Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

by Caitlin Doughty

  When Mitford died in 1996, her husband made good on her request and sent her body for a direct cremation—$475.00 for a no-frills, straight cremation, with no funeral and no family present. Her ashes were placed in a disposable plastic urn. As Mitford saw it, a direct cremation was the clever, inexpensive way to go. The old-timers in the death industry—mostly men—called this type of direct cremation “bake ’n’ shake” or “direct disposal.” Mitford’s last request was one final dig at this group who hated everything she stood for.

  Although she had grown up in England, Mitford’s second husband was an American and they had been living for years in Oakland, California. So where did she get this $475.00 direct cremation? Good ol’ Westwind Cremation & Burial. Chris picked up her body himself.

  Working as the operator of the very cremation machine that had reduced Jessica Mitford to ash made me self-satisfied with my little place in death history. I knew that, like Mitford, I didn’t agree with the large, expensive traditional funerals of the past. I wasn’t sold on eternal preservation, either, despite Bruce’s open enthusiasm for the art of embalming. It was an admirable thing for Mitford to pull back the “formaldehyde curtain” of embalming and to reveal to the public that behind the scenes the average dead person was “in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”

  She wasn’t afraid to use vivid details, to the point where her original publisher warned her that she made the book “harder to sell by going at too much length and in too gooey detail into the process of embalming.” To her credit, Mitford switched publishers and forged ahead.

  But the longer I worked at Westwind, I found that I wasn’t entirely in agreement with Mitford, though it felt like a betrayal to question her. After all, she was the undisputed queen of the alternative funeral industry, a crusader with a love for the consumer. If embalming and expensive funerals were bad, then surely her call for simple, affordable funerals must be good?

  Yet I found something disturbing about a death culture based on direct cremation alone. Although Westwind offered embalmings and burials, the driving source of business was direct cremation—corpse to ashes for less than a thousand dollars. Now Bayside Cremation and Internet servicing had emerged as Mitford’s greatest ally in the quest to cut out the funeral director.

  On the cover of my copy of the 1998 reissue of The American Way of Death, Mitford sits in the hallway of an above ground mausoleum. She wears a sensible suit, carries a sensible bag, and bears a sensible, no nonsense expression. She is the middle-aged version of the stern woman featured on the television show Supernanny, where “Nanny” has been imported from England to straighten out a brood of unruly American children who scream things like “But Nanny, bacon is a vegetable!”

  Mitford’s Englishness was front and center in her writing. She was proud of the traditions of her birthplace, traditions that in modern times meant precious little interaction with the body at the time of death. She quotes a fellow Englishwoman living in San Francisco who had attended an American wake where the body was viewed: “It shook me rigid to get there and find the casket open and poor old Oscar lying there in his brown tweed suit, wearing a suntan makeup and just the wrong shade of lipstick. If I had not been extremely fond of the old boy, I have a horrible feeling that I might have giggled. Then and there I decided that I could never face another American funeral— even dead.”

  Viewing the embalmed body evolved as the cultural norm in the United States and Canada, but the Brits (at least among Mitford’s fellow upperclassmen) chose a complete absence of the corpse. It is difficult to say which custom is worse.

  Geoffrey Gorer, the British anthropologist, compared modern death in Britain to a kind of pornography. Where sex and sexuality were the cultural taboo of the Victorian period, death and dying were the taboo of the modern world. “Our great-grandparents were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes or cabbages; our children are likely to be told that those who have passed on . . . are changed into flowers, or lie at rest in lovely gardens.”

  Gorer argued that the “natural deaths” of disease and old age were replaced in the twentieth century by “violent deaths”—wars, concentration camps, car accidents, nuclear weapons. If the American optimism led to a prettying-up of the corpse with makeup and chemicals, British pessimism led to the removal of the corpse and the death ritual from polite society.

