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

by Caitlin Doughty

  The worst part of his disease was the way it eroded his self-control, and since Alzheimer’s is in part genetic, it offered daily reminders of how it might someday erode mine as well. Then again, death brings an inevitable loss of control. It seemed unfair that I could spend a lifetime making sure I was dressed well and saying all the right things only to end up dead and powerless at the end. Naked on a cold white table, boobs flopped to the side, blood seeping out the side of my mouth, some random funeral home worker hosing me down.

  I, of all people, had no rational reason to be against scientific donation, against the fragmentation of the body. Part of the fear is cultural. The dismemberment of the body prior to a Tibetan Sky Burial is difficult to accept even though, rationally, cremation is just another kind of fragmentation. The cousin of a friend was killed in Afghanistan. There was a brief period of time after the death that his mother received distressing reports that the roadside bomb that killed him had sent his limbs in all directions. She was relieved to discover his body was intact, even though his body was flown home to be placed directly into the cremation chamber, transformed by fire into thousands upon thousands of anonymous chunks of inorganic bone.

  Like it or not, some of those bones will be irretrievable from the cracks between the floor and the wall of the cremation machine. The official State of California cremation authorization acknowledges this phenomenon with the following language:

  The chamber is composed of ceramic or other material which disintegrates slightly during each cremation and the product of that disintegration is commingled with the cremated remains. . . . Some residue remains in the cracks and uneven places of the chamber.

  In layman’s terms: When you’re pulled out of the machine post-cremation, some of the machine comes with you—and some of your bones stay behind. “Commingling,” it’s called.

  No matter how many times I dragged the mini retort broom across the breaks in the ceramic surface, fragments of each body were lost. Not that I didn’t try. I attempted to gather each sliver. The hot air would scorch my face as I stuck my body a little too far into the machine, dislodging trapped bones with the mini broom until the straw bristles melted into a stump.

  Once, while sweeping out the cremation machine, a hot bone fragment launched itself out at me. I accidentally stepped on it and burned a hole deep into the rubber sole of my boot. “Goddammit!” I yelled, and with an involuntary jerk of the knee I kicked the bone in a high arc across the crematory. It landed somewhere behind a row of gurneys. After five minutes crawling on my hands and knees I found the ember and matched the piece to the bone-shaped hole in my boot. You will be fragmented.

  Of course, there are different perspectives on fragmentation. A month later, Mike gave me two (unpaid, mind you) vacation days to attend the wedding of my cousin in Nashville. In typical pre-wedding fashion, a ladies’ spa day was scheduled for the afternoon before the ceremony. I was whisked into the massage room, a windowless den of incense and meditation Muzak. The blond masseuse, soft-spoken and very Southern, began her heavenly dance across my back, making chitchat as she massaged.

  “So what do you do, sweetheart?” she drawled over the chanting from the speakers.

  Do I tell this woman what I do, I wondered. Do I tell her that her magical fingers are kneading muscle knots caused by the hauling of corpses and scraping of bones from giant ovens?

  I decided to tell her.

  To her credit she didn’t skip a beat. “Well. . . . I can tell you that I’ve got lots of family in West Virginia and they consider all that cremation-stuff to be devil’s work.”

  “Well, what do you think about cremation?” I asked my masseuse.

  She deliberated for a second, her hands resting on my back. “You know, I’m born again.”

  Fortunately I was face-down on the massage table, so she couldn’t see my eyes flickering back and forth. I was unsure if I was supposed to ask a follow-up question.

  There was a long pause before she continued. “I do believe Jesus will come at the rapture to take the blessed up to heaven. But here’s the thing. I know we will need our bodies, but what if I should be swimmin’ in the ocean and get myself torn apart by a shark? My body is bobbing around the water and in the shark’s stomach, but are you telling me our Savior can’t make me whole again? If his power can heal a shark attack, he can heal a cremation.”

  “Heal a cremation,” I repeated. I had never thought of this. “Well, hypothetically if God can reconfigure decomposed bodies that have passed through the digestive tracts of maggots, I guess He could probably heal a cremation.”

  She seemed satisfied with my reply and we spent the rest of the session in silence, pondering the degree to which we would ultimately be fragmented. Her body would await the rapture. My body, I feared, would enjoy no such transcendence.

  It wasn’t only the inevitability of fragmentation that got to me, it was the way death was inescapable, sweeping over everything in its path. As Publilius Syrus wrote in the first century CE, “As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.”

  In the late Middle Ages, the “danse macabre,” or dance of the dead, was a popular subject in art. Paintings depicted decomposing corpses with huge grins who arrive to collect the unsuspecting living. The gleeful corpses, made anonymous by putrefaction, wave their hands and stomp their feet as they pull both popes and paupers, kings and blacksmiths into their whirling dance. The images reminded viewers that death was certain: No one escapes. Anonymity awaits.

  The Golden Gate Bridge stretches north from the tip of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Sound to Marin County. The burnished red-orange architectural masterpiece is the most photographed bridge in the world. You can drive across it at any hour, on any day of the year, and there will be happy couples embracing and taking pictures. The bridge also holds the somewhat infamous distinction of being one of the most popular suicide destinations in the world, squaring off against places like the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China and the Aokigahara Forest in Japan in a competition none of the tourist bureaus particularly want to win.

