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

by Caitlin Doughty

  It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely. I even went on a date with one of them, a PhD candidate in computational biology at the University of Southern California. Isaac started his graduate career in physics, but made the switch once he discovered that, biologically, man does not have to age. Perhaps “discovered” is too strong a word. “I had the idea that, using the principles of physics and biology, we can engineer and maintain a state of indefinite youth. But when I realized that there were other people already working on it, I was almost like, fuck it,” Isaac explained to me over our organic chicken sandwiches, revealing not a trace of irony.

  Though he had seriously pursued rock stardom and considered writing a great novel, Isaac now waxed poetic on mitochondria and cell death, and the idea of slowing the aging process to a snail’s pace. But I was ready for him. “There is already overpopulation,” I said. “So much poverty and destruction, we don’t have the resources to take care of the people we already have on Earth, forget everyone living forever! And there will still be death by accident. It will just be even more tragic for someone who is supposed to live until three hundred to die at twenty-two.”

  Isaac was entirely unmoved. “This isn’t for other people,” he explained. “This is for me. I’m terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don’t want to die. I want to live forever.”

  Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation. Isaac was getting his PhD, exploring the boundaries of science, making music because of the inspiration death provided. If he lived forever, chances are he would be rendered boring, listless, and unmotivated, robbed of life’s richness by dull routine. The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death. He didn’t seem to realize the fire beneath his ass was mortality—the very thing he was attempting to defeat.

  THE MORNING I GOT the call about Tutu’s death, I was in L.A. at a crematory, labeling boxes of ashes. After almost a year driving the body van, I had recently moved to a job at a mortuary, running their local office. I was now working with families and coordinating funerals and cremations with doctors, the coroner’s office, the county death-certificate office.

  The phone rang, with my mother’s voice on the other end: “Valerie just called. She’s hysterical. She said Tutu’s not breathing. I think she’s dead. I used to know what to do, but now I don’t. I don’t know what to do.”

  The remainder of my morning was spent on the phone with family members and the funeral home. It was exactly the same thing I did at work every day, except this was my grandmother, the woman who had lived a block away when I was growing up, who had put me through college and mortuary school, and who called me Caiti-pie.

  While they waited for the morticians to arrive, Valerie laid Tutu’s corpse out on her bed and dressed her body in a green cashmere sweater and a colorful scarf. My mother texted me a picture. “Here’s Tutu,” it read. Even through the phone, I could tell Tutu looked more peaceful than she had in years. Her face was no longer screwed up in confusion, struggling to understand the rules of the world around her. Tutu’s mouth hung open and her face blanched white, but she was a beautiful shell. A relic of the woman she once was. I still treasure this picture.

  On my flight to Hawai’i that afternoon I had one of those somnial visions that live between dream and nightmare. I was at the funeral home to see Tutu, and I was led into a room where her emaciated body lay in a glass coffin. Her face was decomposed, bloated and black. She had been embalmed, but something had gone horribly wrong. “Is she to your liking?” the funeral director asked. “My God, no! She isn’t!” I cried, and grabbed a sheet to cover her. I had told them not to embalm her, and they had done it anyway.

  In real life, my family had let me handle the funeral arrangements, as I was, technically, the professional. We had decided on a simple viewing for our family and then a witness cremation. When we came into the viewing room I understood what the man from New Zealand (or was it Australia? I’ll probably never know) at Westwind had meant by “Mom looked better before.” Tutu didn’t look like the woman in the picture my mother sent me. Her mouth had been pulled into a grimace with wires and superglue. I knew the tricks. She wore bright-red lipstick in a color she never wore when she was alive. I couldn’t believe I had let my own grandmother’s body fall victim to the postmortem tortures I was fighting against. It demonstrated just how strong a hold the mortuary industry has over our way of death.

  My family and I stared down at Tutu’s body in the coffin. One of my cousins clumsily touched her hand. Valerie, her caregiver, approached the casket carrying her four-year-old niece, who would often come to visit with Tutu. Valerie let her niece kiss Tutu repeatedly, and she herself began to wail, touching Tutu’s face and crying, “Lucy, Lucy, my beautiful lady” in her lilting Samoan accent. To see her touch the corpse so freely made me ashamed that I had been so awkward. Ashamed that I hadn’t pushed harder to keep Tutu’s body at home, even when the funeral director had told my mother that keeping the body any longer than two hours was against Hawai’i state law (it’s not).

  It is never too early to start thinking about your own death and the deaths of those you love. I don’t mean thinking about death in obsessive loops, fretting that your husband has been crushed in a horrific car accident, or that your plane will catch fire and plummet from the sky. But rational interaction, that ends with you realizing that you will survive the worst, whatever the worst may be. Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

  A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices—racism, sexism, homophobia—have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.

  Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientists confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you’ve been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn’t set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating new mental circuits.

  I was not doomed forever to be the child tortured by the sight of a girl falling to her death in a Hawaiian shopping mall. Nor was I doomed forever to be the woman in the redwood forest on the brink of taking her own life rather than submitting to a life consumed by death. Through my interactions with art and literature, and, crucially, through my confrontations with my own mortality, I had rewired my brain’s circuits into what Joseph Campbell called a “bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life.”

  The day of Tutu’s viewing, the power had gone out in the funeral home’s primary chapel. They decided to troubleshoot by moving another, much larger family into our room. Dozens of people crowded outside, pushing up against the glass, waiting for me and my relatives to finish our viewing. It was clear that we were an inconvenience to this family and to the funeral home employees. I thought, for the three hundredth time that day, how different this would have been if I hadn’t caved and we had kept Tutu at home.

  When the crowd finally became too cumbersome to ignore, we cut the service short. Ou
r family practically had to jog down the hall to keep up with the funeral director wheeling Tutu’s casket to the crematory. The crematory operator had rolled her into the flames before my family even had time to gather. I missed Westwind, which, despite its industrial décor, did have a certain openness and warmth, with its vaulted ceilings and skylights (and with Chris to light the candle as the machine door closed). I felt like I had failed my family.

  Someday, I would like to open my own crematory. Not an industrial warehouse, but a space both intimate and open, with floor-to-ceiling windows to let the sunshine in and keep the weirdo death stigma out. Through the reach of the Order of the Good Death, I was able to work with two Italian architects to design such a place, where a family can witness the body loading into the cremation machine with light streaming in through the glass, giving the illusion they are outdoors in a place of serenity and nature, not of industry.

  I also want better municipal, state, and federal laws in North America, which would allow not only for more natural burials but also for open-air pyres and grounds where bodies can be laid out in the open and consumed by nature. We don’t need to stop at green or natural burial. “Burial” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word birgan, “to conceal.” Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed. Ever since my dark night of the soul in the redwood forest, I've believed the animals I've consumed my whole life should someday have their turn with me. The ancient Ethiopians would place their dead in the lake where they fished, so the fish would have the opportunity to receive back the nutrients. The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us.

  We can wander further into the death dystopia, denying that we will die and hiding dead bodies from our sight. Making that choice means we will continue to be terrified and ignorant of death, and the huge role it plays in how we live our lives. Let us instead reclaim our mortality, writing our own Ars Moriendi for the modern world with bold, fearless strokes.

  PRODIGAL DAUGHTER

  (AN EPILOGUE OF SORTS)

  Four years after leaving my job at Westwind Cremation & Burial, I stood, once again, outside the front gate. I rang the bell, the prodigal daughter returned home to the corpse-burning hearth. After a few moments, Mike came out to let me in.

  “Well, look at who it is,” he said with a smirk. “You keep coming back like a bad penny. Come inside with me, I’m fingerprinting a body.”

  We passed through the lobby and back into the crematory, and I still felt some of the same reverence I’d had when I first walked into that cavernous room five years earlier. In the middle of the room was a cot holding the body of an elderly woman. She was surrounded by four sheets of white paper, filled along the edges with black thumbprints.

  “OK, so you’re literally fingerprinting a body,” I said. “I was wondering if that was a metaphor or something. Is this for one of those Thumbie necklaces?” I asked, recalling the company that laser-etches fingerprints into memorial necklaces. It seemed even Westwind couldn’t escape the funeral industry’s siren song to personalization.

  “Yeah, you got it,” Mike said as he lifted the woman’s hand and gently wiped the black ink off her thumb. He applied a fresh coat and pressed her thumb to paper for the umpteenth time. “This is the stuff I get obsessed with, man. None of these are right yet. I’m cremating the body today—I have to get a good print.”

  Mike went to answer the phone, and I pulled out my notebook. I had come to research this book, to ask questions, to confirm stories. I had even made an official appointment, like a professional. Mike walked back into the room and asked, deadpan, “So are you around here for the afternoon? We need you to go on a removal out in Piedmont. I have a service today, I can’t do it, and Chris needs a second person.”

  I had been back for all of five minutes and already I was being sent out on a removal. It was as if I had never left, death’s indomitable schedule sending me straight back to work.

  “What the hell, yeah, I’ll go,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant at the prospect. To be honest, I was pretty excited to be back on the team.

