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

by Caitlin Doughty

  My personal favorite was Tim Collison’s article “Cosmetic Considerations for the Infant Death,” a fancy way of saying “Makeup for Dead Babies.” The three pictures accompanying the article were of a darling living baby, Mr. Collison himself, and a well-lit shot of Dodge’s patented Airbrush Cosmetics Deluxe Kit, presumably perfect for use with infants.

  If you are like me, your first response might be, “Gosh, I don’t think dead babies really need makeup.” Mr. Collison disagrees with you. He wants to ensure that funeral professionals place “the tiny body in the casket to look as natural as possible.”

  Mortuary schools no longer teach students that they are embalming to make the dead bodies look “lifelike.” “Lifelike” makes people think the dead might actually come back to life. The word of choice in the industry is now “natural.” Embalmers “restore the body to a natural appearance.”

  According to Mr. Collison, the first step to applying “natural” baby makeup is to preserve the heck out of the baby in question: “The use of a cosmetic arterial chemical with a humectant base such as Plasdopake or Chromatech, along with sufficient amounts of accessory chemicals, will supply the needed preservation.”

  Plasdopake or Chromatech might provide an excellent base for cosmetics, but the downy hair on a newborn’s face can be such an impediment. Best to go ahead and shave the baby. Be careful, though, “the shaving of an infant requires extra care.”

  Finally, be aware that a baby’s facial pores are much smaller than their adult counterparts. You might think you can use the same old oil- or paraffin-based cream cosmetics you use on adults, but nay. They would make the baby look waxy and not “produce a natural appearance.” There’s that natural again.

  Often our assigned research papers required us to consult and interview “funeral industry professionals.” Mike and Bruce served as my funeral professionals. Phone calls with them made me think that perhaps I had left Westwind too soon. After a year there I was still learning so much; it was imprudent for me to waltz out.

  Most of all I missed their straight talk. When I asked Bruce about whether a corpse is going to “go bad” if not embalmed right away, he laughed derisively, even though he was a longtime embalmer and educator himself. “The whole ‘body going bad’ thing has really gotten blown out of proportion. Granted, if you’re in a hundred and ten degrees with no air conditioning, like, the middle of the Amazon rain forest, you gonna want to take care of that. Otherwise, that body isn’t going to go rotten in the next hour. It’s crazy how funeral homes really think that.”

  Mortuary school made me tense to the point of physical illness. The longer you spend doing something you don’t believe in, the more the systems of your body rebel. The months drifted by and I was plagued by sore throats, muscle spasms, canker sores in my mouth. As Dr. Frankenstein ruminated while working to create his monster, “My heart often sickened at the work of my hands.” It was a stressful environment and a financially foolish decision on my part. But I would have forked over my life savings to anyone who could have let me skip embalming lab and not fail the class.

  Granted, I was far from the only student made tense by mortuary school. There was a woman in the program who would stand outside the building chain-smoking, her hands trembling. She often broke down crying during exams and twice, notably, during labs: once while viciously jamming a metal suction tube into a dead man’s foot and once while applying practice curls to a plastic head. I had named my plastic head Maude. My classmate was not on a first-name basis with hers.

  More and more I began to cherish the idea of the home funeral. I had never forgotten about my original dream of owning a funeral home. The dream of La Belle Mort had morphed into the dream of Undertaking L.A. At Undertaking L.A., families could reclaim the process of dying, washing, dressing, and attending to the body as humans had done for thousands of years. Family members would remain with the body, free to mourn and care for their loved one in a supportive, realistic environment. Such an idea was taboo at mortuary school, where wisdom held that embalming kept a corpse “sanitary.” No wonder Bruce said funeral directors were telling families that dead bodies were a threat to public health: they were learning that dead bodies were a threat to public health.

