Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.

Say you are a gazelle, grazing an African plain. The soundtrack from The Lion King plays in the background. A hungry lion stalks you from a distance. He sprints in to attack, but today you manage to outrun him. By instinct, a fight-or-flight reaction, you feel momentary anxiety. Experience and genetics have taught you to run and evade danger, and it does take some time for your heart to stop racing. But soon enough you can return to happy grazing as if nothing had happened. Chomp-chomp, blissful chomps, until the lion comes back for round two.

The human heart rate may decelerate after the lion chase has ended, but we never stop knowing that the game is lost. We know death awaits us, and it affects everything we do, including the impulse to take elaborate care of our dead.

Some 95,000 years ago, a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh Cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. Some of the surviving skeletal remains found at Qafzeh show stains of red ochre, a naturally tinted clay. Archeologists believe the ochre’s presence means that we performed rituals with our dead very early in our species’ history. One of the recovered skeletons, a thirteen-year-old child, was buried with its legs bent to the side and a pair of deer antlers in its arms. We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.

When families came to Westwind to arrange for cremations and burials, they sat in our front arrangement room and nervously drank water out of paper cups, unhappy about the death that brought them there and often even more unhappy about having to pay for it. Sometimes they’d request a viewing in our chapel in order to see the dead body for a final time. Occasionally the chapel was filled with a hundred people weeping over the strains of gospel music; other days it was just a single mourner, sitting quietly for half an hour before seeing themselves out.

Families would go through the chapel or arrangement room, even the front office, but the crematory itself was my space. Most days I was alone “in the back,” as Mike called it.

On our price list we offered something called a “Witness Cremation,” but no one took us up on this offer the first few weeks I was at Westwind. Then, one day, there was the Huang family. When I showed up to work at eight thirty there were already a dozen older Asian women, in the supply closet of all places, setting up a makeshift altar.

“Mike?” I called out, walking toward his office.

“What’s up?” he called back with his usual deadpan indifference.

“Hey, why are there people in the supply closet?” I asked.

“Oh, right, they’re here for the witness this afternoon. There’s not going to be enough room in the chapel for all their stuff, so I gave them the supply closet for the altar,” he said.

“I—I didn’t know there was going to be a witness,” I fumbled, terrified at the invasion of my space and routine.

“I thought Chris told you, man. Don’t worry about it, I got this one,” he said.

Mike had no qualms about the day’s events. Maybe he could perform a witness cremation with one hand tied behind his back, but the whole premise seemed incalculably dangerous to me. A witness cremation followed a sequence: the family was given time in the chapel with the deceased, the body was wheeled into the crematory, and the cremation process was begun with the whole family standing right there. With the whole family standing right there. About as much room for error as in the transport of nuclear weapons.

When Western cremation evolved from open pyres to enclosed industrial machines, the first of these new machines were built with peepholes in the side so the family could peek in and watch the process like a naughty show. Some funeral homes even required that family members be there to witness the body being loaded into the machine. But as time went on the peepholes were covered and sealed, the families kept out of the crematory altogether.