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

by Caitlin Doughty

  This is the version of the story I wish had informed my childhood. Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. Children of the Disney princess era grew up with a whitewashed version of reality filled with animal sidekicks and unrealistic expectations. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

  Disintegration and death have never been the most popular endings with the general public. It’s far easier to swallow a good old-fashioned love story. So it is with great trepidation that I tell you my own love story, the one that started the day I walked in on Bruce preparing an autopsied body.

  “Hey Bruce, did you get the clothes the family brought in for Mrs. Gutierrez yesterday?” I asked.

  “Oh man, did you see that underwear?” He sighed. “Now, family, your grandma isn’t Bettie Page. Don’t bring in a G-string.”

  “Why would they do that? That’s seriously bizarre.”

  “People do that shit all the time. The g in G-string does not stand for ‘grandma,’ c’mon.”

  Bruce gestured at the young man who lay on the table in front of him. “This is the guy that Chris picked up at the coroner’s today. Overdose or something.”

  That was when I noticed that the man who lay on the table did not have a face. He hadn’t been decapitated, he just did not have a face. The skin from the crown of his head to the bottom of his chin had been pulled down like a Fruit Roll-Up, revealing the vessels and muscles underneath.

  “Bruce, why is he like this? What is going on?” I asked, expecting he would lecture me on some kind of flesh-eating, face-rolling disease.

  As it turns out, peeling down the face like the lid of a sardine can is quite common. When a medical examiner performs an autopsy, he or she will often remove the brain. An incision is made at the scalp line, and the skin is pulled down so the examiner can open the skull with an oscillating saw. The scalping technique is surprisingly similar to that of the ancient Scythian warriors, who would bring the heads of their enemies to the king to prove their victory before removing the scalp. A good warrior (or medical examiner) might have a whole collection of scalps on his belt.

  After removing the brain, the examiner sets the skull cap back on the dead man or woman’s head slightly askance, like a jaunty newsboy cap, and rolls the face back into place. It is the job of the funeral home to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Bruce was having a difficult time of it that day.

  “Look, Caitlin, I tell the family I’m a mortician, not a magician. You understand?” he grumbled, trotting out his favorite joke.

  Bruce was trying valiantly to make the skull fit in place, cutting strips off a towel to prop up the man’s forehead. He was frustrated because the supply closet in the Westwind preparation room was never stocked with the proper forehead-repair materials.

  “Well, what do you need, Bruce?” I inquired.

  “Some peanut butter.”

  He didn’t need actual peanut butter. What he needed was a type of restorative putty that the old-timers in the funeral industry call peanut butter. I didn’t understand this distinction and spent the next several weeks telling anyone who would listen that morticians spread peanut butter inside our heads as a postmortem beauty remedy. Choosy embalmers choose Jif.

  The removal of the young man’s face revealed the wide, menacing smile of his skull. It was unnerving to think this same deranged grin lurks just beneath the flesh of everyone’s face, the frowning, the crying, even the dying. The skull seemed to know that Bruce didn’t need peanut butter, like, you know, peanut butter peanut butter. It watched my face screw up in confusion and laughed at my ignorance.

  Bruce gently rolled the skin up like a Halloween mask. Voilà, there he was. My stomach dropped down to somewhere below my knees. With the face set back in place I recognized him. The body belonged to Luke, one of my closest friends, his thick brown hair matted with blood.

  The day I found out I had gotten the job at Westwind, Luke, who had never thought my relationship with death was strange, was the first person I told. In his presence I was safe to share my apprehensions about death and life. Our conversations slid easily from the bigger existential questions to slapstick jokes from the British comedies we streamed (ahem, illegally) online. Luke was hysterical, but he was also a listener, a man versed in the art of a well-placed question. Most important, as the months at Westwind wore on and everything I knew about death changed, he understood my doubts and all-too-frequent failures, and never judged me for them.