  In Mitford’s foreword to The American Way of Death, two things struck me. First was her statement that the book wouldn’t go into the “quaint death customs still practiced by certain Indian tribes.” Customs that, incidentally, were far from quaint. Native Americans had intensely rich death rituals including the Dakota Sioux’s method of building six-to-eight-foot-tall wooden platforms and depositing the body for exposure to the elements in an elaborate mourning ceremony. Second was Mitford’s firm dismissal that the American public might be partially to blame for the way things had become in the funeral industry. She states confidently: “I am unwilling on the basis of present evidence to find the public guilty.”

  Unlike Mitford, I was willing to find the public guilty. Very willing, in fact.

  Arranging a funeral at Westwind, the daughter of a deceased woman looked me deeply in the eyes and said, “This planning is so difficult, only because Mother’s death was so unexpected. You have to understand, she had only been on hospice for six months.”

  This woman’s mother had been on hospice (end-of-life care) for six months. That’s 180 days of your mother actively dying in your home. You knew she was ill long before she went into hospice care. Why did you not look up the best funeral homes in the area, compare prices, ask friends and family, figure out what’s legal, or most important, talk to your mother about what she herself wanted when she died? Your mother was dying and you damn well knew it. Refusing to talk about it and then calling it “unexpected” is not an acceptable excuse.

  When a young person dies unexpectedly, the family will likely face what Mitford called the “necessity of buying a product of which they are totally ignorant.” The sudden death of a young person is a horrible tragedy. In their sorrow, the family should not have to worry that a funeral home will take advantage and upsell them to a more expensive casket or funeral-service package. But anyone who works in the death industry can readily tell you that a slim minority of cases involves the sudden death of a young person. Most deaths come after long, significant diseases or very lengthy lives.

  If I showed up at a used-car lot and the salesman said, “It’s $45,000 for this 1996 Hyundai” (market value $4,200) and I bought it, the situation would be my fault. I could shake my fist all I wanted at the con artist who sold me the $45,000 Hyundai, but everyone would agree that I had been taken advantage of because I did not do my research.

  Mitford acknowledged that the average person in the market for a car would read Consumer Reports (or, in the twenty-first century, presumably browse the Internet). But to do that kind of research into the death industry, well, “it just would not seem right.” Because John Q. Public does not like to think about the implications of death, “he is anxious to get the whole thing over with.” At no point does Mitford object to this head-in-the-sand approach.

  The American Way of Death assures readers that hating death is perfectly normal: Of course you’re anxious to get the whole thing over with and leave the funeral home; of course it would be morbid to go around asking in advance what “reliable undertakers” people use; of course you don’t know what a funeral home looks like or how it runs. Mitford promised us in her soothing prose that our death denial was not only appropriate, it was the natural state of affairs. She was an enabler.

  Mitford hated the fact that funeral directors were businesspeople. But for better or worse, that’s what they are. Funeral homes in most developed countries are moneymaking private enterprises. People working in corporate funeral homes have
no shortage of stories to tell of the overwhelming pressure to sell and push extra products and services. A former funeral director from one of the major corporate funeral homes told me that when he had a bad month in revenues (perhaps because his clientele that month came from lower-income families or because his clients had chosen cremation), “all of a sudden there was corporate in Texas on the phone asking if something was wrong in your life, asking if you understood you wouldn’t be getting your bonus.”

  As a journalist, Mitford was an expert at stirring things up, exposing the hidden wrongs of the world. There is no doubt that the American funeral industry needed a change. What it got, however, was a scorched-earth policy. Mitford lit a match, threw it over her shoulder, and walked away. In her wake, she left a disgruntled public clamoring for cheaper funeral alternatives.

  In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve out relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality. For all of Mitford’s good intentions, direct cremation has only made the situation worse.

  UNNATURAL NATURAL

  “How dare you try to charge us that?” she screamed in a thick eastern European accent.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Ionescu,” I tried to explain, “but we have to charge you the hundred and seventy-five dollars.”

