Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (7 page)

Kaipo, my direct supervisor, a young local Hawaiian man, would look at the board and declare in his thick pidgin accent, “Eh, Caitlin, you like come get Mr. Yamasake from Pauahi Wing?” Oh yes, I most certainly did want to get Mr. Yamasake.

Kaipo and I arrived in Mr. Yamasake’s room to find him curled up in the fetal position on his immaculate white hospital bed. He looked like a museum mummy, with taut skin like brown leather. He was less than ninety pounds, desiccated by disease and old age. Either one of us could have lifted him onto the stretcher with one hand.

“Dang, dis guy’s pretty old, yeah?” Kaipo said, Mr. Yamasake’s age surprising even a veteran of the corpse-transfer beat.

The stretcher Kaipo and I had brought with us was actually a hollowed-out metal cage. We placed Mr. Yamasake inside before covering him with a stainless steel top, like a lid. A white sheet was draped over the whole operation. Kaipo and I left Mr. Yamasake’s room pushing what appeared to be an empty stretcher.

We rolled into the elevator with regular hospital visitors holding their teddy bears and flowers, none the wiser about the secret corpse in their midst. (The next time you see two full-grown adults moving an unoccupied stretcher in a hospital, think of Mr. Yamasake.) The others got off the elevator long before we did. Kaipo, Mr. Yamasake, and I continued down to the basement.

The hospital presented itself as a positive place of healing with the latest technology and attractive Hawaiian art prints on the walls. Everything—the false stretcher, the secret morgue in the basement—was artfully designed to mask death, to distance it from the public. Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.

Kaipo and Chris from Westwind were kindred spirits in a way: two men of quiet dignity who transported the husks of the recently alive. To them it was a prosaic day job, while to the average citizen theirs was a task both mystifying and disgusting.

The first few house calls for Westwind taught me that Chris was unflappable, even when removing bodies in the cramped, near-impossible conditions of San Franciscan homes. We’d walk up perilous, winding staircases, and Chris would just sigh and say, “Better get the portable.” The portable was a portable stretcher, the kind they use to carry casualties off the field of battle. Chris and I would strap the deceased to that sucker and bring them out on their sides, their stomachs, straight up and down, over our heads—anything it took to get them out to the van.

“It’s just like moving furniture,” Chris explained. “Geometry and physics.”

Chris was equally unflappable in the face of decomposed bodies, overweight bodies, and downright bizarre bodies. By bizarre, I mean like the time we arrived at a home in the Haight District and were escorted into a cold, decrepit basement by a gentleman who had the pointed mustache and clawed hands of horror-movie actor Vincent Price. Propped up in the corner was the dead man, curled up in a ball with a single glass eye gazing up at us. “Well, that’s weird, Cat. Him winking at us? Let’s go get the portable.”

The most important thing about body removal was to never give up. Trite, perhaps, but it was Chris’s mantra. He told a story about a four-hundred-pound body located up three flights of stairs in a hoarder house infested with roaches. His number-two man that day had refused to even attempt the removal, saying they would never be able to get the person out with just the two of them. “I just lost all respect for him right then,” Chris said. “I hate people who don’t try.”

In our long trips in his van I learned more about Chris, like his single-minded obsession with the two years in the late 1970s he spent working for a tyrannical construction manager in Hawai’i. Some Google mapping showed that during his time in Hawai’i he had lived within a three-block radius of both my newly married parents and a young Barack Obama. (It was easy to construct mundane fantasy scenarios in my head where they were all at the same corner store together or crossing the street at the same stoplight.)

A
FEW
WEEKS
AFTER
our trip to the Adamses’, Chris and I took a house call in the Marina District of San Francisco at a fancy home on a well-trafficked street. We had been chatting about Hawai’i or the weather or Mike’s brusqueness when we pulled up outside. “You know what I think about, Cat?” Chris said as we grabbed our pairs of rubber gloves “How we’re like hit men. Like the guys in
Pulp Fiction
. They’re sitting there in the car talking about a sandwich, and then they go blow someone’s brains out. We’re just sitting here in the car chitchatting and now we’re goin’ in for a dead body.”

When we knocked, a dark-haired woman in her fifties opened the door. I gave her a big, sincere smile, having learned at that point that a sincere smile was more effective than faked sympathy.

“I called you hours ago!” she shrieked.

“Well, ma’am, you do know that it is rush hour and we were coming from Oakland,” Chris said in his soothing Chris voice.

“I don’t care, Mom deserves the best. Mom would have wanted everything to be dignified. She was a dignified woman, this is not dignified,” she continued, still shrieking.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, we’ll take good care of her,” Chris said.

We continued into a bedroom to find Mom. As we pulled out the sheet to shroud her, the woman hurled her body over her mother, wailing dramatically. “No, Mother, no, no! I need you, Mother, don’t leave me!”

This is what raw human emotion
should
look like. It had all the signs: death, loss, gut-wrenching wailing. I wanted to be moved, but I wasn’t. “Guilt,” Chris mumbled under his breath.

“What?” I whispered back.

“Guilt. I’ve seen this so many times. She hasn’t visited her for years. Now she’s here acting like she can’t live without her mother. It’s bullshit, Cat,” he said. And I knew he was right.

The woman finally extricated herself from mother’s corpse, and we were able to get Mom wrapped up and out the door. As we rolled the gurney out onto the busy street, people stopped and stared. Dog walkers halted and yoga moms slowed their baby carriages. They gawked at us as if we were detectives or coroners, pulling a body from a violent murder scene, not two mortuary workers handling a woman in her nineties who had died quietly at home in bed. 

