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

  MY JOB AT WESTWIND lasted until the end of November, and mortuary school didn’t begin until January; in between, I felt aimless. I drove up to the far north of California to hike through the giant redwood trees, intending to get my mind off of what had happened with Luke. I wrote my friends (and my mother) a lighthearted e-mail detailing what I wanted done with my body (and my cat) were I to perish on the winding mountain roads.

  I checked into the Redwood Hostel, an old house along the jagged Northern California coast. The next day I set off to find the Cathedral Trees Trail, where I had hiked several years before, but for some reason I couldn’t find it. I drove up and down the highway, unable to locate the entrance. Suddenly my frustration gave way to rage, and I slammed my foot all the way down on the accelerator and drove full-speed toward the edge of a cliff, swinging the wheel at the very last moment to avoid driving off. Pulling off to the shoulder to catch my breath, I marveled at my own fury. I wasn’t prone to outbursts of violence. I had certainly never tried to drive off a cliff before.

  After collecting myself, I stopped to ask directions from a park ranger, who led me to the turnoff for the Cathedral Trees Trail. There was no one on the trail with me as I descended into the canopy of towering, sacred trees, some more than a thousand years old. I could sense their ancient wisdom as I made my way down the hill. It was when I reached the bottom that I realized I had gone there to die. I hadn’t consciously planned to do so, but I had written my last e-mails, stated what I wanted done with my body, and carried with me in my backpack the agent of my demise. Twenty minutes earlier I sped straight toward the cliff’s edge because I was furious at myself for being so pathetically lost, ruining the sanctity of my final day.

  I felt fucking cheated. Culture exists to provide answers to the big human questions: love and death. When I was still a young girl, my culture made me two promises. The first promise was that society knows what’s best for us, and what’s best for us is that death be kept hidden. That promise was shattered at Westwind, which I had discovered was playing its part in a vast mortality cover-up. Now that I had seen our society’s structural denial of death, it was hard for me to stop thinking about. I wanted to quiet my brain, to stop its incessant ruminations on the whys and hows of mortality. I felt like Muchukunda, the mythical Hindu king who, when asked by a god what reward he desired for his years of fighting (literal) demons, wished for nothing more than never-ending sleep. Death, for me, was like a never-ending sleep. And I longed for it.

  The second promise was delivered by popular culture, which laid out the narrative that a girl is owed the prize of true love. I didn’t believe myself to be a slave to popular-culture narratives (spoiler: I was). Instead I believed what I shared with Luke was a rational, passionate connection with another human being. But somehow I was wrong about everything. Both of the promises my culture made to me were broken, my webs of significance snapped. None of my privileged assumptions about the world could be counted on anymore.

  For what seemed like hours, no one came by. This was a well-trod hiking trail, but today there was absolutely not a soul. So there I sat, debating whether or not to walk into the forest. If I did, I would follow the example of painter Paul Gauguin, who tried to commit suicide by swallowing arsenic deep in the mountains of Tahiti. He had just finished one of his greatest paintings, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin hoped that no humans would find his body so that ants would eat his corpse. In his zeal, he swallowed too much arsenic. His body rejected the poison, and he vomited it back up. He woke up, wandered out of the mountains, and lived for six more years.

  Like Gauguin, I wanted the animals to devour my body. There is, after all, a thin line between a corpse and a carcass. I was just as much an animal as the other creatures in the redwood forest. A deer needs no embalming, sealed caskets, or headstones. He is free to lie where he dies. My whole life I had eaten other animals, and now I would offer myself to them. Nature would at last have its chance with me.

  Botflies can smell a carcass from ten miles away. Chances are they would arrive first to the feast. They would lay their eggs on the outside of my corpse, eggs that would need only a single day to hatch into maggots. The new maggots would tunnel into my body, impervious to the onset of my putrefaction. A marvel of engineering, their mouths allow them to breathe and eat at the same time.

  If you are interested in the other, more honorable, guests at the feast, may I submit the bald eagle, symbol of America? They are natural scavengers and do not pass up the opportunity to take advantage of dead meat. Their sharp beaks would rip away strips of my flesh and carry them into the sky.

  My body in the woods might also attract a black bear. Omnivorous, they can hunt fish and even young moose, but they have no compunction about scavenging dead bodies. One of which I would become.

  After the animals had consumed my flesh, the dermestid beetle would be the final creature to arrive. These plain, inconspicuous beetles eat wool, feathers, fur, and, in my case, dried skin and hair. They would eat everything except my bones, leaving my bare, white skeleton lying anonymously on the forest floor.

  In this way my body’s decomposition would also be a banquet. My corpse would not be a disgusting mass of corruption but a source of life, dispensing molecules and creating new creatures. It would be the finest acknowledgment that I was but one tiny cog in the ecosystem’s wheel, a blip in the majestic workings of the natural world.

  We all know how this story turned out. In spite of my fear of living, I chose not to die.

  I had become a lonely creature in my time at Westwind, but like Chris held on to thirty-five-year-old coconuts, I held on to friends. These friends didn’t live in San Francisco or L.A., but they were out there, along with my parents, who loved me desperately. I didn’t take much stock in the value of my life in that moment, but I knew I didn’t want them to feel the hopeless ambiguity I had felt years before, left to guess what had become of the little girl at the shopping mall.

