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

  After sweeping all of Mr. Martinez’s bones into the metal bin, I carried them over to the other side of the crematory and poured them along a long, flat tray. The tray, similar to the kind used on archeological digs, was used to search for various metal items that people had embedded in their bodies during their lifetimes. The metal I was looking for could be anything from knee and hip implants to metal dentures.

  The metal had to be removed because the final step in the cremation process was placing the bones into the waiting Cremulator. “The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot.

  I swept the bone fragments from the tray into the Cremulator and set the dial to twenty seconds. With a loud whir, the bone fragments were crushed into the uniform powdery puree that the industry calls cremated remains. In California, it is assumed (and is, in fact, the law) that Mr. Martinez’s family would receive fluffy white ashes in their urn, not chunks of bone. Bones would be a harsh reminder that Mr. Martinez’s urn contained not just an abstract concept but an actual former human.

  Not every culture prefers to avoid the bones. In the first century CE, the Romans built tall cremation pyres from pine logs. The uncoffined corpse was laid atop the pyre and set ablaze. After the cremation ended, the mourners collected the bones, hand-washed them in milk, and placed them in urns.

  Lest you think bone washing hails only from the ancient bacchanalian past, bones also play a role in the death rituals of contemporary Japan. During kotsuage (“the gathering of the bones”) the mourners gather around the cremation machine when the bones are pulled out of the chamber. The bones are laid on a table and the family members come forward with long chopsticks to pick them up and transfer them into the urn. The family first plucks the bones of the feet, working their way up toward the head, so that the deceased person can walk into eternity upright.

  At Westwind there was no family: only Mr. Martinez and me. In a famous treatise called “The Pornography of Death,” the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote, “In many cases, it would appear, cremation is chosen because it is felt to get rid of the dead more completely and finally than does burial.” I was not Mr. Martinez’s family; I did not know him, and yet there I was, the bearer of all ritual and all actions surrounding his death. I was his one-woman kotsuage. In times past and in cultures all over the world, the ritual following a death has been a delicate dance performed by the proper practitioners at the proper time. For me to be in charge of this man’s final moments, with no training other than a few weeks operating a cremation machine, did not seem right.

  After whirling Mr. Martinez to ash in the Cremulator, I poured him into a plastic bag and sealed it with a bread-bag twist tie. The plastic bag containing Mr. Martinez went into a brown plastic urn. We sold more expensive urns than this one in the arrangement room out front, gilded and decorated with mother-of-pearl doves on the side, but Mr. Martinez’s family, like most families, chose not to buy one.

  I punched his name into the label maker, which hummed and spit out the identity that would be stuck on the front of his eternal holding chamber. In my last act for Mr. Martinez, I placed him on a shelf above the cremation desk, where he joined the line of brown plastic soldiers, dutifully waiting for someone to come to claim them. Satisfied at having done my job and taken a man from corpse to ash, I left the crematory at five p.m., covered in my fine layer of people dust.

  THE THUD

  They say the way to figure out your porn-star name is to combine the name of your first childhood pet with the name of the street you grew up on. By that rule, my porn-star name would be Superfly Punalei. I have no intention of pursuing a career in pornography, but the name is almost reason enough to try.

  Punalei Place is the small cul-de-sac in Kaneohe, Hawai’i, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. My house was average at best, but due to its location on a tropical island it had the good fortune of being flanked on one side by an epic mountain range and on the other by a sparkling blue bay. You had to sprint up the front walkway during coconut season lest an overripe coconut hurl itself down onto your head.

  In its languid stillness, Punalei Place was like a warm bath that never cooled. Everything would go on forever as it always had been: the pickup trucks with the feathered warrior heads hanging from their rearview mirrors, the local plate-lunch restaurants serving teriyaki beef next to macaroni salad, ukuleles strumming their steady drone on the island music radio station. The air was thicker than it should be, and never ranged far from the same temperature as your body.

  Superfly arrived from Koolau Pet Store when I was five years old, carried in a plastic bag of filtered water. He lived in my dining room in a blue tank with orange gravel. My parents named him Superfly after the title of the Curtis Mayfield hit, but it’s doubtful my fish experienced the hustlin’ times and ghetto streets described in the song.

  Shortly after coming to live at Punalei Place, Superfly developed Ichthyophthirius multifiliis. Known as “ich” or “ick” in the aquarium trade, the parasite promises a slow aquatic death. White spots started spreading over Superfly’s scales. His once-playful swimming slowed to a pathetic float. One morning, after weeks of his color rinsing from brilliant gold to dull white, he ceased to swim at all. My mother awoke to find his tiny corpse floating in the tank. Not wanting to alarm me, she decided to put off her daughter’s first mortality conversation until returning home from work that afternoon.

  Later my mother sat me down, solemnly grabbing my hand. “Sweetie, there’s something I have to tell you about Superfly.”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  I probably called her Mom or Mommy, but in my memories I’m a very polite British child with exquisite manners.

  “Superfly got sick, which made him die. I saw this morning that he wasn’t alive anymore,” she said.

