Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (8 page)

Mike pointed out that a few of those people would envy the opportunity I had to cremate Jacob. “Maybe they’d smack him around a little first,” he said. “Some light revenge.”

As it was, they would never see his body. Jacob would maintain his power over them, haunting their dreams.

I thought of the years I had spent reliving the little girl hitting the ground at the mall, and I felt a searing sympathy for those people. I wanted to throw open the crematory doors to the train conductor and the other commuters. I wanted them with me that day, gathered around Jacob’s body so I could announce, “Look, here he is; he wanted to die. He is dead, but you’re not.
You are not dead
.”

It was illegal, this open-house-at-the-mortuary fantasy of mine. The California Code of Regulations clearly states that “the care and preparation for burial or other disposition of all human remains shall be strictly private.”

In the late 1800s, the citizens of Paris would come to the morgue by the
thousands
each day to view the bodies of the unidentified dead. Spectators lined up for hours to get in as vendors sold them fruit, pastries, and toys. When they reached the front of the line, they would be ushered into an exhibit room, where the corpses were laid out on slabs behind a large glass window. Vanessa Schwartz, scholar of fin-de-siècle Paris
,
called the Paris morgue “a spectacle of the real.”

Eventually the morgue exhibitions became
too
popular with the citizens of Paris, and they were shut down to the public. Morgues remain behind closed doors today, perhaps because those in charge of regulating death believe the hoi polloi would be too interested, and that such an interest is inherently wrong. Close the morgues if you will, but another attraction will always arise to fill void. The runaway popularity of
Body Worlds
, Gunther von Hagens’s traveling exhibit of plastinated human bodies, shows us that the human urge to file past corpses on display is indeed as strong as ever. In spite of the ongoing controversy that von Hagens obtained some of his bodies from Chinese political prisoners,
Body Worlds
is the most popular touring attraction in the world (having drawn 38 million people by the start of 2014).

J
ACOB
LIVED
IN
WASHINGTON
State, and visited San Francisco for reasons unknown. His parents arranged his cremation over the phone, faxing Westwind the required forms and reading us their credit card number to cover the balance. As usual, it was just Jacob and me as I loaded him into the cremation machine, his one eye gazing up at me.

Because of his violent death, Jacob was taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office before being brought to Westwind. The Medical Examiner’s Office is the modernized version of the Coroner’s Office, and is run by medical doctors trained to investigate suspicious or violent deaths. Whenever Westwind Cremation went to pick up a body, the examiner’s staff would give us whatever personal items arrived with the deceased. This usually meant clothes, jewelry, wallets, and so on.

Jacob came with a backpack. His parents didn’t want it mailed back to Washington, so the only place for it to go was into the flames alongside Jacob.

I set the backpack on a table and pulled open the zipper. Jackpot, I thought, one serving of understanding of the mind of a depressed madman, coming right up. But each item I pulled out was more obscenely normal than the next. Change of clothes, toiletries, a kombucha bottle. Then: a stack of notecards. At last! The scribblings of a suicidal lunatic? No. Chinese language flashcards.

I was disappointed. I had expected answers in that backpack, insight into the human condition.

“Hey, Caitlin, put this wallet back in there before you cremate it,” Mike called from his office.

“Wait, there’s a wallet?” I replied.

“I’m looking at his ID right now. There’s his college ID, his driver’s license, his Greyhound bus ticket to San Francisco. Oh, and a map of the BART train system; that’s depressing. He wrote something on the BART map. Word of the day: ‘anthropophagy.’ What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. I’m going to Google it right now. Spell it,” I said.

“A-N-T-H-R-O-P-O-P-H-A-G-Y.”

“Shit. It means cannibalism. It’s a synonym for cannibalism,” I said.

Mike laughed at the gallows humor of the definition. “No way. Do you think this means he had an insatiable desire for human flesh? This bus ticket says he got in to San Francisco the day before he died. Why not commit suicide back in Washington?”

“Right,” I added, “why would you come all the way to San Francisco to stand in front of a BART train?”

“Maybe he wasn’t trying to die. Just be an ass and dodge the train or something. Like that kid in
Stand by Me
.”

“Corey Feldman?” I asked.

“No, the other one.”

“River Phoenix?”

“No, not that one either,” Mike said. “Whatever, if that’s what he was trying, shit, he didn’t do a very good job.”

As I slid Jacob into the flames, the only things I knew about him were that he was a twenty-two-year-old from Washington who studied Chinese and was perhaps, at least on the day he died, interested in cannibalism. A few weeks earlier I had invested my first paycheck in the box set of the HBO television series
Six Feet Under
, the beloved show about a family-run mortuary. In one episode, Nate the funeral director visits a lonely, dying young man to arrange his cremation. The man is angry and bitter about his impending death and the lack of support from his family. He asks Nate who will push the button on the cremation machine when he dies.

“Whomever you specify,” Nate replies. “Buddhists have a family member, and then some people choose no one, in which case the person at the crematory does it.”

“I’ll take that guy.”

That was me. The person at the crematory. I was “that guy” for Jacob. In spite of what he had done, I didn’t want him to be alone.

T
HE
GREAT
TRIUMPH
(
OR
horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.

Say you are a gazelle, grazing an African plain. The soundtrack from
The Lion King
plays in the background. A hungry lion stalks you from a distance. He sprints in to attack, but today you manage to outrun him. By instinct, a fight-or-flight reaction, you feel momentary anxiety. Experience and genetics have taught you to run and evade danger, and it does take some time for your heart to stop racing. But soon enough you can return to happy grazing as if nothing had happened. Chomp-chomp, blissful chomps, until the lion comes back for round two.