There hadn’t always been this scandal surrounding scenes of death. When the bubonic plague swept through Europe in the 1300s, bodies of the victims would lie in the street in full view of the public, sometimes for days. Eventually the death carts would collect the dead and take them to the edge of town, where trenches were dug for mass graves. A chronicler in Italy described how bodies were layered in the ground—bodies then some dirt, bodies, then some more dirt—“just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.”

Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world. On an average day in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges in India, anywhere from eighty to a hundred cremation ghats burn. After a very public cremation (sometimes performed by young children from India’s untouchable caste), the bones and ashes are released into the waters of the holy river. Cremations do not come cheap; the cost of expensive wood, colorful body shrouds, and a professional cremationist adds up quickly. Families that cannot afford a cremation but want their dead loved one to go into the Ganges will place the entire body into the river by night, leaving it there to decompose. Visitors to Varanasi see bloated corpses floating by or being eaten by dogs. There are so many of these corpses in the river that the Indian government releases thousands of flesh-eating turtles to chomp away at the “necrotic pollutants.”

The industrialized world has established systems to prevent such unsavory encounters with the dead. At this very moment, corpses motor down highways and interstates in unmarked white vans like the one driven by Chris. Bodies crisscross the globe in the cargo holds of airplanes while vacationing passengers travel above. We have put the dead beneath. Not just underground, but under the tops of fake hospital stretchers, within the bellies of our aircraft, and in the recesses of our consciousness.

It is only when the systems are subverted that we even realize they are there. After Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Michael Osterholm of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy was quoted in the
Washington Post
as saying, “One of the many lessons to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is that Americans are not accustomed to seeing unattended bodies on the streets of a major city.” Understatement of the century, Doctor.

For the few minutes it took Chris and me to roll “Mom” from her front door to the back of the van, we gave the dog walkers and yoga moms a cheap, manageable thrill. A whiff of depravity, a small taste of their own mortality.

PUSH THE BUTTON

CBS NEWS, SAN FRANCISCO—A man possibly in his 20s appears to have voluntarily stood on Bay Area Rapid Transit tracks before he was fatally struck by a train at a San Francisco station around noon Saturday, BART officials said.

Witnesses claimed the man “stood in front of the train waiting for it to hit him,” BART spokesman Linton Johnson said. “He did not make any attempt to get out of the way.”

The man was struck and dragged under the BART train at the San Francisco Civic Center Station, halting all trains at that station for nearly three hours and causing system wide delays, according to Johnson.

Jacob was twenty-two when he climbed down onto the BART tracks and waited for the train to end his life. Twenty-two was only one year younger than I was. He didn’t look like someone who had been dragged under a train. He looked like someone who had been in a two a.m. bar fight—light facial bruising, a few cuts.

“The guy we had in here last month, the one pushed under the MUNI train,
that
guy was chopped in half,” Mike said, unimpressed.

Jacob’s only major damage was the absence of his left eyeball, which presumably went missing on the tracks. But if you turned his face to the right side, he looked almost normal, as if he could open his remaining eye and hold a conversation.

The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has. Life can become unbearable in all respects, and “this world can take everything from us . . . but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Cioran, a man “obsessed with the worst,” died an insomniac and recluse in Paris.

Cioran may have been predisposed to Negative Nancy-ism, but madness and despair can touch us no matter our philosophies. Nietzsche, who famously said in
Twilight of the Idols,
“What does not kill me makes me stronger,” suffered a mental breakdown at age forty-four. Eventually he fell into the full-time care of his sister, whose own husband had committed suicide in Paraguay.

Cruel and selfish as many view suicide to be, I suppose I felt supportive of Jacob’s decision. If every day of his life was dull misery, I could not demand he stay alive and endure more dull misery. I couldn’t know if it had been mental illness or a sense of endless despondency that had driven Jacob to suicide. It wasn’t my place to speculate on his motives. But I could pass judgment on his methods. There, I was firmly not on his side.

There was something in the
way
Jacob had killed himself that unsettled me. The public spectacle of staring down a crowded train. In college, I managed a coffee shop on the University of Chicago campus. Only two months before I started at Westwind, my former assistant manager hanged himself in his bedroom after a fight with his girlfriend. His roommate had to come home to find his body. The fact that he left those two women with the lifelong burden of his suicide made me ill, even more so than his death. If you are going to take yourself out of commission, it seems only fair you do so in a way that does the least harm to others, slipping out the back door of the party of life, ensuring the other guests don’t have to agonize about your choice.

Most of the damage Jacob caused by stepping in front of a BART train that day was financial: thousands of people late for work, flights from San Francisco and Oakland Airports missed, important appointments broken.

But for the train conductor, the person who had to look into Jacob’s eyes as he barreled toward him, helpless to stop the train in time, the damage was not financial. The average train conductor will involuntarily kill three people in his career. Having no choice but to kill someone (or several someones) has to be the quickest way to lose affection for an otherwise stable, even desirable, job.

Nor was the damage financial for the people waiting on the platform. They had to stand there screaming for him to get out of the way: didn’t he see there was a train coming? Then came the moment when they realized he knew perfectly well the train was coming, and they would be forced to witness what came next. Forced to live with the image, the sounds, their own confused screams for the rest of their lives.