Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

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.”