  I INCHED TOWARD GRADUATION and passed the exams to become a licensed funeral director in the state of California. My reveries of galloping into the sunset to start Undertaking L.A. were dampened by financial realities. I had put myself in debt to go to Deth Skool and thus lacked the capital, and perhaps the experience, to open my own funeral home. I had to get another job in the death industry.

  One option was moving to Japan, where they were desperate to hire trained embalmers from the United States and Canada. Embalming is a recent development in Japan, where they call it “death medicine.” One Canadian embalmer who moved to Japan to work described placing bandages on the embalmed corpse to make it look like a medical procedure. Appealing as it would have been to live overseas, I wasn’t about to act as the colonialist bearer of ill-advised deathways.

  Professor Diaz told me that it would be hard to get hired at a crematory in Southern California. For that type of physical work, “they can just get an immigrant to do it.” Though insensitive, she was being honest; this was what crematory owners had told her.

  On the opposite end of the death spectrum was someplace like Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Jessica Mitford’s archnemesis, the “Disneyland of Death.” Forest Lawn had expanded to multiple locations across Southern California. Everyone knew Forest Lawn. Their billboards soar high over Los Angeles, picturing a forty-foot-tall elderly couple dressed in white linen. Their heads thrown back in laughter, the couple holds hands and walks along the beach at sunset. They’re reveling in their golden years, beaming at each other, just here to gently remind you (in tiny print at the bottom of the billboard) that there is a memorial park available should you wish to prepay for your funeral.

  A group of Forest Lawn representatives filled the lobby of Cypress College. It was billed as a job fair, although the “fair” element fell somewhat flat, as only Forest Lawn was represented. One of the representatives gave a talk to our graduating class.

  “Our founder, Hubert Eaton was a revolutionary!” she gushed. “Surely you’ve learned about the wonderful things he has done for the death industry. And it’s a wonderful place to work. Such good benefits—people retire from our company.”

  At Cypress, the all-female representative army looked just like Evelyn Waugh had described, “that new race of exquisite, amiable, efficient young ladies” whom he had met everywhere in the United States. They wore matching gray suits and blank stares reminiscent of the Manson family. The Eaton family, if you will, here to gain recruits for the beautiful death brigade.

  I filled out their massive employment application and forced myself to turn it in. I had to wait my turn while they interviewed several male students in the mortuary program, for whom they make no effort to hide their preference.

  “Well, I am looking for a job as an arrangement counselor. I do have experience in that area,” I began.

  “Now, we call those ‘memorial counselors,’ and we don’t have anything like that available,” the representative cooed. “You don’t want to be an embalmer?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Well, perhaps you would be interested in our student program, where we allow selected students to work part-time at services, giving directions to the families, et cetera. Oh! But look, it says here you are graduating this year, you wouldn’t want that.”

  “Oh, well, sure I would. I really want to work for your company!” I said with as much vigor as possible, forcing the bile down the back of my throat. I felt gross the rest of the day.

  Over the next month I applied everywhere, knowing where I actually wanted to be was back in the trenches, with dead bodies, with real grief and real death. I heard back from two places: a very fancy mortuary/cemetery combination, and a crematory. I decided to show up at both interviews looking w
ell put together and let fate decide.

  BODY VAN

  The cemetery was Old Hollywood glamorous. It wasn’t Forest Lawn, but it was close. Turning off the road through the decorative gates was like entering Mount Olympus. A white-columned mansion sat high atop a hill, with a twelve-tiered water fountain cascading below it. It was a wonderland, where a single burial plot could run tens of thousands of dollars.

  I was meeting with the general manager to interview for a job as a funeral director. After a few minutes he came sweeping into the lobby with a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. Directing me into an elevator, he said, “Here, cookies. Take one.” It felt rude to say no. Afraid to interview with chocolate on my teeth, I gracelessly held the sweet burden in my hand through the entire interview.