  A man or woman jumping off the side of the Golden Gate can expect to hit the water at 75 miles per hour, and count on dying with 98 percent certainty. The trauma alone kills most jumpers—their ribs shatter and puncture fragile internal organs. If you do manage to survive the fall, you will drown or develop hypothermia unless someone spots you. Bodies are often found after they have been attacked by sharks or infested with crabs. Some bodies are never found at all. Despite the high death rate (or tragically, because of it), people come from all over the world to jump off the Golden Gate. Tourists walking along the bridge to catch the sunset over the Bay encounter signs reading:

  CRISIS COUNSELING

  THERE IS HOPE

  MAKE THE CALL

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF

  JUMPING FROM THIS

  BRIDGE ARE FATAL

  AND TRAGIC

  The Golden Gate Bridge creates a new corpse in this way about every two weeks. One day, after I had been working at Westwind for about seven months without a single jumper, we got two. Death as the great equalizer needs no better example than the two men brought in to Westwind: a twenty-one-year-old homeless man and a forty-five-year-old aerospace engineering executive.

  Where the bodies of Golden Gate jumpers wind up after their plummet into the bay depends on what direction the currents carry them. If the waters brought the body south, San Francisco County took possession and sent it off to the overcrowded Medical Examiner’s Office in the city. If the currents bore it north, the body belonged to wealthy Marin County, which had a separate Coroner’s Office. The aerospace engineer, an actual rocket scientist, could easily have afforded a mansion in Marin County, but he bobbed south. The homeless gentleman, who never had a job, according to his sister, floated north into the wealthy Marin suburbs. The current under the bridge didn’t recognize their relative status; it didn’t care what helplessness led them to the bridge. The Bay’s current fulfill
ed feminist Camille Paglia’s lament: “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.”

  ONE AFTERNOON, CHRIS AND I left the crematory in his white van and drove into Berkeley to pick up Therese Vaughn. Therese died in her own bed at age 102. Therese was born when World War I—World War I!—was still years in the future. After returning to Westwind and placing Therese’s body in the cooler, I cremated a newborn baby who had lived a mere three hours and six minutes. After cremation, Therese’s ashes and the ashes of the baby were identical in appearance, if not in quantity.

  Bodies cremated in full, heads donated to science, babies, and some woman’s amputated leg all come out looking the same in the end. Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone.

  There is a great deal made in the modern funeral industry about “personalization.” This marketing narrative targets the pocketbooks of baby boomers and ensures that, for the right price, every death can come with extras—Baltimore Ravens caskets, golf-club-shaped urns, corpse-shrouding blankets with duck-hunting scenes. Mortuary Management (the main death-industry trade rag) proclaimed the arrival of Thomas Kinkade airbrushed burial vaults with rainbow-hued pastoral scenes as if they were the second coming of Christ. These products provide the extra touches that say, “I’m not my neighbor, I’m not the same as the next dead guy, I’m me, I’m unique, I’m remembered!” For me, the schmaltzy tchotchkes provided by the funeral home ignite a horror that would shame the swirling corpses of the danse macabre.

  I understood the impulse for personalization. In fact, I had indulged that impulse when I came to Westwind with the naïve idea of someday opening La Belle Mort, a funeral home for the one-of-a-kind, personalized death. But what we needed wasn’t more additions to the endless list of merchandise options. Not when we were missing rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions. Rituals that couldn’t be replaced with purchasing power.

  Over the months I worked at Westwind, sacks of cremated remains had been piling up on the metal shelf above the tools. They were babies, adults, anatomical parts from Science Support, and the “extra” bits from the machines—a leftover mixture of just about everyone who passed through our doors. One afternoon, when there were enough sacks to make a trip worthwhile, we prepared the little gray warriors for their non-witnessed sea scattering. The bags of bones, decedents with names like Yuri Hirakawa and Glendora Jones and Timothy Rabinowitz, were stacked into crates, their little twist ties standing at stoic attention. Family members, next of kin, and Science Support paid our mortuary to take the ashes of their loved ones out onto San Francisco Bay and toss them to the winds.

  The preparation took me a while. In California there are laws and procedures for scattering remains at sea. One has to check and then double-check each decedent, each Authorization for Disposition, each Westwind contract, comparing the little numbers on one form to the little numbers on another. At the end I had three full crates containing the indistinguishable remains of thirty-eight former adults, twelve former infants, and nine former anatomical specimens. I was the leader of my own danse macabre.

  The crates were ready to be taken out on Westwind’s ash-scattering boat the next morning. I dropped the hint to Mike that I should be the one to go. I wanted to be the one who took these people all the way through, picking them up from where they fell to placing them into the fire to releasing them into the sea. Alas, Mike got that job. He had been looking forward to the early morning seaside adventure. Someone had to stay at Westwind, answer the phones, and burn the bodies. That someone was the crematory operator, the low woman on death’s totem pole: me.