  I walked out of the forest, and turned the corner into a magnificent field of wildflowers. The colors were brighter than I thought colors could be.

  Walking out of the redwoods into the parking lot, somewhat stunned, I ran into a woman, the first person I had seen in hours. She asked for directions. “My husband always handled that sort of thing,” she apologized. “He died last year. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  We talked for some time about death, the cremation process, and our culture’s negative relationship with mortality. At her request, I described what had happened to his body at the crematory. “Knowing all that stuff makes me feel better,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know why, but it does. I’m glad I met you.”

  The only other car in the parking lot was a beat-up old van, filled to the brim with canned food and supplies. Its owner, a rotund woman, walked her black Pomeranian on a nearby patch of grass.

  “That’s a darling dog,” I said as I climbed into my car.

  “So, you think this one is cute, do you?” she croaked.

  She walked to the side of her van and returned with two Pomeranian puppies, a gold one and a black one, two perfect balls of fluff. She thrust them into my arms.

  That evening, I wandered back to the Redwoods Hostel, dazed and drained by the day, Pomeranian puppy spittle on my cheek from where they had licked my face. On the porch was a tall, handsome nineteen-year-old named Casey, hitchhiking across Canada and down the West Coast of the United States.

  Two days later he was at my apartment in Koreatown, lying beside me in my bed, just young and uncomplicated enough to relieve the turmoil in my brain.

  “Dude, I could really mow down on some pasta or something right now,” he mused.

  “Yeah, that can be arranged.”

  “Seriously, this is, like, crazy, right? I never expected to meet some random awesome chick like this.”

  Well, Casey, expect anything. The only thing that’s certain is that nothing ever is.
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br />   DETH SKOOL

  A week before I started classes at Cypress College of Mortuary Science, I was poked, prodded, and shot up with tetanus and tuberculosis vaccines—all part of the orientation physical. I was sick, which the doctor at the clinic found wildly unimpressive. “Well, your nodes aren’t swollen,” he said. Well, thank you for your opinion, Doctor, I thought. You’re not the one taking your mortuary school ID photo looking like a bog monster.

  All the disease testing and immunizations caught me off guard. Westwind Cremation had never seemed too concerned with the possibility of me giving syphilis to a corpse or vice versa. The only time Mike would tell me to put on any biohazard protection beyond a pair of rubber gloves was when he thought I might ruin a nice dress. A rare area of sensitivity for him, really.

  The morning of my first day of school I left my apartment in Koreatown early and drove the forty-five minutes south to Orange County. I hadn’t budgeted for the gridlock traffic in the school parking lot, so of course I was five minutes late. I burst in just as the head of the program was explaining how tardiness of any kind would be counted as an absence.

  “And where exactly are you supposed to be?” he asked as I bumbled in.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be here,” I replied, slinking to a seat in the back.

  There had been a mortuary school group orientation session a few weeks earlier, which I had missed in order to indulge my despair in the redwoods. This was the first time I was able to see the people I would be spending the next eighteen months with. Looking around the room I was surprised to discover that most of my fellow classmates were women, and women of color, no less. Hardly the bastion of creepy white men in suits I associated with the American funeral industry.

  At the end of our first day we were corralled into a large room with the second- and third-semester students and given instructions to introduce ourselves and tell the group why we had come to the illustrious concrete halls of deth skool. I was hoping this sharing exercise would help ferret out my fellow death revolutionaries. Surely they would boldly refuse to give the same cheesy, party-line answer, “I just really want to help people.”

  No such luck. Even the students with the crazy eyes, the ones you could just tell enjoyed the transgressive proximity to dead bodies, had to talk about their desire to help people. Finally the sharing circle arrived at me. I imagined myself yelling, “A new dawn is upon us, join me while you still can, fools!” Instead I said something about having worked at a crematory and, you know, seeing a “good future in the death industry.” Then it was over. Everyone grabbed their Nightmare Before Christmas messenger bags and left in a thoughtful mood.

  There were roughly fifty of us starting the program. I quickly befriended Paola, a first-generation Colombian American. One woman I did not have the pleasure of befriending was Michelle McGee. Nicknamed “Bombshell,” her image was later plastered all over the media for her role in breaking up the marriage of America’s sweetheart Sandra Bullock and her tattooed husband Jesse James, a tabloid dream of a cheating scandal. Michelle dropped out two weeks into the program. It may have been the fact that her whole body was covered in tattoos, including her face (not the traditional look a family is expecting when choosing someone to look after their deceased mother). Michelle was the first to go, but others followed at an alarming rate.

  One thing that was immediately apparent about the professors at Cypress College of Mortuary Science was that they believed in the work they were doing. Professor Diaz, a short blond woman, was the most aggressively cheerful person I had ever met in my life. Her enthusiasm for embalming, caskets, and all the available swag of the modern funeral industry bordered on the threatening. In her lectures she described embalming as an ancient art and said things like, “Do we have to embalm our bodies? No, but we do. It is who we are.”