The human heart rate may decelerate after the lion chase has ended, but we
never
stop knowing that the game is lost. We know death awaits us, and it affects everything we do, including the impulse to take elaborate care of our dead.

Some 95,000 years ago, a group of early
Homo sapiens
buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh Cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. Some of the surviving skeletal remains found at Qafzeh show stains of red ochre, a naturally tinted clay. Archeologists believe the ochre’s presence means that we performed rituals with our dead very early in our species’ history. One of the recovered skeletons, a thirteen-year-old child, was buried with its legs bent to the side and a pair of deer antlers in its arms. We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they
did
think about it.

When families came to Westwind to arrange for cremations and burials, they sat in our front arrangement room and nervously drank water out of paper cups, unhappy about the death that brought them there and often even more unhappy about having to pay for it. Sometimes they’d request a viewing in our chapel in order to see the dead body for a final time. Occasionally the chapel was filled with a hundred people weeping over the strains of gospel music; other days it was just a single mourner, sitting quietly for half an hour before seeing themselves out.

Families would go through the chapel or arrangement room, even the front office, but the crematory itself was my space. Most days I was alone “in the back,” as Mike called it.

On our price list we offered something called a “Witness Cremation,” but no one took us up on this offer the first few weeks I was at Westwind. Then, one day, there was the Huang family. When I showed up to work at eight thirty there were already a dozen older Asian women, in the supply closet of all places, setting up a makeshift altar.

“Mike?” I called out, walking toward his office.

“What’s up?” he called back with his usual deadpan indifference.

“Hey, why are there people in the supply closet?” I asked.

“Oh, right, they’re here for the witness this afternoon. There’s not going to be enough room in the chapel for all their stuff, so I gave them the supply closet for the altar,” he said.

“I—I didn’t know there was going to be a witness,” I fumbled, terrified at the invasion of my space and routine.

“I thought Chris told you, man. Don’t worry about it, I got this one,” he said.

Mike had no qualms about the day’s events. Maybe he could perform a witness cremation with one hand tied behind his back, but the whole premise seemed incalculably dangerous to me. A witness cremation followed a sequence: the family was given time in the chapel with the deceased, the body was wheeled into the crematory, and the cremation process was begun with the whole family standing right there.
With the whole family standing right there
. About as much room for error as in the transport of nuclear weapons.

When Western cremation evolved from open pyres to enclosed industrial machines, the first of these new machines were built with peepholes in the side so the family could peek in and watch the process like a naughty show. Some funeral homes even
required
that family members be there to witness the body being loaded into the machine. But as time went on the peepholes were covered and sealed, the families kept out of the crematory altogether.

Over the last few decades the funeral industry has evolved a number of methods to distance the family from any aspect of death that might potentially offend them, and not just in the crematory.

When my friend Mara’s grandmother suffered a fatal stroke, Mara was on the next flight to Florida to hold vigil at the deathbed. Over the next week, Mara watched her grandmother struggle to breathe, unable to swallow or move or make a sound. When death mercifully took the old woman, Mara expected she would be there through the whole funeral as well. She wasn’t. I received this message from her: “Caitlin, we just stood there next to the open grave. Her casket was there and the dirt was covered up with Astroturf. I kept thinking they were going to lower the casket into the grave. They never did. We had to walk away while the casket was still sitting there, unburied.”

Only after Mara’s family had left the cemetery would Grandmother’s casket be lowered into the ground and the yellow construction backhoes brought in to dump the dirt back on top.

These modern denial strategies help focus mourners on positive “celebrations of life”—life being far more marketable than death. One of the largest funeral-home corporations keeps small toaster ovens near their arrangement rooms so fresh-baked cookie smells will comfort and distract families throughout the day—fingers crossed that the chocolate chips mask the olfactory undertones of chemicals and decomposition.

I passed back through Westwind’s supply closet, nodding at the women who were making remarkable progress on the altar. They worked to arrange multiple bowls of fruit and circular flower wreaths at the base of a large framed picture of the deceased Mr. Huang, the patriarch of the family. The picture was in the style of a shopping-mall portrait, the head and shoulders of an older Chinese man in a sharp suit and abnormally rosy cheeks. Airbrushed clouds floated in the background.

On Mike’s instructions, Chris and I brought Mr. Huang’s wooden casket into the chapel. When we opened the lid, Mr. Huang was waiting for us in his best suit. He had the stiff, waxy appearance of an embalmed corpse, no longer the stern dreamer in his cloud portrait.

Throughout the morning, more and more of Mr. Huang’s family arrived, bearing more fruits and gifts for the supply-closet altar. “You,” an older woman barked at me with disapproval, “why you wear red?”

The color red, associated with happiness, is poor form at a Chinese funeral. The cherry-red dress I wore all but screamed, “Ha, grievers! I laugh in the face of cultural sensitivity!”

I wanted to protest that I didn’t know the Huang family would be there that day, especially for something as terrifying as a witness cremation. Instead I mumbled an apology and shuffled away with her bowl of oranges.

Mike had already gone into the back to preheat one of the retorts. When the time came for Mr. Huang’s cremation, he had me follow him into the chapel. We threaded our way through throngs of Mr. Huang’s relatives, clucking with displeasure at my red dress. The casket was rolled out of the chapel and into the crematory. The family streamed in behind us, thirty people at least, invading what until now had been my sacred space.

As we filed into the crematory, everyone (elderly women included) fell to their knees on the ground, wailing. The howls of the mourners mixed in with the roar of the cremation machine. The effect was eerie. I stood in the back, my eyes wide, feeling like an anthropologist privy to some unknown rite.