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

by Caitlin Doughty

  As soon as I arrived at work I started on her makeup. I used whatever was available in Westwind’s makeup kit—half special mortuary makeup, half bottles from the drugstore down the street. I tried primping her hair to distract from the decomposition. I placed white sheets around her face, which was the size (and color) of a basketball, in an attempt at a flattering angle. After rolling her under the rose-colored lamplight of the viewing room, she didn’t look half bad.

  “Not too shabby, Cat. Not bad,” Chris reassured me. “She was looking . . . unwell.”

  “Thanks, Chris.”

  “Look, I gotta pick up Mr. Clemons from the nursing home on Shattuck. They don’t hold bodies for anything; the nurse has already called squawking three times.”

  “Chris, there’s a witness right now. I’m the only one here!”

  “I know, I know, I don’t agree with it either. Mike shouldn’t have left you like this. He thinks everything’s easy. You need backup.”

  True as this might have been, my old “Nope, got it” reflex kicked in. The fear of looking weak or incompetent was worse than any make-believe disaster involving stalled conveyor belts or orange skin.

  “Go, Chris. It’s fine. I got it.”

  Shortly after Chris’s departure, the woman’s son (Yenta Mike’s dream date for yours truly) showed up with ten family members in tow. I escorted them into the viewing room and led them over to the body. “I’ll leave you alone with her. Take all the time you need,” I said, backing respectfully out of the room.

  As soon as doors were shut, I put my ear up next to the wood, anxious to hear their reaction. The first thing the son said, quite emphatically, was, “She looked better before. Mom looked much better before all this makeup.”

  My immediate instinct was to fling the doors open and yell, “You mean when she was visibly decaying, buddy?” but I was aware that wasn’t the best customer-service move. After I had calmed down and overcome the insult to my handiwork, I wanted to speak with the son again, to tell him that I didn’t agree with the corpse-makeup industrial complex either, that natural was better, but that maybe if he had seen her he would have agreed the makeup was warranted. Then I would ask him to clarify what he meant by “she looked better before.” Was “before” when she was still alive? That made sense. Or was “before” when he last saw his mother and she wasn’t yet the color of a traffic cone? Most unsettling of all was the possibility that he was one of the rare creatures genuinely comfortable with bodies that have already moved into the stages of decomposition. In which case Mike was right, maybe this guy was my dream man. Either way, the conversation never happened and I’m pretty sure our rom-com relationship was doomed, despite the excellent meet-cute premise.

  The family took their time viewing their matriarch before coming to get me for the cremation. Back in the chapel I was alarmed to find smoke wafting out from the sides of the corpse. The family had laid several thick bundles of burning sage in the folds of her white sheets. We didn’t usually allow open fire in the viewing room, but since Mike was gone and Mom resembled sports equipment, I let it slide.

  Along with the incense, the family had placed a Häagen-Dazs coffee-and-almond ice-cream bar between her hands like a Viking warrior’s weapon. Those are my favorite. So I yelled, involuntarily, “Those are my favorite!”

  I had successfully kept my mouth shut up till that moment (even after the insult to my skills as a corpse beautician), but ice cream proved a topic on which I could not remain silent. Thankfully, they just laughed. Coffee ice-cream bars were their mother’s favorite too.

  With Chris retrieving Mr. Clemons, it was up to me to transfer Mom into the crematory. My first act was to ram the cot firmly into the doorframe, spewing forth a burst of sage smoke. I don’t remember exactly what I said—mortification clouds the memory—but it was probably something along the lines of “Whoops!” or “First door’s always a doozy!”

  I lifted Mom onto the conveyor belt without incident, and then, to my relief, the belt’s soothing whir accompanied her right into the cremation machine. I let her son push the button to start the flames. Like many before him, he was moved by the button’s ritual power. The incense and ice cream had shown that this family was no stranger to ritual. For the moment it seemed he had forgotten the rammed door and the theatrical makeup (though he still wasn’t charmed enough to ask me out).