  In one class, Professor Diaz showed us lengthy slideshows of different caskets, gushing over her own purchase of a $25,000 Batesville Gold Protection casket with a forest-green interior, the same model the singer James Brown had been buried in. When she died, it would be slid into a pre-paid aboveground vault. Her soaring rhetoric seemed to refer to something far different from the caskets I had seen at Westwind, with crepe pillows and lumpy beds filled with shredded office paper like my cat used in her litter box.

  At the end of the casket slideshow, Professor Diaz briefly showed us a picture of the dirtiest, most soot-stained cremation retort I had ever seen. Paola slid over to me and whispered, “Why does that cremation chamber look like it’s from the Holocaust or something?”

  “I think it’s a veiled warning,” I whispered back.

  “Yeah, like, ‘So, anyone here want to be cremated instead of buried? Well, come on down, this is where you’ll end up. Muahaha.’”

  IN THE SECOND SEMESTER we began embalming lab, the class I feared the most. I had seen embalming in action many a time, but had little interest in performing it myself. Our embalming instructor wore a tie covered in the books of the Bible and would bless us all with the sign of the cross as he dismissed the class. He had faith that, as soon-to-be embalmers, we were doing God’s work.

  It was evident I had no place in “traditional” funeral service. I hated embalming lab and the head-to-toe biohazard-resistant protective gear we were forced to wear. The personal protective equipment, or PPEs, were only available in a sickly shade of light blue, making the students look like a cross between the stars of a deadly-disease-outbreak film and overweight Smurfs. More than the outfits (admittedly a frivolous concern), I also hated that our lab bodies were the indigent and homeless dead of Los Angeles County.

  The county of Los Angeles has, depending on the year, upward of 80,000 homeless men and women living within its borders. More citizens live on the streets in L.A. than in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. A mere ten minutes away from the latest big-budget film premiere is a section of downtown known as Skid Row, a popup-tent city of homeless men and women, many of them mentally disturbed and dependent on drugs. In L.A., the gap between the haves and the have-nots is more like a chasm.

  When a celebrity dies in Los Angeles, the news is greeted with tremendous fuss. Michael Jackson’s body warranted a private helicopter escort to the L.A. County Coroner’s and hundreds of thousands of mourners observed his funeral in person and on the Internet. His body, like those of the medieval saints, was a relic, an object of public adoration.

  Not so the bodies of the homeless. They are a rotting burden that must be disposed of on the government’s dime. I know these bodies well. They were embalming practice.

  Every week a volunteer from Cypress College went to retrieve bodies from the L.A. County Morgue. We fetched our victims from a special fridge (really a vault) full of the unclaimed. The morgue attendant opened the refrigeration unit to reveal hundreds of identical white body bags, stacked five shelves high. They are what mortician Thomas Lynch calls “larger than life-size sperm” for the way hospitals and coroners’ offices tie the bags tight around the deceased’s feet. It is an entire city of dead bodies, a frozen sperm necropolis.

  This fridge is where the dead wait. Weeks pass into months as the county tries to find someone to claim the body. When the trail ends, a county-provided cremation will take place. Starting early in the morning, while some young starlet stumbles drunkenly out of a Hollywood club, bodies are already burning. Having been reduced to ash, they are placed in a container, labeled, and put on a shelf. That shelf is a burgeoning necropolis of its own, and the remains will wait there even longer. They’ll wait until the bureaucratic channels have run dry, and the government is finally satisfied that nobody is coming to retrieve the anonymous tin of ashes.

  In bad economies, major cities see a drastic increase in unclaimed bodies, not all of them homeless, or even without a family. A son may have loved his mother, but if his house is in foreclosure and his car repossessed, his mother’s body might shift from relic to burden very quickly.

  Evergreen Cem
etery is the oldest cemetery in Los Angeles, established in 1877. Buried on its grounds are former Los Angeles mayors and congressmen and even film stars. Once a year, in a small section where the grass is brown and the markers almost unnoticeable, L.A. County workers dig a large hole. Into the hole they will dump, one after another, almost two thousand sets of unclaimed cremated remains, a thick, gray cloud of dust rising above the backhoe. They replace a thin layer of topsoil and mark the area with a plaque stating the year they were put in the ground.

  Some bodies are “lucky” enough to visit Cypress College before this anonymous ceremony, where they are laid out on embalming tables and surrounded on all sides by the student Smurf brigade in our protective outfits. We spent the first semester of embalming lab learning where the arteries and veins were, often through trial and error. Someone would slice open the upper thigh in the incorrect place, only to say, “D’oh! The femoral artery is actually down here.” If at first you don’t succeed, slice, slice again.

  Outside the embalming laboratory was a stack of trade magazines from the Dodge Company (no relation to the automobiles), which sells embalming and restorative chemicals. Their trade magazine is full of tips ’n’ tricks to use with their products.

  “Fills! Plumps! Firms!”

  “Dryene! Stay Cream! Looks like a dream!”

  There were products for sealing skin, hydrating skin, dehydrating skin, firming skin, and bleaching skin. Products to prevent the body from leaking, smelling, and turning strange shades of orange (mental note). Products for curling hair and blushing cheeks and moisturizing lips.