Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

For months I had been ducking my mouth down into my shirt and releasing my saliva into the fabric, letting the wet stain slowly spread downward like a second collar. The reasons for this were obscure. Somehow I had decided that failing to drool down my shirt sent a direct message to the governing powers of the universe that I didn’t want my life badly enough, and that they were free to throw me to the wolves of death.

There is a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder called cognitive-behavioral therapy. By exposing the patient to her worst fears, she can see that the disastrous outcome she expects will not occur, even if she doesn’t perform her rituals. But my parents had grown up in a world where therapy was for the insane and the disturbed, not their cherished eight-year-old child (who just happened to spit into her shirt collar and obsessively tap her fingers on the kitchen counter).

As I grew older and the constant thoughts of death subsided, the rituals ended, and the thuds stopped haunting my dreams. I developed a thick layer of denial about death in order to live my life. When the feelings would come, the emotions, the grief, I would push them down deeper, furious at myself for allowing them to peek through. My inner dialogue could be ruthless: You’re fine. You’re not starving, no one beats you. Your parents are still alive. There is real sadness in the world and yours is pathetic, you whiny, insignificant cow.

Sometimes I think of how my childhood would have been different if I had been introduced directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend.

So, really, what was a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematory like Westwind? The truth was, I saw the job as a way to fix what had happened to the eight-year- old me. The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn’t see her, then he couldn’t take her.

Not only could I heal myself, but I could develop ways to engage children with mortality from early on so that they didn’t end up as traumatized as I was by their first experience with death. The plan was simple. Picture this: an elegant house of bereavement—sleek and modern, but with an Old World charm. It was going to be called La Belle Mort. “Beautiful death,” in French. At least, I was fairly sure it meant beautiful death. I needed to double-check before opening my future funeral home, so I wasn’t like those girls who think they’re getting the Chinese character for “hope” tattooed on their hip when in fact it is the Chinese character for “gas station.”

La Belle Mort would be a place where families could come to mourn their dead in exciting new ways and put the “fun” back into “funeral.” Perhaps, I reasoned, our pathological fear of death comes from treating it as so much gloom and doom. The solution was to do away with all the nonsense of the “traditional” funeral.

Out the door with you, expensive caskets, tacky flower wreaths, and embalmed corpses in suits. Sayonara, canned eulogies featuring “Lo as you walk through the valley of sad stuff,” and stacks of greeting cards with sunsets and saccharine platitudes like “She’s in a better place.”

Our traditions had held us back for far too long. It was time to get out from underneath the cloud of death denial and into celebration mode. There would be parties and merriment at La Belle Mort. It would usher in the new age of the twenty-first-century spectacle funeral. Dad’s cremated ashes could be sent into space, or tamped into bullets and shot out of a gun, or turned into a wearable diamond. I would likely end up catering to celebrity types; Kanye West was sure to want a laser hologram of himself next to twelve-foot-high Champagne fountains at his memorial service.

Back in the crematory at Westwind, as I waited for a pair of decedents to burn, I made lists of what I was going to offer at La Belle Mort Funeral Home: ashes turned into paintings, crushed into tattoo ink, made into pencils or hourglasses, shot out of a glitter canon. My Belle Mort notebook had a simple black cover, but the front page was covered in pastel stickers of giant-eyed animals like something from a Margaret Keane painting. I thought it made the contents more upbeat, but in retrospect it probably increased the creepy factor tenfold.

“What are you always writing over here?” Mike asked, peeking over my shoulder.

“Never you mind, boss. It’s just the death revolution. Never you mind,” I replied with no irony, scribbling the outline of a potential funeral package where an ash-scattering yacht carried your family out into the San Francisco Bay as a string quartet played a movement from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.