  We got off the elevator and he led me into his office, which had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over his death utopia. He delivered a thirty-minute monologue on the pros and cons of his establishment. I would be hired to make funeral arrangements, but, he warned, “Don’t be surprised if the family treats you like a butler—that’s the kind of people they are. Here, well, you’re the help.”

  I would handle the arrangements for everyone except the celebrities. He did all the celebrity calls. “Look,” he said by way of explanation, “last month when [redacted] died, his service time leaked to the media. Of course, all the paparazzi were swarming the gates. I need that kind of publicity like I need a fist in my ass, if you get me. I handle the celebrities now.”

  This wasn’t my ideal employment situation, but at least the cemetery wasn’t run by one of the big funeral corporations. Even better, he swore up and down that I wouldn’t have to upsell anything to families: more-expensive caskets, extended services, fancy golden urns. No lines like “Are you sure Mom wouldn’t have wanted the rosewood casket? Didn’t she deserve a dignified send-off?” were required to earn my bonus. It seemed like a good enough place to recover for a while, licking my wounds from mortuary school.

  After telling me I was hired, making me fill out my W-9, and showing me my new office, I didn’t hear from him for a month. I had erroneously thought that his “fist in my ass” speech meant I was part of the team. Apparently there are far more intimate rungs in the funeral service ladder, because I eventually got a curt e-mail from his secretary informing me they had decided to “hire internally” instead.

  My second interview was at a crematory, a Westwind of magnificent proportions, a veritable disposal factory. It cremated thousands of bodies a year in a sizeable warehouse in Orange County. It was run by Cliff, a man who spoke in the same flat monotone as Mike, leading me to believe the speech pattern is a job requirement. He also took the place very seriously, having built the business to a size sufficient to support his real passion, competition Spanish Andalusian horses. I got the job.

  My position would not be a crematory operator, but a body-transport driver. Most crematories receive bodies in deliveries of one to four at a time, depending on their source of origin. My body van, a tall diesel-fuel Dodge Sprinter with built-in shelves, held eleven dead bodies at once. Twelve in a pinch, with one corpse tilted at a slight angle.

  With my eleven corpses in tow I drove hither and thither across Southern California—San Diego, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara—to retrieve the dead and bring them back to the crematory. Hauling, lifting, and driving filled my daily schedule.

  In my new job I was no longer the belle of my own little ball as I had been at Westwind. I was a mere piece of a puzzle, a specialized laborer. My position was a product of Jessica Mitford’s influence, the result of her direct-cremation vision achieving ubiquity, on its way to supreme popularity. California was once again the leader in this new way of death, as it had been with Forest Lawn, as it had been with Mitford, as it had been with Bayside Cremation.

  The crematory was manned by three young Latino men from East Los Angeles, working in shifts all hours of the day and night (and on weekends) to perform cremations in the colossal machines whose fires constantly burned. There was the good—the very sweet Manuel, who always helped me unload my bodies from the van at the end of the day; the bad—the tattooed Emiliano, who made sure to tell me he was looking to get a white girl pregnant; and the ugly—Ricky, who cornered and threatened me in one of the cooling fridges for stacking the bodies in a manner not to his liking.

  There was a never-ending stream of decedents who required fetching. On Christmas Eve I got a call from the woman who ran the facility in San Diego: “Caitlin, there are too many bodies here, we need you tonight.” So in the middle of the night, while others snuggled in their beds, dreaming sugarplum dreams, my van zoomed from Los Angeles to San Diego and back like a depressing Santa Claus with even more depressing cargo. “The bodies were stacked in the reefer with care, with hope that the body van soon would be there . . .”

  If there was one luxury I had as captain of the Good Ship Body Van, it was time to think. Driving more than 350 miles a day as a long-haul corpse trucker gives one ample time to ponder. Some days I listened to books on tape (Moby-Dick on eighteen unabridged CDs, thank you very much). Other days it was the Christian talk radio that starts to come in clearly as soon as you leave metropolitan Los Angeles. But mostly I thought about death.

  Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives. This need for meaning is why some believe in an intricate system of potential afterlives, others believe sacrificing a certain animal on a certain day leads to healthy crops, and still others believe the world will end when a ship constructed with the untrimmed nails of the dead arrives carrying a corpse army to do battle with the gods at the end of days. (Norse mythology will always be the most metal, sorry.)

  But there is something deeply unsettling—or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it—about what is happening to our death values. There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality. There have been times when humans were driven to break tradition by necessity—for example, deaths on a foreign battlefield. But for the most part, when a person dies, they are disposed of like their mother and father were, and like their mothers and fathers were. Hindus were cremated, elite Egyptians entombed with their organs in jars, Viking warriors buried in ships. And now, the cultural norm is that Americans are either embalmed and buried, or cremated. But culture no longer dictates that we must do those things, out of belief or obligation.

  Historically, death rituals have, without question, been tied to religious beliefs. But our world is becoming increasingly secular. The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion”—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even those who identify as having strong religious beliefs often feel their once-strong death rituals have been commoditized and hold less meaning for them. At a time like this, there is no limit to our creativity in creating rituals relevant to our modern lives. The freedom is exciting, but it is also a burden. We cannot possibly live without a relationship to our mortality, and developing secular methods for addressing death will become more critical as each year passes.

  I started to put essays and manifestos on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death,” looking for people who shared my desire for change. One such person was Jae Rhim Lee, an MIT-trained designer and artist who created a full-body suit for a human to wear for burial. The “Infinity Burial Suit,” which might be described as ninja couture, features a dendritic pattern of white thread spreading out across the black fabric. Lee crafted the thread from mushroom spores, which she specially engineered to consume parts of the human body using her own skin, hair, and nails. This may sound like a Soylent Green future, but Lee is actually training the mushrooms to remove toxins from our bod
ies as they decompose the human corpse.

  After seeing a demonstration of her work at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, we met at a taco truck and talked for hours on a bus-stop bench on Olympic and La Brea. I was grateful to talk to someone interested in pushing the boundaries of body disposal; she was grateful that someone in the traditional funeral industry was willing to listen to her ideas. We both agreed that inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition was a noble purpose. She gave me a bucket of the flesh-eating mushroom prototype, which I attempted (and failed) to keep alive in my garage. Not feeding it enough flesh, I reckon.

  For years, while working at Westwind and attending mortuary school, I had been afraid to discuss cultural death denial in public. The Internet is not always the kindest of forums, especially for young women. Tucked away in the comment section of my kitschy web series “Ask a Mortician,” there are enough misogynistic comments to last a lifetime. Yes, gentlemen, I’m aware I give your penis rigor mortis. It wasn’t just the anonymous basement dwellers who took issue with me. People in the funeral industry weren’t always thrilled that I was sharing what they perceived to be privileged “behind the black curtain” knowledge. “I’m sure she’s just having some fun. But since fun has no place in the funeral industry, I wouldn’t go to her for my loved one.” To this day the National Funeral Directors Association, the industry’s largest professional association, won’t comment on me.

  But as I grew bolder, people came out of the woodwork. Crawled out of the coffin, if you will. People from all different disciplines—funeral directors, hospice workers, academics, filmmakers, artists—had wanted to discover how death works in our lives.

  I wrote a lot of letters, sometimes out of the blue. One such recipient was Dr. John Troyer, a professor at the University of Bath’s Center for Death and Society. Dr. Troyer, whose PhD dissertation was titled “Technologies of the Human Corpse,” is studying crematoriums that capture the excess heat from the cremation process and put it to use elsewhere—heating other buildings, or even, as one crematory in Worcestershire did, a local swimming pool, saving taxpayers £14,500 a year. It is a way to make the cremation process, which uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body, more energy efficient. Luckily Dr. Troyer was willing to talk with me, even with my crude e-mail subject line, “Fan Gurl!”