  EROS AND THANATOS

  The house I grew up in, on Punalei Place, had a swimming pool where I spent countless hours as a child. During my teenage years, the pool’s cleaning pump broke and my childhood hangout gradually turned green, developed a thick layer of vegetation, and became a wildlife habitat for local frogs and ducks. The flora and fauna were pleased to find a fully developed bog in the midst of a normal suburban street.

  I’m sure our neighbors were not impressed with the conservation efforts happening over at the ol’ Doughty estate. The bog frogs croaked at impossible volumes throughout the night and it was no secret that the Kitasakis, our neighbors across the street, loathed the pair of mallards that occasionally waddled from our pool over to their lawn to defecate. When both ducks turned up dead lying side by side in the street (fed rat poison—my unconfirmed theory), I took their postmortem portraits and put a silent hex on the Kitasaki family. They moved out the next year, likely driven mad by their sin and the quality of my hex.

  When my parents finally repaired the pool almost fifteen years later, the men who drained it found a thin layer of bones at the bottom: bird, toad, mouse. None of the bones were human, though, meaning my father won a bet. I thought the odds were good we’d find at least two or three of our former neighbors.

  In the early days, when our pool still looked like any other pool, the game of choice for the gang of seven-year-old neighborhood girls was based on The Little Mermaid. The Disney film had come out in 1989 and it was our everything. No self-respecting game of make believe could start without strict parameters. “I’m a mermaid with a shiny purple bra, long green hair, and a pink tail with sparkles. My best friend is a singing octopus,” one of us would announce. If you called dibs on green hair and a pink tail, no one else had better try a similar color scheme or soon they’d be ostracized from the group and end up crying behind the banana plant.

  The entire Disney oeuvre, The Little Mermaid in particular, gave me a hopelessly warped understanding of love. For those of you who have not seen it, allow me to sum up the plot (which differs considerably from the Hans Christian Andersen version—more on that later): Ariel is a beautiful young mermaid with an even more beautiful voice. She is obsessed with becoming a human due to her profound love for Prince Eric (a human she has only seen once) and for the detritus of human civilization (which she collects in her underwater hoarder cave). An evil hag sea witch tells Ariel she can transform her into a human if she gives up her voice and goes silent. Ariel agrees to the bargain and the sea witch splits her mermaid tail into two human legs. Fortunately, even without her voice Prince Eric still falls for Ariel because she’s cute, and cute women don’t need voices. The evil sea witch tries to keep them apart, but love prevails and Ariel marries the prince and becomes a permanent human. The end.

  I expected this is how my love life would proceed, minus the evil sea witch and the wise but sarcastic musical crab. My teen years disabused me of this notion.

  As a teenager with morbid proclivities, my only real social outlets in Hawai’i were the gothic and S&M fetish clubs with names like “Flesh” and “The Dungeon” that took place on Saturday nights in warehouses down by the airport. My friends and I, all uniform-wearing private-school girls by day, would tell our parents we were having a sleepover and instead change into black vinyl ball gowns we ordered off the Internet. Then we’d go to the clubs and get tied to iron crosses and publicly flogged amid puffing fog machines. After the clubs closed at two a.m. we’d go into a twenty-four-hour diner called Zippy’s, invariably get called “witches” by some confused late-night patrons, wash off our makeup in the bathroom, and sleep for a few hours in my parents’ car. Since I was also on my school’s competitive outrigger canoe paddling team, the next morning I would have to peel off the vinyl ball gown and paddle in the open ocean for two hours as dolphins leapt majestically next to our boat. Hawai’i is an interesting place to grow up.

  As an American (well, American-ish) child in the late twentieth century, I had no idea that the stories from my beloved Disney movies were pilfered from brutal, macabre European fa
iry tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Fairy tales that didn’t end with the familiar “and they lived happily ever after,” but with conclusions like this, from “The Goose-Girl” by the Brothers Grimm: “she deserves no better fate than to be stripped entirely naked, and put in a barrel which is studded inside with pointed nails. . . two white horses should be harnessed to it, which will drag her along through one street after another, till she is dead.”

  The plot of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1836 story “The Little Mermaid” is, in fact, entirely devoid of tuneful sea animals. In Andersen’s story, the young mermaid falls in love with a prince and goes to the sea witch for help. (So far we’re on track with the Disney version.) The mermaid is given human legs, but each step is made to feel like sharp knives slicing into her feet. The sea witch, requiring payment for these services, “cut off the mermaid’s tongue, so that she became dumb, and would never again speak or sing.” The bargain is that if our mermaid cannot convince the prince to love her, she will die, turning to sea foam on the water and losing her chance to have an immortal soul. Luckily, the prince does appear enamored with her, “and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion.” Because nothing says love like being allowed to sleep in a man’s doorway on a dog bed.

  The prince, not sold on the silent woman who sleeps outside his door, marries a princess from another kingdom. Having failed to win the love of her human prince, the mermaid knows she will die the morning after the wedding. At the last minute her sisters swoop in and cut off all their hair, trading it to the sea witch for a knife. They give it to her, telling her, “Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart of the prince; when the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again, and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid.” The mermaid can’t bring herself to slaughter her beloved prince, so she leaps over the side of the boat to her death. The End. Try selling that one as an animated children’s film.