Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
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When families came to Westwind to arrange for cremations and burials, they sat in our front arrangement room and nervously drank water out of paper cups, unhappy about the death that brought them there and often even more unhappy about having to pay for it. Sometimes they’d request a viewing in our chapel in order to see the dead body for a final time. Occasionally the chapel was filled with a hundred people weeping over the strains of gospel music; other days it was just a single mourner, sitting quietly for half an hour before seeing themselves out.
Families would go through the chapel or arrangement room, even the front office, but the crematory itself was my space. Most days I was alone “in the back,” as Mike called it.
On our price list we offered something called a “Witness Cremation,” but no one took us up on this offer the first few weeks I was at Westwind. Then, one day, there was the Huang family. When I showed up to work at eight thirty there were already a dozen older Asian women, in the supply closet of all places, setting up a makeshift altar.
“Mike?” I called out, walking toward his office.
“What’s up?” he called back with his usual deadpan indifference.
“Hey, why are there people in the supply closet?” I asked.
“Oh, right, they’re here for the witness this afternoon. There’s not going to be enough room in the chapel for all their stuff, so I gave them the supply closet for the altar,” he said.
“I—I didn’t know there was going to be a witness,” I fumbled, terrified at the invasion of my space and routine.
“I thought Chris told you, man. Don’t worry about it, I got this one,” he said.
Mike had no qualms about the day’s events. Maybe he could perform a witness cremation with one hand tied behind his back, but the whole premise seemed incalculably dangerous to me. A witness cremation followed a sequence: the family was given time in the chapel with the deceased, the body was wheeled into the crematory, and the cremation process was begun with the whole family standing right there. With the whole family standing right there. About as much room for error as in the transport of nuclear weapons.
When Western cremation evolved from open pyres to enclosed industrial machines, the first of these new machines were built with peepholes in the side so the family could peek in and watch the process like a naughty show. Some funeral homes even required that family members be there to witness the body being loaded into the machine. But as time went on the peepholes were covered and sealed, the families kept out of the crematory altogether.
Over the last few decades the funeral industry has evolved a number of methods to distance the family from any aspect of death that might potentially offend them, and not just in the crematory.
When my friend Mara’s grandmother suffered a fatal stroke, Mara was on the next flight to Florida to hold vigil at the deathbed. Over the next week, Mara watched her grandmother struggle to breathe, unable to swallow or move or make a sound. When death mercifully took the old woman, Mara expected she would be there through the whole funeral as well. She wasn’t. I received this message from her: “Caitlin, we just stood there next to the open grave. Her casket was there and the dirt was covered up with Astroturf. I kept thinking they were going to lower the casket into the grave. They never did. We had to walk away while the casket was still sitting there, unburied.”
Only after Mara’s family had left the cemetery would Grandmother’s casket be lowered into the ground and the yellow construction backhoes brought in to dump the dirt back on top.
These modern denial strategies help focus mourners on positive “celebrations of life”—life being far more marketable than death. One of the largest funeral-home corporations keeps small toaster ovens near their arrangement rooms so fresh-baked cookie smells will comfort and distract families throughout the day—fingers crossed that the chocolate chips mask the olfactory undertones of chemicals and decomposition.
I passed back through Westwind’s supply closet, nodding at the women who were making remarkable progress on the altar. They worked to arrange multiple bowls of fruit and circular flower wreaths at the base of a large framed picture of the deceased Mr. Huang, the patriarch of the family. The picture was in the style of a shopping-mall portrait, the head and shoulders of an older Chinese man in a sharp suit and abnormally rosy cheeks. Airbrushed clouds floated in the background.
On Mike’s instructions, Chris and I brought Mr. Huang’s wooden casket into the chapel. When we opened the lid, Mr. Huang was waiting for us in his best suit. He had the stiff, waxy appearance of an embalmed corpse, no longer the stern dreamer in his cloud portrait.
Throughout the morning, more and more of Mr. Huang’s family arrived, bearing more fruits and gifts for the supply-closet altar. “You,” an older woman barked at me with disapproval, “why you wear red?”
The color red, associated with happiness, is poor form at a Chinese funeral. The cherry-red dress I wore all but screamed, “Ha, grievers! I laugh in the face of cultural sensitivity!”
I wanted to protest that I didn’t know the Huang family would be there that day, especially for something as terrifying as a witness cremation. Instead I mumbled an apology and shuffled away with her bowl of oranges.
Mike had already gone into the back to preheat one of the retorts. When the time came for Mr. Huang’s cremation, he had me follow him into the chapel. We threaded our way through throngs of Mr. Huang’s relatives, clucking with displeasure at my red dress. The casket was rolled out of the chapel and into the crematory. The family streamed in behind us, thirty people at least, invading what until now had been my sacred space.
As we filed into the crematory, everyone (elderly women included) fell to their knees on the ground, wailing. The howls of the mourners mixed in with the roar of the cremation machine. The effect was eerie. I stood in the back, my eyes wide, feeling like an anthropologist privy to some unknown rite.
