Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Think about the way this bridge is built, Cat”—he called me Cat—“crammed up here on eighty-foot Douglas fir pilings just stuck in the mud. It’s like toothpicks in Jell-O, structurally. We’re just swaying up here. The legs could just snap in half like twigs any second, and we’re all dead.”


I laughed at a slightly higher pitch than usual, glancing out the window at the long drop to the Bay below.

We pulled up outside the Adamses’ home twenty minutes later with none of the pomp and pageantry of the funeral carriages of old. In lieu of plumed horses in a cortège, it was Chris and me in his twenty-year-old unmarked white van.

Before we went in, I made Chris go over everything again. I wasn’t about to embarrass myself in front of this woman’s husband.

“Don’t worry about it, Cat. A monkey could do this job. I’ll talk you through it.”

As we got closer to the house, it became clear that we would not be dealing with just the woman’s husband. At least fifteen people were milling around outside, eyeing us suspiciously as we walked up the front path to the door. When we walked through the front door we found ourselves in a high-ceilinged living room, where at least forty people were gathered around a woman’s body. Like the scratch of a needle on a skipping record, their voices all went silent at once as the group turned to look at us.

Oh great, I thought, the only two white people here have arrived to take their beloved matriarch away in our roving child-molester van.

Chris, however, didn’t miss a beat. “Hello, folks, we’re here from Westwind Cremation & Burial. Is this Mrs. Adams here?” he asked, gesturing to the dead body in the center of the room.

It was a pretty safe bet to assume that this was, in fact, Mrs. Adams, but the group seemed to appreciate the question. A man stepped out and introduced himself as Mr. Adams.

Quick to prove myself useful, I asked in a solemn tone, “Were you her husband?”

“Young lady, I am her husband. Not were her husband,” he replied, fixing me with a withering gaze, compounded by the forty other withering gazes from around the room.

This is it, I thought. I’m done. I have shamed myself and my family and all is lost.

However, Chris was, again, unfazed. “Well, I’m Chris, and this is Caitlin,” he said. “Are we ready to take her, here?”

At this point the family usually leaves the room, leaving the funeral-home employees to do whatever they do with the corpse to make it disappear. But this family wanted to watch us. This meant my first time removing a dead body from a home was going to be in front of forty crying people who hated me.

This was the moment I learned the magic of Chris. He began talking me through the process in the same voice he’d told Mike about the day’s elaborate traffic route. He explained how we were going to remove Mrs. Adams as if he were telling the crowd.

“Now we’re going to pull the gurney right alongside the bed, and Caitlin is going to use that handle there to lower her side down. I’m going to take the sheet next to her head and Caitlin is going to take the sheet by her feet and slide it right underneath her. Caitlin is going to pick up her feet onto the gurney in one, two, three. Now she’s going to wrap the second sheet over her and snap her in tightly.”

This continued until Mrs. Adams was swathed and buckled securely to the gurney. The people in the room paid rapt attention to the process, following Chris’s voice step by step. I was grateful that he didn’t expose me as a fraud. I didn’t even really feel like a fraud. The way Chris explained things made me believe I actually knew what I was doing. Surely there had never been a time I hadn’t been an expert body shrouder.

As we wheeled Mrs. Adams out the front door, her son came up to us. He was my age, and his mother was dead. He wanted to lay a flower on the gurney. I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted out, “She must have been a really amazing woman. Trust me, I can just tell about these things.”

This was, of course, a lie. This was my very first house call and I still didn’t know how to properly wrap the body in a sheet, forget measuring the vibe of the room to determine just how “amazing” a dead person was when they were living.

“Um, yeah, thank you,” he said.

Driving away from the house, Mrs. Adams rattling gently in the back, Chris assured me that I hadn’t actually screwed everything up forever. “Look, Cat, we see people at their worst moments. Maybe if someone’s buying a new car, or a new house, they want to be there. But what are they buying from us? Nothing, we’re charging money to take away someone they love. That’s the last thing in the world they want.” This made me feel better.