  While Mike was on vacation, I cremated twenty-seven adults, six babies, and two anatomical torsos. Three of those cremations were witnessed, and they went off without a hitch.

  On his first morning back, Mike glanced up from his paperwork and said, “I’m so fucking proud of you.”

  I almost burst into tears right there. I felt like I had conquered something huge, like I was no longer a girl playing dress-up at this job. I wasn’t a dilettante. I was a crematory operator. It was something I knew how to do. It was a skill. And I was good at it.

  If Mike had been in the habit of flattering my vanity the way I’d hoped he would, congratulating me on a well-swept courtyard or my cremating five babies before five, I would have become a far less competent worker. I succeeded because I needed to prove myself to him.

  “You’ve stepped it up more than ninety-five percent of the people we’ve hired, man,” Mike continued.

  “Wait, who are the five percent who worked harder than me?” My eyes narrowed. “That had better just be an expression.”

  “We usually have to hire people with no experience. Or, if they do have any experience they’re goons from the removal service. I mean, it’s kind of a disgusting job.”

  “That doesn’t pay very much,” I added.

  “No,” he said with a laugh, “it doesn’t. We tricked you into it.”

  My excitement at finally squeezing legitimate praise from Mike was short-lived, promptly turning into guilt. I had applied to mortuary school, and had been accepted.

  Being accepted didn’t mean I had to attend. This was the end of 2008, the beginning of the economic crisis, a foolish time to quit any stable job, even a job as bizarre as crematory operator. But my life in San Francisco was still bland and lonely, and the Cypress College of Mortuary Science (one of only two mortuary schools in California) was located in Orange County, the suburban wonderland just south of Los Angeles and home to the Real Housewives and Disneyland. I didn’t want to be an embalmer, the trade taught at mortuary schools like Cypress, but I did want to discover firsthand how our national mortality racket was training its future members. Where, exactly, did things go so wrong: with the people who ran the industry, the people who taught them, or the industry itself?

  Then there was Luke, more of a consideration than I would then admit to myself, who had been living in Southern California for several years. At the end of college we had planned to move to Los Angeles together, to get an apartment, and to live as penniless but fulfilled artists. Instead I broke north for San Francisco and pursued my wild hare of a death obsession. It was a selfish decision at the time, but things were different now. I knew who I was, my life had a purpose, and I was ready to be with him.

  “So, you’re moving to L.A., Doughty? For real this time?” Luke asked, skeptical.

  “Don’t be too flattered, buddy. It’s not that I want to move to L.A., per se, I just have to get away from all these corpses. Have you read Explosion in a Cathedral?

  “I am tired of dwelling amongst the dead. . . . Everything smells of corpses here. I want to return to the world of the living, where people believe in something.”

  He laughed. “Everything smells of corpses, eh? What’s your metaphor with that? Is the crematory made of corpses?”

  “Yes, but they are incredibly difficult to build with,” I explained.

  “I thought they were pretty stiff.”

  “Right, so good for initial bracing. But their constant decay is bad for foundational security. Unpredictable, you know?

  “Caitlin, I think you should get out of there before all of those corpses come crashing down ar
ound you.”

  Luke tipped the scales. I would head south for the winter.

  I finally told Mike a week later. He kept a poker face and said, “Well, if that’s your decision.”

  It was more obvious that Chris didn’t want me to go. We had memories together, like the time we picked up an elderly hoarder lying in a pool of her own blood on the kitchen floor, the counter cluttered with open peanut butter and Nutella containers crawling with roaches. Many of our memories were disgusting, but they were our memories nonetheless.

  As my departure approached, we posted the opening for my job on the Internet, and people applied in droves. The job market must have been abysmal, because people seemed eager to work in a mortuary.

