby! No, my baby!” shrieked her mother, barreling down the escalator, violently shoving mall patrons aside as the crowd swarmed forward. To this day, I have never heard anything so otherworldly as that woman’s screams.

My knees buckled, and I looked down to where my father had been sitting, but he was gone with the surge of the crowd. Where he had been sitting there was only an empty bench.

That thud—that noise of the girl’s body hitting laminate—would repeat in my mind over and over, dull thud after dull thud. Today, the thuds might be called a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, but back then the noises were just the drumbeat of my childhood.

“Hey, kid, don’t
you
try and jump down too—just take the escalator, OK?” my dad said, trying to be lighthearted, with the same goofy grin he had used on my mom after the Superfly incident.

I didn’t think it was funny at all. I think my eyes told him nothing was funny anymore.

There is a Japanese myth that tells of the descent of Izanagi into the underworld to find his sister, Izanami. When he finds her, she tells him that she will return with him to the world of the living, but—in a parallel to the Western myth of Orpheus—under no circumstances should he look at her. Izanagi is impatient, and lights a torch to see her. The torchlight reveals Izanami’s corpse, rotting and covered in maggots. She attempts to chase her brother, but he draws a giant rock between them so they are separated forever. No longer ignorant of death, Izanagi must place the rock to shield him from his own thoughts, now filled with the horrors he discovered.

I sat up until dawn that night, afraid to turn out the lights. It was as if the little girl had fallen into a pit of fear in the center of my body. There had been no violence or gore; I had seen worse on television. But this was reality. Until that night I hadn’t truly understood that I was going to die, that everyone was going to die. I didn’t know who else had this debilitating piece of information. If others did possess this knowledge, I wondered, how could they possibly live with it?

The next morning, my parents found me huddled on the couch in the living room under several blankets, my eyes wide. They took me for chocolate-chip pancakes at the Koa House Restaurant. We never spoke about the “incident” again.

What is most surprising about this story is not that an eight-year-old witnessed a death, but that it took her eight whole years to do so. A child who had never seen a death would have been unheard-of only a hundred years ago.

North America is built on death. When the first European settlers arrived, all they did was die. If it wasn’t starvation, the freezing cold, or battles with the Native people, it was influenza, diphtheria, dysentery, or smallpox that did them in. At the end of the first three years of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, 440 of the original 500 settlers were dead. Children, especially, died
all the time
. If you were a mother with five children, you were lucky to have two of them live past the age of ten.

Death rates didn’t improve much in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A popular chant for a children’s jump-rope game went:

Grandmother, Grandmother,

Tell me the truth.

How many years

Am I going to live?

One, two, three, four . . . ?

The sad truth was that many wouldn’t live longer than a few skips in the rope. During funerals, children were enlisted to act as pallbearers for other children, carrying their tiny coffins through the streets. A dismal task, but those children’s long walk to the grave could be no worse than the terrors my young brain conjured after watching that little girl plunge through the air.

On a Girl Scout field trip to the local fire station a few months after the episode at the mall, I got up the nerve to ask one of the firemen what had happened to the girl. “It was real bad,” he said, shaking his head and looking at the ground in despair.

That wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to ask, “Real bad like they still haven’t found some of her organs, or real bad like it was an incredible trauma; I can’t believe she survived?”

I didn’t even know whether she was alive or dead, and I was far too terrified to ask. Very quickly it ceased to matter to me. Oprah could have brought me on her show and, her hands waving wildly, announced, “Caitlin, you don’t know it, but that girl is ALIIIIIVE and here she IIIIIS” and it wouldn’t have changed the fear that had already infected me. I had started seeing death everywhere. It lived at the very edge of my peripheral vision—a fuzzy, cloaked figure that disappeared when I turned to face him head-on.

There was a student in my class, Bryce Hashimoto, who had leukemia. I didn’t know what leukemia was, but a fellow classmate told me it made you throw up and die. As soon as he described the disease, I knew, at once, that it afflicted me as well. I could feel it eating me from the inside out.

Fearing death, I wanted to reclaim control over it. I figured it
had
to play favorites; I just needed to make sure I was one of those favorites.

To limit my anxiety I developed a whole bouquet of obsessive compulsive behaviors and rituals. My parents could die at any moment.
I
could die at any moment. It was my job to do everything right—counting, tapping, touching, checking—to retain balance in the universe and avoid further death.

The rules of the game were arbitrary but did not feel irrational. Walk the perimeter of my house three times in a row before feeding my dog. Step over fresh leaves; plant feet directly on dead leaves instead. Check five times to make sure the door had locked. Jump into bed from three feet away. Hold your breath when passing the mall so small children don’t go plummeting off the balcony.