  Ms. Ionescu, daughter of the late Elena Ionescu, sat in front of me at the Westwind Cremation arrangement desk. Her thick brown hair spiraled in corkscrew rings from the side of her head and her hands, loaded down with golden rings, gesticulated wildly.

  “You are trying to extort us. I don’t understand why you are doing this, I am just here to see my mother one last time.”

  If this had been my first ride at the “one last time” rodeo, I might have caved in to this woman’s demands. As it was, I knew Mike wouldn’t like me dropping the charge just because I hoped to avoid a confrontation. It was common for families to want to “see Mom one last time” before she was cremated or buried. They didn’t want have to pay $175 for the privilege. It was hard to explain why we suggested they did.

  Dead people look very, very dead. It is difficult to grasp what that means, since it’s unlikely that any of us will stumble across a roving pack of dead bodies in the wild. We live in a world where people rarely die in their homes, and if they do, they’re carted off to the funeral home the second after taking their last breath. If a North American has seen a dead body, that body has likely been embalmed, made up, and dressed in its Sunday finest by a funeral-home employee.

  Televised crime shows rarely help matters. The dead bodies on prime-time TV, discovered by maids, maintenance men, and joggers in Central Park, are laid out as if they have already been prepared for a wake, eyes closed and lips pursed together, glossed over with a whitish-blue-tinted makeup, which we, the viewers, read as “dead.” The victims on these shows are played by young models and actors who are making their rounds on the CSI and Law & Order corpse circuit while waiting to get called for a pilot. They are a far cry from the majority of bodies in a funeral home—old, knotted, and wracked with years of diseases like cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.

  There was a huge gap between what the Ionescu family expected and what the Ionescu family would actually get if we rolled Elena directly out of the refrigeration unit to visit with her waiting family. That gap of expectation has become a problem for funeral homes, under constant threat of being sued by families when a body doesn’t look how they expect it to look. It is challenging, of course, to feel sorry for the funeral industry, as the rise of embalming was what created this gap in the first place.

  Untreated, a dead person’s face looks horrific, at least by our very narrow cultural expectations. Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The color drains from their faces. These images reflect the normal biological processes of death, but they are not what a family wants to see. As part of their price lists, funeral homes generally charge anywhere from $175 to $500 for “setting the features.” That is how corpses come to look “peaceful,” “natural,” and “at rest.”

  The cruel fact was that Elena Ionescu, a ninety-year-old Romanian woman, had been in the hospital for over two months prior to her death. The combination of being bedridden for eight weeks and hooked up to IV drips and machines had caused Elena’s body to slide into full-blown edema, a postmortem condition in which fluid swells beneath the skin. She was puffed up like the Michelin man, edema having taken over the lower parts of her legs, arms, and back. Her skin leaked fluid. What’s worse, the overwhelming moisture from the edema had expedited decomposition.

  Where decomposition has begun and excess fluid abounds, the dreaded “skin slip” becomes a real possibility. Its technical name is desquamation, but in practice it is called skin slip, a phrase that can be given credit for calling it like ya see it. The decomposition process had caused gas and pressure to build up inside Elena, her skin to loosen, and the top layer of skin to slip away, like it wanted to abandon ship. If this situation happened to a living person, the skin would eventually regrow and regenerate. For Elena, this was it: until cremation her skin would remain fresh, pink, and covered in a thin layer of slime.

  It was safe to say that Elena’s body would not look like her irate daughter imagined it would. Yet Westwind Cremation & Burial had absolutely no right to keep Elena Ionescu locked in our refrigeration unit. Corpses, by law, are quasi-property. Elena’s family owned her dead body until burial or cremation. Which leads us to another popular reason to sue funeral homes—lawsuits arise after some scorned funeral director illegally holds a dead body as corpse collateral until the family can pay.

  If Elena’s daughter said, “Hand her over this instant, I’m putting Mother in the backseat of my car and driving away from this Godless place,” I would have done it, no questions asked. There were days when I might have applauded such a decision.