  “No, Mother. That’s not right,” I insisted. “Superfly is fine.”

  “Honey, I’m sorry. I wish he wasn’t dead, but he is.”

  “Come look, you’re wrong!”

  I led my mother over to Superfly’s tank, where a motionless white fish floated near the surface. “Look, Caitlin, I’m going to give him a poke, to show you what I mean, OK?” she said, lifting the top.

  As she brought her finger down to touch the little carcass, Superfly shot forward, swimming across the tank to escape the jabbing human.

  “Jesus Chri—!” she squealed, watching as he swam back and forth, very much alive.

  This is when she heard my father laughing behind her.

  “John, what did you do?” she said, clutching her chest.

  What my father had done was wake up slightly later than my mother, drink his usual cup of coffee, and then unceremoniously dispose of Superfly in the toilet. He took me back to Koolau Pet Store to purchase a healthy white fish of exact Superfly dimensions. This new fish came home and plopped into the blue plastic tank, the sole purpose of its short fish life to give my mother a heart attack.

  It worked. We named our new pet Superfly II and my first lesson in death was the possibility of cheating it.

  Other than poor Superfly (and Superfly II, shortly thereafter), for most of my childhood I saw death only in cartoons and horror movies. I learned very early in life how to fast-forward videocassette tapes. With that skill I was able to skip the death scene of Bambi’s mother, the even more traumatic death scene of Little Foot’s mother in The Land Before Time, and the “off with her head” scene in Alice in Wonderland. Nothing snuck up on me. I was drunk with power, able to fast-forward through anything.

  Then came the day that I lost my control over death. I was eight years old the evening of the Halloween costume contest at Windward Mall, only four blocks from my house. Intending to be a princess, I had found a blue sequined ball gown at a thrift store. When I realized that something as clichéd as “princess” was not going to win me any trophies, I decided, eyes on the prize, g
o scary or go home.

  Out of the dress-up box came a long black wig, a prop I would later use for such vital artistic projects as a cringe-inducing rendition of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” filmed on my family’s 1980s videotape camcorder. On top of the wig sat a broken tiara. The finishing touch was fake blood—a few healthy squirts sealed it. I had transformed into a D.I.Y. dead prom queen.

  When my turn came at the costume contest, I limped and shuffled down the atrium runway. The master of ceremonies asked me over the mall loudspeaker who I was supposed to be, and I answered in a zombie monotone, “He llleeefft me. Now he will paaayyy. I am the dead prom queen.” I think it was that voice that won the judges over. My prize money was $75—enough, I calculated, for an obscene amount of Pogs. If you were a third-grader living in Hawai’i in 1993, you structured your whole life around getting enough money for Pogs.

  After taking off the sequined gown in a department store bathroom, I changed into a pair of neon-green leggings under a neon pink T-shirt (also very Hawai’i in 1993) and went to the mall’s haunted house with my friends. I wanted to find my father, hoping to charm him into giving me enough money for one of those giant pretzels. Like many malls, this one was two stories, with an open floor plan that allowed people on the higher floor to look down at the action below.

  I spotted my father dozing on a bench at the food court. “Dad!” I yelled from the second story, “Pretzel, Dad! Pretzel!”

  As I shouted and waved my arms, I saw out of the corner of my eye a little girl climb up to where the escalator met the second-story railing. As I watched, she tipped over the edge and fell thirty feet, landing face-first on a laminate counter with a sickening thud.

  “My baby! No, my baby!” shrieked her mother, barreling down the escalator, violently shoving mall patrons aside as the crowd swarmed forward. To this day, I have never heard anything so otherworldly as that woman’s screams.

  My knees buckled, and I looked down to where my father had been sitting, but he was gone with the surge of the crowd. Where he had been sitting there was only an empty bench.

  That thud—that noise of the girl’s body hitting laminate—would repeat in my mind over and over, dull thud after dull thud. Today, the thuds might be called a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, but back then the noises were just the drumbeat of my childhood.

  “Hey, kid, don’t you try and jump down too—just take the escalator, OK?” my dad said, trying to be lighthearted, with the same goofy grin he had used on my mom after the Superfly incident.

  I didn’t think it was funny at all. I think my eyes told him nothing was funny anymore.

  There is a Japanese myth that tells of the descent of Izanagi into the underworld to find his sister, Izanami. When he finds her, she tells him that she will return with him to the world of the living, but—in a parallel to the Western myth of Orpheus—under no circumstances should he look at her. Izanagi is impatient, and lights a torch to see her. The torchlight reveals Izanami’s corpse, rotting and covered in maggots. She attempts to chase her brother, but he draws a giant rock between them so they are separated forever. No longer ignorant of death, Izanagi must place the rock to shield him from his own thoughts, now filled with the horrors he discovered.

  I sat up until dawn that night, afraid to turn out the lights. It was as if the little girl had fallen into a pit of fear in the center of my body. There had been no violence or gore; I had seen worse on television. But this was reality. Until that night I hadn’t truly understood that I was going to die, that everyone was going to die. I didn’t know who else had this debilitating piece of information. If others did possess this knowledge, I wondered, how could they possibly live with it?

