Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

In the late 1800s, the citizens of Paris would come to the morgue by the thousands each day to view the bodies of the unidentified dead. Spectators lined up for hours to get in as vendors sold them fruit, pastries, and toys. When they reached the front of the line, they would be ushered into an exhibit room, where the corpses were laid out on slabs behind a large glass window. Vanessa Schwartz, scholar of fin-de-siècle Paris, called the Paris morgue “a spectacle of the real.”


Eventually the morgue exhibitions became too popular with the citizens of Paris, and they were shut down to the public. Morgues remain behind closed doors today, perhaps because those in charge of regulating death believe the hoi polloi would be too interested, and that such an interest is inherently wrong. Close the morgues if you will, but another attraction will always arise to fill void. The runaway popularity of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’s traveling exhibit of plastinated human bodies, shows us that the human urge to file past corpses on display is indeed as strong as ever. In spite of the ongoing controversy that von Hagens obtained some of his bodies from Chinese political prisoners, Body Worlds is the most popular touring attraction in the world (having drawn 38 million people by the start of 2014).



JACOB LIVED IN WASHINGTON State, and visited San Francisco for reasons unknown. His parents arranged his cremation over the phone, faxing Westwind the required forms and reading us their credit card number to cover the balance. As usual, it was just Jacob and me as I loaded him into the cremation machine, his one eye gazing up at me.

Because of his violent death, Jacob was taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office before being brought to Westwind. The Medical Examiner’s Office is the modernized version of the Coroner’s Office, and is run by medical doctors trained to investigate suspicious or violent deaths. Whenever Westwind Cremation went to pick up a body, the examiner’s staff would give us whatever personal items arrived with the deceased. This usually meant clothes, jewelry, wallets, and so on.

Jacob came with a backpack. His parents didn’t want it mailed back to Washington, so the only place for it to go was into the flames alongside Jacob.

I set the backpack on a table and pulled open the zipper. Jackpot, I thought, one serving of understanding of the mind of a depressed madman, coming right up. But each item I pulled out was more obscenely normal than the next. Change of clothes, toiletries, a kombucha bottle. Then: a stack of notecards. At last! The scribblings of a suicidal lunatic? No. Chinese language flashcards.

I was disappointed. I had expected answers in that backpack, insight into the human condition.

“Hey, Caitlin, put this wallet back in there before you cremate it,” Mike called from his office.

“Wait, there’s a wallet?” I replied.

“I’m looking at his ID right now. There’s his college ID, his driver’s license, his Greyhound bus ticket to San Francisco. Oh, and a map of the BART train system; that’s depressing. He wrote something on the BART map. Word of the day: ‘anthropophagy.’ What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. I’m going to Google it right now. Spell it,” I said.

“A-N-T-H-R-O-P-O-P-H-A-G-Y.”

“Shit. It means cannibalism. It’s a synonym for cannibalism,” I said.

Mike laughed at the gallows humor of the definition. “No way. Do you think this means he had an insatiable desire for human flesh? This bus ticket says he got in to San Francisco the day before he died. Why not commit suicide back in Washington?”

“Right,” I added, “why would you come all the way to San Francisco to stand in front of a BART train?”

“Maybe he wasn’t trying to die. Just be an ass and dodge the train or something. Like that kid in Stand by Me.”

“Corey Feldman?” I asked.

“No, the other one.”

“River Phoenix?”

“No, not that one either,” Mike said. “Whatever, if that’s what he was trying, shit, he didn’t do a very good job.”

As I slid Jacob into the flames, the only things I knew about him were that he was a twenty-two-year-old from Washington who studied Chinese and was perhaps, at least on the day he died, interested in cannibalism. A few weeks earlier I had invested my first paycheck in the box set of the HBO television series Six Feet Under, the beloved show about a family-run mortuary. In one episode, Nate the funeral director visits a lonely, dying young man to arrange his cremation. The man is angry and bitter about his impending death and the lack of support from his family. He asks Nate who will push the button on the cremation machine when he dies.

“Whomever you specify,” Nate replies. “Buddhists have a family member, and then some people choose no one, in which case the person at the crematory does it.”

“I’ll take that guy.”

That was me. The person at the crematory. I was “that guy” for Jacob. In spite of what he had done, I didn’t want him to be alone.