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

by Caitlin Doughty

  Or maybe it was because her blue eyes reminded me in some primal, narcissistic way of myself, and the fact that I somehow lived not to be cremated but to cremate. My heart beat and hers did not.

  I could see why Mike wanted to delegate the baby-hair shaving to me, even if he hesitated to make the request. Mike had a son of his own, an angelic five-year-old boy. The process of cremating children was hard enough for a childless twenty-three-year-old, but it had to be torture for a loving father. He never said it, but there were times when his veneer would crack ever so slightly, when you could see that it affected him.

  Months had passed with me believing Mike was pure hard-ass. But the ogre Mike I had created in my head wasn’t anything close to the actual Mike. Actual Mike had a New-Agey wife named Gwaedlys, an adorable young child, and an organic garden in his backyard. He had taken the job at the crematory after years of working to secure amnesty for refugees. I viewed him as an ogre because no matter how hard I worked he remained stern, unimpressed by my efforts. It wasn’t that Mike gave me negative feedback, but the absence of feedback was just as crippling for an insecure millennial. I projected onto him the fear that a weakling like me couldn’t handle the work, couldn’t handle the real death I had been so desperate to be in the presence of.

  I asked Bruce about Mike not wanting to handle the babies. He looked at me like I was crazy for even asking. “Well, yeah, duh Mike wants you to do it; he’s got a kid. You don’t have a kid. You see your baby in that baby. When you get older your own mortality starts to creep in on you. Watch out, children are going to bother you the older you get,” he said, as if in warning.

  When my Gerber baby was done cremating, all that was left of her—all that was left of any of the babies we cremated—was a tiny pile of ash and bone fragments. The bones of a baby are too small to be reduced to powder in the same Cremulator (bone grinder) used for adults. But cultural expectations (and again, the law) dictated that we couldn’t return a tiny sack of identifiable, obvious bones to the parents either. So after the bones cooled down, each baby had to be “processed” by hand. Using a small piece of metal like a wee pestle, I ground their little femurs and skull fragments until they were uniform. The bones produced maybe an eighth of a cup of cremated remains, but the parents could bury them, put them in a mini urn, scatter them, hold them in their hands.

  I had written my thesis on medieval witches accused of roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. A year later I found myself literally roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. The tragedy of the women who were accused of witchcraft was that they never actually ground the bones of babies to help them fly to a midnight devil’s Sabbath. But they were unjustly killed for it anyway, burned alive at the stake. I, on the other hand, did grind the bones of babies. Often I was thanked by their poor parents for my care and concern.

  Things change.

  DIRECT DISPOSAL

  Mark Nguyen was only thirty years old when he died. His body was under cold storage awaiting an autopsy at the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office when his mother arrived to arrange his cremation at Westwind.

  “For the death certificate—was Mark married, Mrs. Nguyen?”

  “No, dear, he wasn’t.”

  “Did he have children?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “And what was Mark’s most recent career?”

  “No, he didn’t have one of those. He never worked.”

  “I’m so sorry Mrs. Nguyen,” I said, thinking a woman with a dead thirty-year-old son would be understandably destroyed.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head in resignation, “trust me, it’s for the best.”

  Mrs. Nguyen had done her mourning for her son long ago: when he first started using drugs, first went to jail, had his first . . . second . . . sixth relapse. Every time Mark went missing she worried he had overdosed. Just two days earlier she had found Mark dead on the floor in a rent-by-the-hour motel room in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. After discovering his body, she no longer had to worry. Her worst fears had come true—and she was relieved.

  When it came time to pay for the cremation, Mrs. Nguyen handed me a credit card, pulled it back, and said, “Wait, hold on hon, use this one instead. I get airline miles on it. At least Mark can get me some miles.”

  “You should go somewhere tropical,” I blurted without thinking, as if she had come to see a travel agent. After all, when you find your son deceased in a seedy motel room, don’t you deserve a mai tai?

  “I think that would be lovely, dear,” she said, signing her receipt. “I’ve always wanted to go to Kauai.”

  “I’m from Oahu originally, but I’ve really come to like the Hilo side of the Big Island,” I replied, and we slipped into a natural conversation about the pros and cons of the different Hawaiian islands that Mrs. Nguyen could visit on her son Mark’s cremation miles.

  Mrs. Nguyen’s was my first airline miles request, but Westwind Cremation & Burial was no stranger to the marriage of technology and death. Inside Westwind’s garage, on the wall above the extra boxes of urns, hung the framed city business license for Bayside Cremation. The garage technically stood at a different street address, and Bayside Cremation was technically a different business, but they operated out of the same facility. Bayside distinguished itself by offering the cutting-edge option of ordering a cremation over the Internet.

  If your father died in a local hospital, you could visit the Bayside Cremation website, type in the location of Dad’s body, print out some forms, sign them, fax them back to the number provided, and input your credit card number to the website. All of this without ever having to speak to a real person. In fact, you weren’t allowed to speak to a real person even if you wanted to: all questions had to be sent by e-mail to info@baysidecremation.com. Two weeks later, the doorbell would ring and the postman would hand over Dad’s ashes, shipped by registered mail, signature required. No funeral home, no sad faces, no need to see Dad’s body—total avoidance for the low, low price of $799.99.