  After an excruciating moment I realized it wasn’t really him. “Peanut butter” wasn’t really peanut butter and this deceased drug addict wasn’t really Luke, who lived hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles. But this man looked shockingly like him, and once seen, the image could not be unseen.

  After Bruce had embalmed this pseudo-Luke and gone home for the day, Mike asked me to clean up the body. He lay in the prep room under a white sheet, all sewn back together like a patchwork quilt. I pulled back the sheet to reveal the body and used a warm cloth to wipe the blood from his hair and eyelashes and the backs of his delicate hands. The real Luke was not dead, but now I understood he could die, and I would regret it deeply if my beloved friend died without knowing how vital he was to me.

  The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or community to confirm our meaning in the world, so we seize a love partner instead, someone to distract us from the fact of our animal existence. French existentialist Albert Camus said it best: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

  On the day I saw Faux Luke in the crematory I was alone, having moved to San Francisco not knowing a soul. The morning of my twenty-fourth birthday I walked to my car and found a single flower tucked under the windshield wiper. I experienced a moment of euphoria, thinking that someone had remembered. This was followed by a deep sadness when I realized it wasn’t possible; there was no one in San Francisco who would have known. Perhaps the wind had brought it there.

  After I came home from work that night I bought a pizza and ate it alone. My mother called to wish me happy birthday.

  The only other people I saw regularly, other than Mike, Chris, and Bruce, were a group of teenagers. In addition to my nine to five at the funeral home, I moonlit as an English and history tutor for wealthy high-schoolers in Marin County (recently described by the New York Times as being “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth”). My students were innocent kids with manicured lawns and well-meaning helicopter parents who performed backflips to avoid hearing the details of my day job. Often I would go straight from the Westwind in Oakland across the San Rafael Bridge to various mansions overlooking the Bay. It was the only way I could live off my body-burning salary while living in San Francisco.

  It was a double life I lived, shuttling between the worlds of the living and the dead. The transition was so abrupt that some days I wondered if they could see it in my eyes. “Good afternoon, here I am in your multimillion-dollar home covered in people dust and smelling vaguely of rot. Please pay me a large sum of money to mold the impressionable mind of your teenager.” If the parents noticed the dust covering my body, they were kind enough not to mention it. People! It’s made of people.

  When you know that death is coming for you, the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love. I decided the moment I saw his doppelgänger lying on the table that what I felt for Luke was love. My feelings were strong, more intense than I had ever experienced. The heavens struck
me with their clichéd bolt of lightning. Luke became my ideal, and I desperately hoped he would bring me security and relief from the emotions that had assaulted me over the past months. If I could be with him, I wouldn’t die alone; someone would plan my funeral and hold my hand and wipe the bloody purge from my dying mouth. I wouldn’t be like Yvette Vickers, the B-movie actress and star of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, who was found completely mummified in her Los Angeles home more than a year after her death. She had been a recluse while alive; no one had bothered to check on her. Instead of worrying that my own cat would end up eating my dead body to survive, I projected my loneliness onto Luke.

  I was still thinking about Luke when I cremated Maureen. She was in her mid-fifties, diagnosed with a lightning-fast cancer and dead in a little over a year. Maureen left behind a husband, Matthew. By all rights, Matthew should have been the first to go. He was wheelchair-bound and unable to leave his home; Chris had to drive to his apartment to make the arrangements for Maureen’s cremation. Written on the wall calendar in big, tragic letters was “September 17th: Maureen Dies.”

  I was the one who delivered Maureen’s cremated remains to Matthew’s apartment. He wheeled himself down to the lobby, a man with long graying hair and a small, strange voice. As I handed him Maureen’s ashes he didn’t move, or even look up. He just thanked me in his thin voice, and cradled the brown box in his lap like a child.

  FAST-FORWARD TO MONDAY MORNING, and who turns up in our fridge at the crematory but Matthew. Dead. Given up. His sister came by the mortuary with a small bag of personal items that Matthew had wanted to be cremated with.