  The next morning, my parents found me huddled on the couch in the living room under several blankets, my eyes wide. They took me for chocolate-chip pancakes at the Koa House Restaurant. We never spoke about the “incident” again.

  What is most surprising about this story is not that an eight-year-old witnessed a death, but that it took her eight whole years to do so. A child who had never seen a death would have been unheard-of only a hundred years ago.

  North America is built on death. When the first European settlers arrived, all they did was die. If it wasn’t starvation, the freezing cold, or battles with the Native people, it was influenza, diphtheria, dysentery, or smallpox that did them in. At the end of the first three years of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, 440 of the original 500 settlers were dead. Children, especially, died all the time. If you were a mother with five children, you were lucky to have two of them live past the age of ten.

  Death rates didn’t improve much in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A popular chant for a children’s jump-rope game went:

  Grandmother, Grandmother,

  Tell me the truth.

  How many years

  Am I going to live?

  One, two, three, four . . . ?

  The sad truth was that many wouldn’t live longer than a few skips in the rope. During funerals, children were enlisted to act as pallbearers for other children, carrying their tiny coffins through the streets. A dismal task, but those children’s long walk to the grave could be no worse than the terrors my young brain conjured after watching that little girl plunge through the air.

  On a Girl Scout field trip to the local fire station a few months after the episode at the mall, I got up the nerve to ask one of the firemen what had happened to the girl. “It was real bad,” he said, shaking his head and looking at the ground in despair.

  That wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to ask, “Real bad like they still haven’t found some of her organs, or real bad like it was an incredible trauma; I can’t believe she survived?”

  I didn’t even know whether she was alive or dead, and I was far too terrified to ask. Very quickly it ceased to matter to me. Oprah could have brought me on her show and, her hands waving wildly, announced, “Caitlin, you don’t know it, but that girl is ALIIIIIVE and here she IIIIIS” and it wouldn’t have changed the fear that had already infected me. I had started seeing death everywhere. It lived at the very edge of my peripheral vision—a fuzzy, cloaked figure that disappeared when I turned to face him head-on.

  There was a student in my class, Bryce Hashimoto, who had leukemia. I didn’t know what leukemia was, but a fellow classmate told me it made you throw up and die. As soon as he described the disease, I knew, at once, that it afflicted me as well. I could feel it eating me from the inside out.

  Fearing death, I wanted to reclaim control over it. I figured it had to play favorites; I just needed to make sure I was one of those favorites.

  To limit my anxiety I developed a whole bouquet of obsessive compulsive behaviors and rituals. My parents could die at any moment. I could die at any moment. It was my job to do everything right—counting, tapping, touching, checking—to retain balance in the universe and avoid further death.

  The rules of the game were arbitrary but did not feel irrational. Walk the perimeter of my house three times in a row before feeding my dog. Step over fresh leaves; plant feet directly on dead leaves instead. Check five times to make sure the door had locked. Jump into bed from three feet away. Hold your breath when passing the mall so small children don’t go plummeting off the balcony.

  My elementary school principal called my parents in for a chat. “Mr. and Mrs. Doughty, your daughter has been spitting into the front of her shirt. It’s a distraction.”

  For months I had been ducking my mouth down into my shirt and releasing my saliva into the fabric, letting the wet stain slowly spread downward like a second collar. The reasons for this were obscure. Somehow I had decided that failing to drool down my shirt sent a direct message to the governing powers of the universe that I didn’t want my life badly enough, and that they were free to throw me to the wolves of death.

  There is a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder called cognitive-behavioral therapy. By exposing the patient to her wor
st fears, she can see that the disastrous outcome she expects will not occur, even if she doesn’t perform her rituals. But my parents had grown up in a world where therapy was for the insane and the disturbed, not their cherished eight-year-old child (who just happened to spit into her shirt collar and obsessively tap her fingers on the kitchen counter).

  As I grew older and the constant thoughts of death subsided, the rituals ended, and the thuds stopped haunting my dreams. I developed a thick layer of denial about death in order to live my life. When the feelings would come, the emotions, the grief, I would push them down deeper, furious at myself for allowing them to peek through. My inner dialogue could be ruthless: You’re fine. You’re not starving, no one beats you. Your parents are still alive. There is real sadness in the world and yours is pathetic, you whiny, insignificant cow.

  Sometimes I think of how my childhood would have been different if I had been introduced directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend.

  So, really, what was a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind? The truth was, I saw the job as a way to fix what had happened to the eight-year- old me. The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn’t see her, then he couldn’t take her.

  Not only could I heal myself, but I could develop ways to engage children with mortality from early on so that they didn’t end up as traumatized as I was by their first experience with death. The plan was simple. Picture this: an elegant house of bereavement—sleek and modern, but with an Old World charm. It was going to be called La Belle Mort. “Beautiful death,” in French. At least, I was fairly sure it meant beautiful death. I needed to double-check before opening my future funeral home, so I wasn’t like those girls who think they’re getting the Chinese character for “hope” tattooed on their hip when in fact it is the Chinese character for “gas station.”