  Nothing was different behind the scenes, mind you. Either Chris or I still went to pick up the body, still filed the death certificate, still cremated in the same cremation machine. Bayside Cremation offered Westwind’s model of direct cremation—already pretty low on human interaction—minus the human interaction altogether.

  Bruce, our embalmer, had strong feelings about the need for actual live humans to take care of dead humans: “Look, Caitlin, a computer can’t cremate a body.” He had worked at another cremation facility before Westwind, where they had the workers run the cremation machines off computerized timers. “You’d think that’s a good idea, right, for efficiency and whatnot? But it wouldn’t work if that body wasn’t in there perfect. If it wasn’t perfect, that machine goes, ‘Oh, ding-ding, cremation is over!’ and that body ain’t cremated. Open it up, there’s a half-charred body in there. That’s what you get with a computer, man.”

  Most of the families who chose to use Bayside Cremation were looking for the rock bottom price at which to dispose of their sixty-five-year-old estranged brother-in-law whose arrangements California legally required them to pay for. Mark Nguyen might have been an ideal Bayside Cremation case, a long-term drug addict with a mother who had mentally buried him long before his actual death. But there were troubling cases, too. One gentleman cremated by Bayside was just twenty-one—close to my age at the time. Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause.

  I tried to imagine my parents receiving word of my death. My mother would turn to my father and say, “Now, John, I wonder if we could find an inexpensive online cremation for Caiti? Remember how easy it was to order the Chinese food online last week? Since I don’t need to discuss any questions or concerns about my precious offspring with an actual human being, I’m sure the Internet option will be just fine.”

  I was beginning to doubt that my own body would be well cared for were I to die young. The very id
ea of Bayside Cremation crushed me with loneliness. I was burdened with the thought that any of my Facebook friends would be quick to comment “Yummy!” on a photo of my Niçoise salad, but wouldn’t step up to wipe the sweat from my dying brow or the poop off my corpse.

  It was my job to wrap up the Bayside Cremation ashes for mailing. The United States Postal Service required that the urns be packaged a certain way, with heavy brown packing tape covering all sides and what felt like forty separate labels. When there were several packages ready to be mailed I’d trundle into the post office and set them out on the linoleum counter. The elderly Asian lady behind the counter shook her head at me while covering the boxes with the “Human Remains” stamp.

  “Look, the families want them sent, I don’t make the rules!” I insisted.

  Her judgmental expression didn’t soften, she just continued to stamp. Stamp. Stamp.

  Even with the mailing boxes sealed, boxed, and taped up like a citadel, we still had family members trying to convince us they received them in poor condition. Anything to avoid paying. One gentleman in Pennsylvania claimed his brother had arrived in a package actively leaking remains, a situation that deteriorated when he set his brother in the backseat of his convertible and ash flew out into the air as he drove down the interstate. While I appreciated the homage to The Big Lebowski, he gave up on his story and stopped threatening lawsuits when I told him how the urn was packaged. We came to find out he had never even gone to the post office to pick it up.

  There was a special fax sound when a Bayside Cremation request came down through the Internet tubes. It elicited a Pavlovian response from Westwind employees because we had been promised a company cocktail party and dinner when we hit our first 100 online cremation cases.

  One Tuesday morning the fax rang, and Chris stood up with his usual grumble (cocktail parties and social gatherings in general holding no appeal for him) and went over to pick it up.

  “Oh, what the hell, Cat, she’s nine.”

  “Wait, Chris, she’s what?”

  “She’s nine.”

  “Like nine years old?” I asked, horrified. “What’s her name? Jessica?”

  “Ashley,” Chris said, shaking his head.

  “Jesus.”

  A nine-year-old girl named Ashley, who had just finished the third grade, died at a hospital, where her parents left her body, went home, typed their credit card into a website, and waited two weeks for her to appear in a box by mail.

  I did end up talking to Ashley’s mother on the phone, because no matter how many e-mails we sent back and forth, the credit card she provided wouldn’t work. It turned out she had been trying to use her Sears department store card to pay for the cremation. Who, really, is to say that Sears won’t offer a similar one-click cremation in the future? If they do, they will surely think of a euphemism for cremation like “heat fragmentation procedure” to spare us the reality of the offer. Perhaps Ashley’s family members were death visionaries of the future, not the thoughtless people I made them out to be.

  The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks. But Joe, Westwind’s owner, thought Bayside Cremation was the future of low-cost death care. It wouldn’t be the first time California had witnessed the future of death.

  JUST NORTH OF LOS Angeles is the city of Glendale, home to such diverse offerings as one of the largest populations of Armenians in the United States, the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream chain, and arguably one of the most important cemeteries in the world—Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn is not just a cemetery, but a “memorial park,” with expansive, rolling hills and nary a headstone in sight. Its soil houses a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities: Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Nat King Cole, Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and even Walt Disney himself (despite the legend, he was not cryogenically frozen).