  Relatives of the deceased asked us to do this all the time. As long as there’s nothing explosive among the objects, we’re happy to include them; the items just burn up with the corpse. After loading Matthew onto the mechanical belt to place him in the cremation chamber, I opened the bag to empty its contents alongside him. Inside were a lock of Maureen’s hair, their wedding rings, and maybe fifteen photographs. Not photographs of the brittle, wheelchair-bound man I had met, but a healthy young man and his blushing bride. Maureen and Matthew: happy, young, beautiful, married over twenty years. They had friends, dogs, what looked like an incredible amount of fun. And each other.

  One more item slipped out of the bag. It was the metal identification tag from Maureen’s cremation, the one I had burned with her just a few weeks before. These tags stay with the body through the whole cremation, and leave stuck in with the ashes, which is how sacks of cremated remains found in old storage lockers and attics can still be identified years later. The tag I found was identical (except for the ID number) to the one I was putting in with Matthew now. I imagined his hands sinking into the gray mulch of Maureen’s bones and finding the tag. I imagined him pulling the tag out and brushing the dusty metal against his cheek. It was a bizarre honor to have been a part of their private last moment together, the last act of their love story.

  I cried (sobbed, if we’re being honest) standing over Matthew’s body, moments before it was loaded into the chamber. Even if all we love will die, I still ached for a love like theirs, to be adored so completely. Had not Disney guaranteed all of us such an ending?

  In the fourteenth century Dom Pedro, the heir to the Portuguese throne, fell in love with a noblewoman, Inês Pérez de Castro. Unfortunately, Dom Pedro already had a wife, meaning his affair with Inês was carried out in secret. Several years later, Dom Pedro’s first wife died, freeing him to be with Inês at last. Dom Pedro and Inês had several children together, children who were perceived as a threat to the rule of Pedro’s father, the king. While Pedro was away, the king had Inês and her children executed.

  Furious, Pedro revolted against his father, eventually taking the throne. He ordered Inês’s executioners brought back from Castile and had their hearts ripped from their chests as he watched He declared that Inês was his legal wife and instructed that she be disinterred, some six years after her death. Here, legend mixes with reality, but it is said that Inês was placed on her throne, a crown set upon her skull, and the members of the king’s court made to kiss the skeletal hand of their rightful queen.

  King Dom Pedro longed for Inês; I longed for Luke. The Portuguese have a word with no equivalent in English, saudade, which indicates a longing, tinged with nostalgia, madness, and sickness over something you have lost. The ghastly image of Luke’s face detached from his skull was a preview of his death; at any moment, he might disappear. I needed him now, for tomorrow is not promised. But I was willing to play the long game. No matter how long it took, I had to figure out a way to be with him.

  BUBBLATING

  The day started innocently enough. “Caitlin!” Mike hollered from the preparation room, “Hey, come in here and help me get this big guy on the table.”

  Actually, I remember him saying, “Hey, come in here and help me get this big Mexican on the table.” But that cannot be right. Mike was always politically correct in his terminology. (He once referred to the victims of Oakland’s gang violence as “young urban men of color.”) I have trouble believing “this big Mexican” is not just a trick of my memory. Regardless, the man we transferred from the stretcher to the prep table was neither big nor Mexican. He was massive and El Salvadorian, an insurance salesman who weighed well over 450 pounds. Should you ever wish to understand the phrase “dead weight” in all its gravitational glory, attempt to lift the corpse of a morbidly obese man off of a perilous, wobbly stretcher.

  Juan Santos died from an overdose of cocaine. His body went undiscovered for two days in his apartment in the East Bay. He was autopsied by the medical examiner and his chest sewn back up leaving a dramatic Y-shaped stitch stretching from his clavicle to his stomach. “Did you catch this guy’s bag of viscera in the back of the reefer?” Mike asked.

  “Viscera? All his organs and stuff?”