  “Good. Chris is on his way back from the coroner’s now. By the way, I didn’t tell him you were coming. It’s a surprise.”

  When Chris walked through the door, a look of disbelief flickered over his face. The look passed quickly. “I knew you’d be back, Cat.”

  Later, as we drove through the winding hills up to Piedmont, Chris asked where I was staying.

  “Oakland, with friends,” I answered.

  “That’s good, it means you don’t have to go to that devil city,” he replied, pointing vaguely in the direction of San Francisco.

  “So I hear that you’re writing a ‘book,’” he continued, making air quotes with his fingers.

  “Well, it’s a real book, Chris. Not a hypothetical one.”

  “Why would you ever write about us? We’re dull. You should make it fictionalized characters. Like us, but better.”

  “I would argue that you guys are pretty interesting.”

  “It’s dull as tombs here. It’s a good thing you got out while you still could. Shame you didn’t leave the industry altogether.”

  We pulled up to a large old house with a white picket fence covered in vines.

  “Well, this is nice place. You got lucky, Cat. The body I picked up yesterday was a decomp. It purged all over me. Although that guy was in a pretty nice apartment too. You just never know what’s inside,” Chris mused, pulling the gurney out from the back of the van.

  We returned to Westwind with the body of Ms. Sherman, a beautiful woman in her mid-eighties with thick white hair. Her body had been washed by her family and covered in fresh flowers. Before sliding her onto the cot I grabbed her hand, colder than a living human’s, warmer than a mere inanimate object. My reaction to seeing her laid out this way was a reminder of how much I had changed since I first started at Westwind; whereas before bodies had scared me, now there was nothing more elegant in my eyes than a corpse in its natural state, prepared with dignity by her own family.

  After unloading Ms. Sherman, Chris went out again to retrieve the latest batch of babies. Mike was up front making funeral arrangements with a family. With no one to talk to, I decided to put Ms. Sherman away in the refrigeration unit. As I taped and labeled her cremation container, the cardboard edge gave me the same razor thin paper cut it had a million times in the past. “Oh, what the—really?” I said to no one in particular.

  Westwind’s newest crematory operator, a young woman named Cheryl, came into the crematory, clearly confused by my presence there. After I explained who I was, she clumsily shook my hand and walked back out. Jerry, the man originally hired to replace me when I left Westwind, had died of fast-moving cancer a few months earlier. He was only forty-five.

  As I was leaving for the day, Bruce stopped by to pick up a check for several embalmings he had done the week prior. “Caitlin! How you doing? I’ve seen those videos you do online. What’s your website?”

  “The Order of the Good Death.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and the videos, the Question for a Mortician ones? Yeah, they’re good, they’re good.”

  “Thanks, Bruce, I’m glad you like them.”

  “You know what you need to do? I have a plan for you. You need to do a show at night, like with monster movies and such. A show like Answer a Mortician . . . is that what it’s called? Anyway, it would be like that. Paired with like, creature features. There was one on cable access in the ’70s. I tried to get my buddy at KTVU to bring it back. Everybody watches these monster movies on a Saturday. Like Svengoolie or who’s that woman—Vampira. Cult classic stuff.”

  “I think I’d make a pretty poor Vampira substitute.”

  “No! Don’t worry about it, you’ve already got the right hair for it,” he assured m
e. “I’m gonna talk to my buddy.”

  ON MY WAY OUT of San Francisco I drove by Rondel Place. My former apartment had been stripped of its dull pink paint and refashioned as an elegant Victorian, right down to the gilded trimmings. I had a feeling my old room no longer rented for $500 a month. A handcrafted bicycle-messenger-bag shop had opened up across the street, and high-tech cameras at the end of the alley threatened to expose potential miscreants. The sidewalks on the surrounding streets had been repaved with glitter. Glitter. It was a shocking change from the Rondel I knew, but as the joke goes: “Q: What’s the definition of a gentrifier? A: Someone who arrived five minutes after you did.”

  Halfway to Los Angeles, I stopped for the night at a small boarding house in the seaside town of Cambria. This was one of my favorite places in California, but I was filled with anxiety that I couldn’t place.

  In 1961, a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology laid out the seven reasons humans fear dying:

  1. My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends.

  2. All my plans and projects would come to an end.

  3. The process of dying might be painful.

  4. I could no longer have any experiences.

  5. I would no longer be able to care for my dependents.

  6. I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death.

  7. I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.

  The anxiety I felt was no longer caused by the fear of an afterlife, of pain, of a void of nothingness, or even a fear of my own decomposing corpse. All my plans and projects would come to an end. The last thing preventing me from accepting death was, ironically, my desire to help people accept death.