It is a Chinese practice to hire professional mourners for a ceremony to help facilitate grief, to whip the crowd into a frenzy. It was difficult to tell if some of the people on the crematory floor were such professional mourners, hired by the family to promote sorrow through their excess emotion. Were professional mourners even available in Oakland? Their grief appeared genuine. But then again, I had never been in a situation like this before, where such a large group of people allowed themselves to be emotionally vulnerable. No stiff upper lips here.
Suddenly, a man I had somehow missed began weaving his way through the crowd with a video camera, filming the mourners. He would stop in front of a wailer and wave his hands upward, indicating what he wanted from them was more, more wailing! The mourner would let out a louder, more anguished cry and beat the ground. It seemed that no one wanted to get caught on camera looking calm or stoic.
The Huang family was engaged in ritual in the classic sense, mixing belief with tactile, physical action. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, two researchers of the human brain from the University of Pennsylvania, explained that for a ritual to work, the participants must engage “all parts of the brain and body, it must merge behavior with ideas.” Through their wailing, their kneeling, their grief, Mr. Huang’s family were connecting to something greater than themselves.
Mr. Huang’s casket slid into the cremation chamber and Mike gestured at Mr. Huang’s son to push the button to start the flames. It was a symbolic gesture, but one of incredible power.
Mike said to me later, “You gotta let ’em push the button, man. They love the button.”
Mr. Huang got something crucial that Jacob did not: someone he loved, not the random crematory operator in her culturally insensitive dress, to push the button that would take him out of this world.
As the door closed, locking Mr. Huang into the fiery chamber, Chris swooped in to set a large burning candle in front of the machine. Mike and Chris had done this part as a team before. The Huangs had wailed in grief before. I was the only one who was out of place.
Mr. Huang forced me to thi
nk about what I would do if my own father died. Frankly, I hadn’t a clue. There was a good chance that not everyone taking part in this witness cremation felt quite the intensity of grief they were displaying. For some it may have been more performance than genuine sorrow. But that didn’t matter; the Huang family had ritual. They knew what to do and I envied them for it. They knew how to cry louder, mourn harder, and show up with bowls of fruit. At the time of death, they were a community, rallied around ideas and customs.
My father taught history at a public high school for more than forty years. Even though the school where he taught was on the other side of the island, he would wake up at five thirty every morning to drive me an hour to my private school in Honolulu, and then another hour to his own school. All so I wouldn’t have to take the city bus. He had carried me for thousands of miles—how could I just hand him off to another person when he died?
As I gained more experience in the crematory I no longer dreamt of the gracious cover-ups of La Belle Mort Funeral Home. I began to realize that our relationship with death was fundamentally flawed. After only a few months at Westwind I felt naïve for having ever imagined putting the “fun” back in funerals. Holding “celebration of life” ceremonies with no dead body present or even realistic talk of death, just Dad’s favorite old rock-n’-roll songs playing while everyone drank punch, seemed akin to putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one. As a culture it was time to go after the bullet.
No, when my father died he would go to a crematory. Not a warehouse like Westwind, but a beautiful crematory with huge windows that let in gobs of natural light. But it would not be beautiful because death was hidden or denied; it would be beautiful because death would be embraced. It would be a place of experience, with rooms for families to come and wash their dead. Where they could feel safe and comfortable being with a body until its final moment, inserted into the flames.
In 1913, George Bernard Shaw described witnessing the cremation of his mother. Her body was placed in a violet coffin and loaded feet-first into the flames. “And behold!” he wrote. “The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like Pentecostal tongues, and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.”
I pictured my father, the door of the cremation chamber rising and the reverberation filling the room. If I was still alive when he died, I would be there to watch him become “that beautiful fire.” I didn’t want anyone else to do it. The more I learned about death and the death industry, the more the thought of anyone else taking care of my own family’s corpses terrified me.
PINK COCKTAIL
Once upon a forgotten time, the Wari’ people lived in the jungles of western Brazil with virtually no contact with Western civilization. Then, in the early 1960s, the Brazilian government arrived in Wari’ territory alongside evangelical Christian missionaries, both groups trying to establish relations. The outsiders brought with them a host of diseases (malaria, influenza, measles) that the Wari’ immune system had no precedent for fighting. In the span of a few years, three out of every five Wari’ were dead. Those who survived became dependent on the Brazilian government, who supplied them with Western medicine to fight the new Western diseases.
In order to receive medicine, food, and government aid, the Wari’ were forced to give up an important aspect of their lives—their cannibalism.
The Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in his conveniently titled On Cannibals that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” We certainly would call cannibalism barbaric, and it is not our practice, thank you very much. Consuming human flesh is for sociopaths and savages; it conjures up images of headhunters and Hannibal Lecter.
We can be confident that cannibalism is for the deranged and heartless because we are caught in what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance.” From the time we are born, we are indoctrinated by our specific culture as to the ways death is “done” and what constitutes “proper” and “respectable.”