  “Yeah, the medical examiner takes the organs out and piles them in those red hazmat bags. Comes in to the funeral home with the body.”

  “Just, like, tucked up next to ’em or something?” I asked.

  Mike grinned. “No, Chris carries them slung over his shoulder like Santa Claus.”

  “Really?”

  “No, man, no. What the hell—that’s gross,” Mike said.

  Ah, Mike in a jovial mood. I tried to play along with his yuletide-themed organ humor. “So that’s where the legend of ‘Chris’ Kringle comes from? Is it the good or bad kids that get internal organs for Christmas?”

  “I guess it depends on how morbid a kid you are.”

  “Does it all get put back in the body?”

  “Eventually. When Bruce comes in this afternoon to embalm him. There’s a service tomorrow, so he’ll soak them in embalming sludge and stick them back in,” he explained.

  After hoisting Juan onto the table with a theatrical heave, Mike brought out a tape measure. “The family bought a casket, too. I’m going to measure him. I hope he fits because I really don’t want to call this family back and tell them they need the oversized casket. Maybe I’ll make you do it,” Mike said, smiling at the thought.

  The World Health Organization (along with any of the forty-five extreme-weight-loss television programs) tells us that the United States has more overweight adults than any other country in the world. It’s no surprise that the market for oversized caskets is booming.

  The website for Goliath Casket, Inc. features this charming origin story:

  Back in the 70’s and 80’s oversize caskets were hard to get and poorly made. In 1985, Keith’s father, Forrest Davis (Pee Wee), quit his job as a welder in a casket factory and said, “Boys, I’m gonna go home and build oversize caskets that you would be proud to put your mother in.” . . . The company started in an old converted hog barn on their farm, by offering just two sizes and one color.

  We could have used Pee Wee’s ingenuity, because there was no way Juan was going to fit into a regular-sized casket. The man, bless his departed soul, was almost as wide as he was tall. �
��Go ahead, cross his arms, like he’s in the casket,” Mike instructed.

  I stretched myself across Juan’s body to access both appendages. “No, cross them harder, harder, harder,” Mike insisted, extending the tape measure across his shoulders. By now I was fully spread out over the body. “Keep going, keep—there we are! Boom. He will totally fit.”

  “Oh, c’mon, he will not!” I said.

  “We’ll make him fit. The family is already paying more than they can afford for this service. I’m not going to tack on the extra $300 for an oversized casket if I can help it. Just telling them their son needs an oversized casket is hard enough.”

  Later that day, as the Cremulator whirred through the backlog of bones, Bruce arrived to embalm Juan. After seeing him laid out, Bruce, always one for tact, yelled into the crematory: “Caitlin! Caitlin, this is a lot of Mexican. It’s gonna stink. Bigger people always stink.”

  “Why does everyone keep calling him Mexican?” I yelled back over the rumble of the cremation machines.

  Bruce was wrong about Juan’s country of origin, and surely he was also wrong about fat people stinking. Yet emanating from the preparation room was the most ferocious smell my nostrils e’er had smell’d. You would think such an odor would have repelled me, but for some reason it aroused a desire in me to find the pot of gold at the end of the olfactory rainbow.

  I had seen Bruce embalm bodies, but I was in no way intellectually or emotionally prepared to see 450 pounds laid out before me. Autopsied bodies require the embalmer to cut open the stiches from the Y-shaped incision and, as Mike had said, to chemically treat the deceased’s internal organs from Santa Chris’s red hazmat bag. Bruce had just begun that portion of the preparation when I walked in.

  To describe the scene as a “swampy mire” simply would not do it justice. It was more guts and blood and organs and fat I could ever have imagined a single human body containing. Bruce, who was pulling the organs out of the bag, launched into a narrative immediately: “I told you it would stink, Caitlin. Bigger people just decompose faster. That’s science, girl. It’s the fat; the bacteria love the fat. By the time they get here after going in for an autopsy, phew.”