  Founded in 1906, Forest Lawn got a new general manager in 1917 named Hubert Eaton, a businessman with a forceful dislike of the drab European model of death. His vision was to create a new, optimistic, American “memorial park,” waging an all-out war against traditional cemeteries, which he called “depressing stoneyards.” Eaton removed Forest Lawn’s headstones and replaced them with flat identification markers, as “you wouldn’t want to mar [the cemetery] with tombstones. It would spoil everything.” He littered the grounds of Forest Lawn with art and sculptures, which he referred to as his “silent salesmen.” His first major purchase was a sculpture called Duck Baby, a naked toddler surrounded by ducklings. As Forest Lawn’s artistic acquisitions grew, he offered one million lire to the Italian artist who could paint him “a Christ filled with radiance and looking upward with an inner light of joy and hope.” To be more specific, Eaton wanted “an American-faced Christ.”

  Eaton was the original upbeat undertaker. His goal was “to erase all signs of mourning.” Forest Lawn was the genesis of some of the American funeral industry’s most beloved death-denial euphemisms. Death became “leave-taking,” a corpse became “the loved one,” “the remains,” or “Mr. So-and-So,” who, after elaborate embalming and cosmetic treatment, awaited burial in a private, well-furnished “slumber” room.

  An article in a 1959 issue of Time called Forest Lawn the “Disneyland of Death,” and described Eaton as starting his day off by leading his staff in prayer and reminding them that “they were selling immortality.” There were, of course, limits to who would be allowed to purchase immortality. The same article tells us that “Negroes and Chinese were regretfully refused.”

  Forest Lawn became well known for its aggressive, beautiful-death-at-all-costs policy, satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. Waugh described in verse how Eaton’s army of luxury embalmers ensured that every corpse coming to Forest Lawn was “pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, / Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before.”

  Hubert Eaton implemented his plan for the beautiful death with a dictatorial air. He was known to his employees (by his own decree) as “The Builder.” (This reminds me of the surreal nomenclature of my middle school orthodontist, who had his dental assistants refer to him not as “the doctor” or “Dr. Wong” but just “Doctor.” The title is still imprinted on my mind, though my teeth have long since migrated back to their original crooked configuration. “Doctor will be with you in a minute,” or “When is the last time you saw Doctor?” or “I’ll have to ask Doctor what he thinks about that . . .”)

  Due in no small part to the influence of Forest Lawn, the 1950s was a glamorous time for the death industry. In the ninety years since the end of the Civil War, undertakers had managed to shift the public’s perception of their occupation. They went from local coffin makers forced to supplement their income in other ways to highly trained medical professionals, embalming bodies for the “good of public health,” and creating artistic corpse displays for the family. It didn’t hurt that the postwar economic boom gave people the expendable income to keep up with the postmortem Joneses.

  For almost twenty years after the end of World War II, the national cremation rate hung out in the scandalously low 3 to 4 percent range. Why would a family want a cremation when they could impress their neighbors with sleek Cadillac-style caskets, flower arrangements, embalming, and elaborate funerals? The embalmed body was art, heading down into the grave on pastel pillows in gauzy burial gowns with bouffant hairdos. It was pure kitsch, a perfect fit for the postwar aesthetic. Stephen Prothero, professor of religion and scholar of the American cremation industry explained, “The 1950s represented a wonderful opportunity for gaudy excess.”

  But the “gaudy excess” could not last forever, and by the early 1960s, American consumers began to feel swindled by the funeral industry’s absurdly high prices. Where once the funeral home was a pillar of righteousness in the community, people started to suspect that perhaps undertakers were unscrupulous charlatans
taking advantage of grieving families. The undisputed leader of the movement against the funeral status quo was a woman named Jessica Mitford.

  Mitford was a writer and journalist born into a wildly eccentric family of English aristocrats. She had four famous sisters, one of whom was a Nazi and a “tremendous friend of Hitler.” Mitford influenced everyone from Christopher Hitchens to Maya Angelou. JK Rowling cited Mitford as her biggest influence as a writer.

  In 1963, Mitford wrote a book called The American Way of Death, which was not at all kind to funeral directors. A card-carrying Communist, Mitford believed funeral directors were avaricious capitalists who had managed to “perpetrate a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.” The American Way of Death was a massive bestseller, staying at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. In response to her book, Mitford received thousands of letters from citizens who felt cheated by the death industry. She found unlikely allies in Christian clergy members, who thought the focus on the expensive funeral was “pagan.”

  Mitford grudgingly admitted that Forest Lawn’s Hubert Eaton “probably had more influence on the trends of the modern cemetery industry than any other human being,” and thus, he was the funeral man she hated most.

  To protest the evil wrought by Forest Lawn and their ilk, Mitford announced that when she died she would forego the expensive “traditional” funeral service and choose an inexpensive cremation instead. It is safe to say that 1963 was cremation’s year. The American Way of Death came out in 1963, as did Pope Paul VI’s overturning of the Catholic Church’s ban on cremation. These two factors turned the death trends of the entire country toward cremation. When The American Way of Death came out, the vast majority of Americans were opting for embalming followed by burial. Rates of cremation have risen steadily in the years following Mitford’s book, however. Sociologists believe 50 percent of Americans, if not the majority, will choose it within the coming decade.