Our biases in this matter are inescapable. As much as we fancy ourselves open-minded, we are still imprisoned by our cultural beliefs. It is like trying to walk through a forest after the spiders have been up all night spinning webs between the trees. You may be able to see your destination in the distance, but if you attempt to walk toward that destination, the spiderwebs will catch you, sticking to your face and lodging themselves awkwardly in your mouth. These are the webs of significance that make it so hard for Westerners to understand the cannibalism of the Wari’.
The Wari’ were mortuary cannibals, meaning their form of cannibalism was a ritual performed at the time of death. From the moment a member of the Wari’ took their last breath, their corpse was never left alone. The family rocked and cradled the body to the sound of a steady, high-pitched chant. This chanting and wailing announced the death to the rest of the community, and soon everyone joined in the hypnotic sound. Relatives from other villages rushed to get to the corpse’s side to participate in the ritual for the dead.
To prepare for the consumption of the flesh, relatives walked through the village and pulled a wooden beam from every house, leaving the roofs sagging. Anthropologist Beth Conklin described this sagging as a visual reminder that death had violated the community. The wood gathered from the homes was bundled together, decorated with feathers, and used as kindling for a roasting rack.
At last the family relinquished the corpse and the body was cut into pieces. The internal organs were wrapped in leaves and the flesh from the limbs placed directly on the rack to cook. The women of the village prepared corn bread, considered an ideal pairing for human meat.
The act of cooking human flesh as if it were “no more than a piece of meat” did not trouble the Wari’. Animals and their flesh meant (and still mean) something very different to members of the Wari’ tribe than they do to us. To the Wari’, animals have dynamic spirits. Animals do not belong to, nor are they any lower than, human beings. Depending on the day, humans and animals alternate between hunter and hunted. Jaguars, monkeys, and tapirs might see themselves as humans and see humans as animals. Wari’ have respect for all the meat they consume, human or animal.
The people who actually consumed the roasted flesh were not the dead person’s closest blood relatives, such as wives or children. That honor—and it was indeed an honor—went to chosen people who were like blood to the deceased: in-laws, extended relatives, and community members, known as affines. None of the affines were vengeful, flesh-hungry savages, desperate for the taste of grilled human, and neither were they after the protein the human flesh provided—both common motives ascribed to cannibals. In fact, the corpse, which had been laid out over several days in the warm, humid climate of the Amazon rain forest, was often well into various stages of decomposition. Eating the flesh would have been a smelly, foul experience. The affines often had to excuse themselves to vomit before returning to eat again. Yet they forced themselves to continue, so strong was their conviction that they were performing a compassionate act for both the family and the person who had died.
The affines weren’t eating the dead to preserve life force or power; they ate to destroy. The Wari’ were horrified by the thought of a dead body being buried and left fully intact in the ground. Only cannibalism could provide the true fragmentation and destruction they desired. After the flesh was consumed, the bones were cremated. This total disappearance of the body was a great comfort to the family and community.
The dead had to be removed to make the community whole again. The body destroyed, the dead person’s possessions, including the crops they had planted and the home they had built, were burned as well. With everything gone, the family of the dead person was at the mercy of their relatives and community to take care of them and help them rebuild. And the community did take care of them, reinforcing and strengthening their communal bonds.
If we had been born into the Wari’ tribe, the cannibalism we dismiss as barbarism would have been our own cherished custom, one we engaged in with sincerity and conviction. The burial practice in North America—embalming (long-term preservation of the corpse), followed by burial in a heavy sealed casket in the ground—is offensive and foreign to the Wari’. The “truth and dignity” of the Western style of burial is only the truth and dignity as determined by our immediate surroundings.
When I began working at Westwind, modern embalming wasn’t something I could clearly define. I knew it was what was “done” with bodies, one thread in my own web of significance. When I was ten years old, my cousin’s husband’s father died. Mr. Aquino was a good Catholic, the elder statesman of an enormous Hawaiian-Filipino family. His funeral was held at an old cathedral in Kapolei. When we arrived, my mother and I joined the line to file past his casket. As we reached the front of the line, I peered over the edge and saw Papa Aquino laid out. He was so made up that he no longer looked real. His gray skin was stretched tight, a by-product of the embalming fluid pumped through his circulatory system. Hundreds of candles burned around his casket, and the light from their flames reflected off his shiny, bright-pink lips, contorted into a grimace. He was a dignified man in life but looked like a waxen replica of himself in death. It was an experience I share with thousands upon thousands of other American children, trundling past a casket and getting this brief, waxy vision of death.
As to the type of person who would choose a career performing this dismal process, I vaguely imagined a gaunt man with hollowed cheeks, tall and thin like Lurch from the Addams Family. I crossed this vision of Lurch with the archetypal undertaker from a 1950s horror movie, wearing a lab coat and watching neon-green liquid slide through tubes into a dead body.