  Many people were applying to the job listing, but that didn’t mean many good people were applying to the listing. From one cover letter: “You can trust me because I am a Muslim. I don’t do fraud. There could be a $100 bill on the floor and I would not pick it up. The one thing that motivates me is incentive: If I run 3 miles a day, what will I get?”

  Then there were the myriad applications with incorrect spelling/terminology/grammar: “Objective: To aquire experience and gain oppurtunity to work in field of mortuary.”

  The real gems came in when we selected several people to fill out an additional questionnaire. I thought that the questionnaire was a little much, in an “if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?” way, but one has to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  Q: In approximately 300 words explain why you are interested in working at a mortuary.

  A: I love the death.

  Q: Are you aware of, or have you participated in any religious/spiritual rituals surrounding death? Please describe these events.

  A: I play with the wigy [sic] board once.

  Q: Are you able to be empathetic to people without becoming personally involved? Describe a situation where you were able to do this.

  A: I kill a bunch of people once.

  Q: Are you able to be flexible with regards to your job duties and description?

  A: Oh hell yeah.

  These candidates’ qualifications aside, Mike eventually hired Jerry, a tall, attractive African American man. Ironically, Jerry had previously worked for the removal service. He was one of the removal “goons” Mike swore up and down he would never hire just a few weeks prior. I guess when your other candidate’s experience is having played “with the wigy board once,” it shifts your perspective.

  The week before I left, Chris’s clunker of a white van was in the shop. I made the mistake of referring to his much-loved van as such. “Clunker? Young lady, don’t insult her integrity. She’s been with me for twenty years,” he said. “She’s my Great White Whale, the beast that drags down careless men.”

  I dropped Chris off at his parents’ home. The house was high up in the Berkeley Hills, where his family has lived since the 1950s. “Cat, I want to show you something,” he said, leading me to the base of a tree in the center of the front yard. It was a coastal redwood, maybe fifty feet tall and twenty feet around.

  “My mother died when I was really young, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. After my mom died, Grandma gave me one of these leaves and told me that if I planted it in the ground a tree would grow from it. It sounded ridiculous, but I planted the leaf in a Maxwell House coffee container and gave it three cups of water every morning. And here she is,” he said, lovingly patting the base of the tree. “This is my tree. If you ask me what my greatest accomplishment in this world is—well, here you have it.”

  He continued: “Of course, it’s so big now that the roots are starting to push into the neighbor’s driveway. Any day now she’s going to call the city and have them come tear out everything that’s on her property and the whole tree will die. Rot and collapse. I have nightmares about that.”

  So much for sentimentality.

  To my surprise, the staff at Westwind held a party in honor of my departure. Everyone was there. Chris, who didn’t much care for parties, left early, but not before giving me a plastic party bag covered in pastel balloons. The only thing inside was a dried up coconut.

  “It’s . . . a coconut? Thanks, Chris.”

  “In 1974, when I was living in Hawai’i, my friend threw that coconut into the backseat of my orange Pinto. He said, ‘That’s an important coconut. Keep it, and take it with you wherever you go.’ So I did. And now I’m giving it to you.”

  Leave it to Chris to imbue a thirty-five-year-old coconut in a party bag with profundity. I was touched. I gave him an awkward hug.

  “Bye, Cat,” he said, and walked out.

  Later that evening, when I was about two and a half sheets to the wind, Mike and Bruce got me into a conversation about work. (None of us really had much to talk about apart from work.) But this wasn’t the usual chitchat about the asshole who worked at a competing crematory or the difficult case last week, it was about the existential stuff, the stuff I had wanted to talk about for so long.

  Bruce told the story of an arrangement he had made with a pregnant woman ten years prior. She had told him the arrangement was for her baby. “When she came in I said to her, ‘That’s a shame about your baby, but you’re lucky you’re pregnant, and gonna have another child.’ But the baby she was making arrangements for was the baby in her stomach. It had died and they couldn’t take it out yet. That baby was eight months old. That tripped me out. She’s sitting in front of me with a dead baby in her. That was messed up. All these years I remember that. To this day, man. That’s why there’s so many alcoholics and drug addicts in the mortuary business, so you can forget about what’s going on.”

