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

by Caitlin Doughty

  “It’s just like moving furniture,” Chris explained. “Geometry and physics.”

  Chris was equally unflappable in the face of decomposed bodies, overweight bodies, and downright bizarre bodies. By bizarre, I mean like the time we arrived at a home in the Haight District and were escorted into a cold, decrepit basement by a gentleman who had the pointed mustache and clawed hands of horror-movie actor Vincent Price. Propped up in the corner was the dead man, curled up in a ball with a single glass eye gazing up at us. “Well, that’s weird, Cat. Him winking at us? Let’s go get the portable.”

  The most important thing about body removal was to never give up. Trite, perhaps, but it was Chris’s mantra. He told a story about a four-hundred-pound body located up three flights of stairs in a hoarder house infested with roaches. His number-two man that day had refused to even attempt the removal, saying they would never be able to get the person out with just the two of them. “I just lost all respect for him right then,” Chris said. “I hate people who don’t try.”

  In our long trips in his van I learned more about Chris, like his single-minded obsession with the two years in the late 1970s he spent working for a tyrannical construction manager in Hawai’i. Some Google mapping showed that during his time in Hawai’i he had lived within a three-block radius of both my newly married parents and a young Barack Obama. (It was easy to construct mundane fantasy scenarios in my head where they were all at the same corner store together or crossing the street at the same stoplight.)

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER our trip to the Adamses’, Chris and I took a house call in the Marina District of San Francisco at a fancy home on a well-trafficked street. We had been chatting about Hawai’i or the weather or Mike’s brusqueness when we pulled up outside. “You know what I think about, Cat?” Chris said as we grabbed our pairs of rubber gloves “How we’re like hit men. Like the guys in Pulp Fiction. They’re sitting there in the car talking about a sandwich, and then they go blow someone’s brains out. We’re just sitting here in the car chitchatting and now we’re goin’ in for a dead body.”

  When we knocked, a dark-haired woman in her fifties opened the door. I gave her a big, sincere smile, having learned at that point that a sincere smile was more effective than faked sympathy.

  “I called you hours ago!” she shrieked.

  “Well, ma’am, you do know that it is rush hour and we were coming from Oakland,” Chris said in his soothing Chris voice.

  “I don’t care, Mom deserves the best. Mom would have wanted everything to be dignified. She was a dignified woman, this is not dignified,” she continued, still shrieking.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, we’ll take good care of her,” Chris said.

  We continued into a bedroom to find Mom. As we pulled out the sheet to shroud her, the woman hurled her body over her mother, wailing dramatically. “No, Mother, no, no! I need you, Mother, don’t leave me!”

  This is what raw human emotion should look like. It had all the signs: death, loss, gut-wrenching wailing. I wanted to be moved, but I wasn’t. “Guilt,” Chris mumbled under his breath.

  “What?” I whispered back.

  “Guilt. I’ve seen this so many times. She hasn’t visited her for years. Now she’s here acting like she can’t live without her mother. It’s bullshit, Cat,” he said. And I knew he was right.

  The woman finally extricated herself from mother’s corpse, and we were able to get Mom wrapped up and out the door. As we rolled the gurney out onto the busy street, people stopped and stared. Dog walkers halted and yoga moms slowed their baby carriages. They gawked at us as if we were detectives or coroners, pulling a body from a violent murder scene, not two mortuary workers handling a woman in her nineties who had died quietly at home in bed.

  There hadn’t always been this scandal surrounding scenes of death. When the bubonic plague swept through Europe in the 1300s, bodies of the victims would lie in the street in full view of the public, sometimes for days. Eventually the death carts would collect the dead and take them to the edge of town, where trenches were dug for mass graves. A chronicler in Italy described how bodies were layered in the ground—bodies then some dirt, bodies, then some more dirt—“just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.”

  Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world. On an average day in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges in India, anywhere from eighty to a hundred cremation ghats burn. After a very public cremation (sometimes performed by young children from India’s untouchable caste), the bones and ashes are released into the waters of the holy river. Cremations do not come cheap; the cost of expensive wood, colorful body shrouds, and a professional cremationist adds up quickly. Families that cannot afford a cremation but want their dead loved one to go into the Ganges will place the entire body into the river by night, leaving it there to decompose. Visitors to Varanasi see bloated corpses floating by or being eaten by dogs. There are so many of these corpses in the river that the Indian government releases thousands of flesh-eating turtles to chomp away at the “necrotic pollutants.”

  The industrialized world has established systems to prevent such unsavory encounters with the dead. At this very moment, corpses motor down highways and interstates in unmarked white vans like the one driven by Chris. Bodies crisscross the globe in the cargo holds of airplanes while vacationing passengers travel above. We have put the dead beneath. Not just underground, but under the tops of fake hospital stretchers, within the bellies of our aircraft, and in the recesses of our consciousness.