My elementary school principal called my parents in for a chat. “Mr. and Mrs. Doughty, your daughter has been spitting into the front of her shirt. It’s a distraction.”

For months I had been ducking my mouth down into my shirt and releasing my saliva into the fabric, letting the wet stain slowly spread downward like a second collar. The reasons for this were obscure. Somehow I had decided that failing to drool down my shirt sent a direct message to the governing powers of the universe that I didn’t want my life badly enough, and that they were free to throw me to the wolves of death.

There is a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder called cognitive-behavioral therapy. By exposing the patient to her worst fears, she can see that the disastrous outcome she expects will not occur, even if she doesn’t perform her rituals. But my parents had grown up in a world where therapy was for the insane and the disturbed, not their cherished eight-year-old child (who just happened to spit into her shirt collar and obsessively tap her fingers on the kitchen counter).

As I grew older and the constant thoughts of death subsided, the rituals ended, and the thuds stopped haunting my dreams. I developed a thick layer of denial about death in order to live my life. When the feelings would come, the emotions, the grief, I would push them down deeper, furious at myself for allowing them to peek through. My inner dialogue could be ruthless:
You’re fine. You’re not starving, no one beats you. Your parents are still alive. There is
real
sadness in the world and yours is pathetic, you whiny
,
insignificant cow.

Sometimes I think of how my childhood would have been different if I had been introduced directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend.

So, really, what was a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind? The truth was, I saw the job as a way to fix what had happened to the eight-year- old me. The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn’t see her, then he couldn’t take her.

Not only could I heal myself, but I could develop ways to engage children with mortality from early on so that they didn’t end up as traumatized as I was by their first experience with death. The plan was simple. Picture this: an elegant house of bereavement—sleek and modern, but with an Old World charm. It was going to be called La Belle Mort. “Beautiful death,” in French. At least, I was fairly sure it meant beautiful death. I needed to double-check before opening my future funeral home, so I wasn’t like those girls who think they’re getting the Chinese character for “hope” tattooed on their hip when in fact it is the Chinese character for “gas station.”

La Belle Mort would be a place where families could come to mourn their dead in exciting new ways and put the “fun” back into “funeral.” Perhaps, I reasoned, our pathological fear of death comes from treating it as so much gloom and doom. The solution was to do away with all the nonsense of the “traditional” funeral.

Out the door with you, expensive caskets, tacky flower wreaths, and embalmed corpses in suits. Sayonara, canned eulogies featuring “Lo as you walk through the valley of sad stuff,” and stacks of greeting cards with sunsets and saccharine platitudes like “She’s in a better place.”

Our traditions had held us back for far too long. It was time to get out from underneath the cloud of death denial and into celebration mode. There would be parties and merriment at La Belle Mort. It would usher in the new age of the twenty-first-century spectacle funeral. Dad’s cremated ashes could be sent into space, or tamped into bullets and shot out of a gun, or turned into a wearable diamond. I would likely end up catering to celebrity types; Kanye West was sure to want a laser hologram of himself next to twelve-foot-high Champagne fountains at his memorial service. 

Back in the crematory at Westwind, as I waited for a pair of decedents to burn, I made lists of what I was going to offer at La Belle Mort Funeral Home: ashes turned into paintings, crushed into tattoo ink, made into pencils or hourglasses, shot out of a glitter canon. My Belle Mort notebook had a simple black cover, but the front page was covered in pastel stickers of giant-eyed animals like something from a Margaret Keane painting. I thought it made the contents more upbeat, but in retrospect it probably increased the creepy factor tenfold.

“What are you always writing over here?” Mike asked, peeking over my shoulder.

“Never you mind, boss. It’s just the death revolution. Never you mind,” I replied with no irony, scribbling the outline of a potential funeral package where an ash-scattering yacht carried your family out into the San Francisco Bay as a string quartet played a movement from Schubert’s
Death and the Maiden.

In my imagination, La Belle Mort appeared as the promised land of the postmodern designer funeral experience. Now that I had finally secured a real funeral job at Westwind, all I needed to do was get up every day and put on my ridiculously too-short pants and steel-toed boots and pay my dues in the trenches, burning bodies. If I worked hard enough no one could say I had never actually worked my way up through the death industry.

There were other eight-year-olds in the world, and if I could make death safe, clean, and beautiful for them, my sins would be absolved, and I too would emerge from the crematory fires cleansed.