Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

In my imagination, La Belle Mort appeared as the promised land of the postmodern designer funeral experience. Now that I had finally secured a real funeral job at Westwind, all I needed to do was get up every day and put on my ridiculously too-short pants and steel-toed boots and pay my dues in the trenches, burning bodies. If I worked hard enough no one could say I had never actually worked my way up through the death industry.

There were other eight-year-olds in the world, and if I could make death safe, clean, and beautiful for them, my sins would be absolved, and I too would emerge from the crematory fires cleansed.





TOOTHPICKS IN JELL-O





Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world’s humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we’re at fourteen. If this is too abstract, consider this number: 2.5 million. The 2.5 million people who die in the United States every year. The dead space this process out nicely so that the living hardly even notice they’re undergoing the transformation. We’d probably pay more attention if no one died all year, and then on December 31 the entire population of Chicago suddenly dropped dead. Or Houston. Or Las Vegas and Detroit put together. Instead, unless a celebrity or public figure dies, we tend to overlook the necro demographic as they slip away into history.

Someone must take care of these corpses, who have become useless at caring for themselves. Someone must pick them up from homes and hospitals and transport them to the places we hide the bodies—mortuaries and coroners’ offices. In Dante’s Inferno the job fell to Charon, a shaggy-jowled, white-haired demon who piloted sinners by boat across the River Styx into hell.

At Westwind Cremation, that job belonged to Chris.

Chris was in his late fifties, tan with a shock of white hair and sad basset-hound eyes. He was always impeccably clean and wore khakis and a button-down shirt—California formal wear. I took to him immediately. He reminded me of Leslie Nielsen, star of the Naked Gun movies, which were my favorite as a child.

Chris’s voice was slow and monotonous. He was a bachelor—never married, never had children. He rented a small apartment he would return to in the evening to eat a bowl of ramen and watch Charlie Rose. Chris was pessimistic and borderline curmudgeonly, but in a way that brought me happiness, like watching a Walter Matthau movie.

As the body-transport driver, Chris technically worked for Mike, even though he was older than his boss and had been in the funeral industry longer. Chris and Mike’s conversations were akin to old-time comedy routines. Chris would walk into Mike’s office and monologue in painstaking detail his planned driving route to pick up the recently deceased Mr. Kim in Berkeley, taking into account possible traffic, construction, and the evils of the modern world. Mike would grunt and half nod, elaborately ignoring him, focused on the computer screen, filing death certificates without really listening.

Picking up a person who has died at home is known as a house call. Doctors may not make them anymore, but morticians are happy to come, day or night. Protocol in the funeral industry says that one person may go alone to pick up bodies from hospitals, nursing homes, and the coroner’s office, but a team of two people must pick up a person who died at home. When a house call came in, I was to be Chris’s number two.

I appreciated the two-person rule tremendously. The gurney was the most uncooperative, unyielding machine e’er created by man. It tried, in sinister fashion, to embarrass you in front of your boss by being clunky and useless at every turn. The gurney was the only thing in this world less cooperative than the dead bodies that were strapped to them. The thought of having to operate a gurney alone in someone’s private home was horrifying.



THE FIRST HOUSE CALL I went on, a week into working at Westwind, was in South San Francisco. The deceased was Mrs. Adams, an African American woman in her late forties who had died of breast cancer.

To pick up Mrs. Adams, Chris and I hopped into the van, his version of Charon’s boat. This particular van, which Chris had owned for more than twenty years, was a white, windowless box of a vehicle, the kind they featured in televised public service announcements to remind children not to ride with strangers. Westwind owned its own removal van—much newer, dark-blue, designed and outfitted with special features for picking up the dead. But Chris liked routine. He liked his van.

As we drove over the massive Bay Bridge connecting Oakland to San Francisco, I made the mistake of commenting on how beautiful the city looked that day.

Chris was horrified. “Yeah,” he said, “but you live there, so you know once you get up close it’s just a noisy and dirty hell pit. It would be better if we just fire bombed the whole city. That is—if we even make it across.”

“What do you mean if we make it across?” I asked, still adjusting to the concept of fire bombing.