  It is only when the systems are subverted that we even realize they are there. After Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Michael Osterholm of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “One of the many lessons to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is that Americans are not accustomed to seeing unattended bodies on the streets of a major city.” Understatement of the century, Doctor.

  For the few minutes it took Chris and me to roll “Mom” from her front door to the back of the van, we gave the dog walkers and yoga moms a cheap, manageable thrill. A whiff of depravity, a small taste of their own mortality.

  PUSH THE BUTTON

  CBS NEWS, SAN FRANCISCO—A man possibly in his 20s appears to have voluntarily stood on Bay Area Rapid Transit tracks before he was fatally struck by a train at a San Francisco station around noon Saturday, BART officials said.

  Witnesses claimed the man “stood in front of the train waiting for it to hit him,” BART spokesman Linton Johnson said. “He did not make any attempt to get out of the way.”

  The man was struck and dragged under the BART train at the San Francisco Civic Center Station, halting all trains at that station for nearly three hours and causing system wide delays, according to Johnson.

  Jacob was twenty-two when he climbed down onto the BART tracks and waited for the train to end his life. Twenty-two was only one year younger than I was. He didn’t look like someone who had been dragged under a train. He looked like someone who had been in a two a.m. bar fight—light facial bruising, a few cuts.

  “The guy we had in here last month, the one pushed under the MUNI train, that guy was chopped in half,” Mike said, unimpressed.

  Jacob’s only major damage was the absence of his left eyeball, which presumably went missing on the tracks. But if you turned his face to the right side, he looked almost normal, as if he could open his remaining eye and hold a conversation.

  The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has. Life can become unbearable in all respects, and “this world can take everything from us . . . but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Cioran, a man “obsessed with the worst,” died an insomniac and recluse in Paris.

  Cioran may have been predisposed to Negative Nancy-ism, but madness and despair can touch us no matter our philosophies. Nietzsche, who famously said in Twilight of the Idols, “What does not kill me makes me
stronger,” suffered a mental breakdown at age forty-four. Eventually he fell into the full-time care of his sister, whose own husband had committed suicide in Paraguay.

  Cruel and selfish as many view suicide to be, I suppose I felt supportive of Jacob’s decision. If every day of his life was dull misery, I could not demand he stay alive and endure more dull misery. I couldn’t know if it had been mental illness or a sense of endless despondency that had driven Jacob to suicide. It wasn’t my place to speculate on his motives. But I could pass judgment on his methods. There, I was firmly not on his side.

  There was something in the way Jacob had killed himself that unsettled me. The public spectacle of staring down a crowded train. In college, I managed a coffee shop on the University of Chicago campus. Only two months before I started at Westwind, my former assistant manager hanged himself in his bedroom after a fight with his girlfriend. His roommate had to come home to find his body. The fact that he left those two women with the lifelong burden of his suicide made me ill, even more so than his death. If you are going to take yourself out of commission, it seems only fair you do so in a way that does the least harm to others, slipping out the back door of the party of life, ensuring the other guests don’t have to agonize about your choice.

  Most of the damage Jacob caused by stepping in front of a BART train that day was financial: thousands of people late for work, flights from San Francisco and Oakland Airports missed, important appointments broken.

  But for the train conductor, the person who had to look into Jacob’s eyes as he barreled toward him, helpless to stop the train in time, the damage was not financial. The average train conductor will involuntarily kill three people in his career. Having no choice but to kill someone (or several someones) has to be the quickest way to lose affection for an otherwise stable, even desirable, job.

  Nor was the damage financial for the people waiting on the platform. They had to stand there screaming for him to get out of the way: didn’t he see there was a train coming? Then came the moment when they realized he knew perfectly well the train was coming, and they would be forced to witness what came next. Forced to live with the image, the sounds, their own confused screams for the rest of their lives.

  Mike pointed out that a few of those people would envy the opportunity I had to cremate Jacob. “Maybe they’d smack him around a little first,” he said. “Some light revenge.”

  As it was, they would never see his body. Jacob would maintain his power over them, haunting their dreams.

  I thought of the years I had spent reliving the little girl hitting the ground at the mall, and I felt a searing sympathy for those people. I wanted to throw open the crematory doors to the train conductor and the other commuters. I wanted them with me that day, gathered around Jacob’s body so I could announce, “Look, here he is; he wanted to die. He is dead, but you’re not. You are not dead.”

  It was illegal, this open-house-at-the-mortuary fantasy of mine. The California Code of Regulations clearly states that “the care and preparation for burial or other disposition of all human remains shall be strictly private.”

  In the late 1800s, the citizens of Paris would come to the morgue by the thousands each day to view the bodies of the unidentified dead. Spectators lined up for hours to get in as vendors sold them fruit, pastries, and toys. When they reached the front of the line, they would be ushered into an exhibit room, where the corpses were laid out on slabs behind a large glass window. Vanessa Schwartz, scholar of fin-de-siècle Paris, called the Paris morgue “a spectacle of the real.”