  Mike leaned his head against the wall, not looking at me directly. Then, sincerely, as if he really wanted an answer, he asked, “Aren’t there times when the sadness gets to you?”

  “Well, I—”

  “When the family is so sad and lost, and you can’t do anything to help them?”

  I thought I saw tears in his eyes. It was dark. I can’t be sure. Mike was human after all—another soul coping with the strange, hidden world of death, trying to do his job and figure out what it all meant.

  As desperate as I had been for someone to talk to about these very things, in the moment all I could do was mumble, “I guess so. It is what it is, right?”

  “Sure it is. Good luck in L.A.,” he said.

  And with that, my career at Westwind Cremation & Burial came to an end.

  THE REDWOODS

  The last night I spent on Rondel Place, our landlord—the gay Catholic Filipino vegetarian activist (and collector of angel figurines) who lived in the apartment above us—called the cops on two gentlemen who had stumbled out of Esta Noche in the wee hours of the morning. After urinating on the walls they came to sit on our stoop to smoke and grope each other while whispering fervent Spanish nothings.

  Their whispers turned to screams,“¿Por qué no me amas?” which turned to vicious blows. The law had to intervene.

  Early the next morning, after my night of live-action telenovela, I drove away from Rondel Place in a rented U-Haul truck, carrying all my worldly possessions. Together with my cat and my python, our motley crew made the six-hour journey south from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

  Luke had asked me to stay at his place while I searched for an apartment. It was painful to even be in his presence, so overwhelming was my desire to divulge the way I felt about him. Afraid that these feelings would upset the delicate balance of our relationship, I declined his offer and quickly settled in Koreatown. Several people had warned me that Koreatown was a “bad neighborhood,” but after living on Rondel Place, it seemed like heaven. I could walk down the street without once encountering a naked man defecating behind my car or a woman in a full intergalactic space-clown costume smoking a crack pipe. There may have been some light drug deals and gang violence on Catalina Street, but in comparison to Rondel Place it was a verdant oasis.

  In Los Angeles, I plunged headlong into researc
h on death and culture—not only how it affected our behavior but why. Death practice was a calling, and I followed it with an earnestness that my cynical nature would have never allowed before. Having a purpose was nothing short of exhilarating.

  But for every bit of exhilaration, my emotions would also swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. I believed so intensely in the importance of death ritual that I worried it might come across as morbid or pathological. Worse still was the fear of isolation—I was a leader in the cult of the corpse, but so far there was no one else at the temple. A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

  But I did have Luke. He represented the comfortable place where I could escape the bonds of death and crawl into the blissful distraction of love. Or so I thought.

  I finally lived in the same city as Luke, but I still couldn’t speak the words to him directly—they were too loaded. When I could stand it no longer, I wrote him a letter telling him how much I needed him, how his support was the only thing keeping me together in a world where it was all too easy to hand yourself over to despair. The letter was equal parts sappy and nihilistic. Fitting, I thought, as Luke and I were both equal parts sappy and nihilistic. I left it for him in his mailbox in the middle of the night. I felt sure that he was expecting this, and that his response would be as ardent as my declaration.

  And then—silence.

  After several days, I received a single-line e-mail from Luke:

  Don’t ask me for this. I can’t see you again.

  Somewhere in the world, Luke was technically alive. But the relationship I knew, the friendship I cherished, crumbled to dust before my eyes. It was a type of death, and the pain was acute. It didn’t take long for my mind to start up the old standby, my running inner monologue. Some sections were similar to the voice of my childhood: People out there are starving, dying for real. This one guy doesn’t want you, well boo-de-hoo, dumb bitch. And new material was added to the script: You thought you could escape, didn’t you? Well, you can’t. You belong to death now, and no one can love someone like that. Everything smells of corpses here.