  “Ms. Ionescu, I’m sorry. You’re absolutely welcome to go elsewhere, I encourage you to call around. But I think that you will find the hundred-and seventy-five-dollar charge to be the case wherever you go in the area,” I said, making one last pitch.

  “I guess we don’t have a choice, do we?” she replied, her rings clanking together as she signed her name at the bottom of the contract.

  Two hours later, Elena Ionescu was laid out before me on the preparation-room table, about to be made “natural” for her viewing the next day. It is a not-so-well-kept funeral industry secret that the processes used to make someone appear natural are often highly unnatural.

  I stood in front of the same metal cabinet where several months prior Mike had presented me with my first corpse-shaving razor. I pulled out two “eye caps,” which looked like small plastic spaceships, rounded and flesh-colored. The tiny spikes sticking up from the plastic made it look like a miniature Inquisition-era torture device. The purpose of the eye caps was twofold: first, by placing a cap under Elena’s eyelid, her eyes would appear rounded, masking the sunken, flattened eyeballs hiding below; second, the torture spikes served the important function of catching the back of the eyelids, preventing them from floating up into a postmortem wink.

  With Q-tips and cotton I cleaned out Elena’s nose, ears, and mouth—a deeply unpleasant task. In the last throes of life, basic hygiene is often ignored. This is reasonable, but reason does not make the aftermath any less abhorrent. In moving the corpse, there is always a chance there may be a sudden burst of “purge”—a frothy, reddish-brown liquid expunged from the lungs and stomach. I did not envy nurses, whose living patients produced these disagreeable fluids every day.

  Without her dentures, which had been left soaking in a glass by her hospital bed, Elena’s lips had rolled in on empty gums. To counteract this, we used a mouth former, a curv
ed piece of plastic that looked like a larger (mouth-shaped) eye cap. I gently lifted her upper lip to insert the mouth former, but the device was far too big for an elderly woman. It made her look like an ape, or a football lineman wearing a mouth guard. Appalled, I quickly removed it and trimmed it down with a heavy pair of scissors.

  Next came the needle injector. The needle injector was a mouth-closing gun, a metal device used to shoot wires into the decedent’s gums so they could be tied together to hold the mouth shut. I began by choosing a sharp pin with a long wire attached to the end, like a tiny metal tadpole. It was placed into the tip of a large metal needle, which shot the barb into the top and bottom gums. Our injector at Westwind was of somewhat shoddy quality, a bit rusty. It didn’t inject with the level of oomph one would desire. This meant I had to climb on top of Elena and use my whole body weight to inject the wires with a mighty “Hoo-AH!”

  At ninety years old, Elena was lacking in the gums department, necessitating several tries to get the barbs to stay put. Once the barbs were lodged in place, the two wire tadpole tails were twisted together through the plastic of the mouth former, bringing the upper and lower jaw together.

  If all these tricks failed and the eyes or mouth still insisted on falling open, there was always the secret weapon: superglue. We used those little green tubes of liquid magic for everything. Even if, by some miracle, the eye caps and needle injector worked as intended, it was wise to reinforce. Milky blue eyes and exposed gums were not what the family wanted, but they were less terrifying than catching an unwanted glimpse of the flesh-toned spiked plastic or the thick tadpole wires that now held their loved one’s face intact.

  Once the Ionescu family had resigned themselves to paying the “one last time” charge, they came back to Westwind with a set of clothes so we could dress Elena for her visitation. Not only had Elena’s edema swelled her to twice her normal size, her family—like many families—had brought in clothes from her fashionable, svelte past. There is a reason why the newspaper obituary pages are littered with glamour shots, wedding pictures, and portraits from long-ago debutante balls. We want people to remain forever in their prime like a beautiful rosy-cheeked Kate Winslet meeting Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic heaven decades after the ship had sunk.