  Eventually the morgue exhibitions became too popular with the citizens of Paris, and they were shut down to the public. Morgues remain behind closed doors today, perhaps because those in charge of regulating death believe the hoi polloi would be too interested, and that such an interest is inherently wrong. Close the morgues if you will, but another attraction will always arise to fill void. The runaway popularity of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’s traveling exhibit of plastinated human bodies, shows us that the human urge to file past corpses on display is indeed as strong as ever. In spite of the ongoing controversy that von Hagens obtained some of his bodies from Chinese political prisoners, Body Worlds is the most popular touring attraction in the world (having drawn 38 million people by the start of 2014).

  JACOB LIVED IN WASHINGTON State, and visited San Francisco for reasons unknown. His parents arranged his cremation over the phone, faxing Westwind the required forms and reading us their credit card number to cover the balance. As usual, it was just Jacob and me as I loaded him into the cremation machine, his one eye gazing up at me.

  Because of his violent death, Jacob was taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office before being brought to Westwind. The Medical Examiner’s Office is the modernized version of the Coroner’s Office, and is run by medical doctors trained to investigate suspicious or violent deaths. Whenever Westwind Cremation went to pick up a body, the examiner’s staff would give us whatever personal items arrived with the deceased. This usually meant clothes, jewelry, wallets, and so on.

  Jacob came with a backpack. His parents didn’t want it mailed back to Washington, so the only place for it to go was into the flames alongside Jacob.

  I set the backpack on a table and pulled open the zipper. Jackpot, I thought, one serving of understanding of the mind of a depressed madman, coming right up. But each item I pulled out was more obscenely normal than the next. Change of clothes, toiletries, a kombucha bottle. Then: a stack of notecards. At last! The scribblings of a suicidal lunatic? No. Chinese language flashcards.

  I was disappointed. I had expected answers in that backpack, insight into the human condition.

  “Hey, Caitlin, put this wallet back in there before you cremate it,” Mike called from his office.

  “Wait, there’s a wallet?” I replied.

  “I’m looking at his ID right now. There’s his college ID, his driver’s license, his Greyhound bus ticket to San Francisco. Oh, and a map of the BART train system; that’s depressing. He wrote something on the BART map. Word of the day: ‘anthropophagy.’ What does that mean?”

  “I have no idea. I’m going to Google it right now. Spell it,” I said.

  “A-N-T-H-R-O-P-O-P-H-A-G-Y.”

  “Shit. It means cannibalism. It’s a synonym for cannibalism,” I said.

  Mike laughed at the gallows humor of the definition. “No way. Do you think this means he had an insatiable desire for human flesh? This bus ticket says he got in to San Francisco the day before he died. Why not commit suicide back in Washington?”

  “Right,” I added, “why would you come all the way to San Francisco to stand in front of a BART train?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t trying to die. Just be an ass and dodge the train or something. Like that kid in Stand by Me.”

  “Corey Feldman?” I asked.

  “No, the other one.”

  “River Phoenix?”

  “No, not that one either,” Mike said. “Whatever, if that’s what he was trying, shit, he didn’t do a very good job.”

  As I slid Jacob into the flames, the only things I knew about him were that he was a twenty-two-year-old from Washington who studied Chinese and was perhaps, at least on the day he died, interested in cannibalism. A few weeks earlier I had invested my first paycheck in the box set of the HBO television series Six Feet Under, the beloved show about a family-run mortuary. In one episode, Nate the funeral director visits a lonely, dying young man to arrange his cremation. The man is angry and bitter about his impending death and the lack of support from his family. He asks Nate who will push the button on the cremation machine when he dies.

  “Whomever you specify,” Nate replies. “Buddhists have a family member, and then some people choose no one, in which case the person at the crematory does it.”

  “I’ll take that guy.”

  That was me. The person at the crematory. I was “that guy” for Jacob. In spite of what he had done, I didn’t want him to be alone.


  THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.

  Say you are a gazelle, grazing an African plain. The soundtrack from The Lion King plays in the background. A hungry lion stalks you from a distance. He sprints in to attack, but today you manage to outrun him. By instinct, a fight-or-flight reaction, you feel momentary anxiety. Experience and genetics have taught you to run and evade danger, and it does take some time for your heart to stop racing. But soon enough you can return to happy grazing as if nothing had happened. Chomp-chomp, blissful chomps, until the lion comes back for round two.

  The human heart rate may decelerate after the lion chase has ended, but we never stop knowing that the game is lost. We know death awaits us, and it affects everything we do, including the impulse to take elaborate care of our dead.

  Some 95,000 years ago, a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh Cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. Some of the surviving skeletal remains found at Qafzeh show stains of red ochre, a naturally tinted clay. Archeologists believe the ochre’s presence means that we performed rituals with our dead very early in our species’ history. One of the recovered skeletons, a thirteen-year-old child, was buried with its legs bent to the side and a pair of deer antlers in its arms. We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.