Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Over the last few decades the funeral industry has evolved a number of methods to distance the family from any aspect of death that might potentially offend them, and not just in the crematory.

When my friend Mara’s grandmother suffered a fatal stroke, Mara was on the next flight to Florida to hold vigil at the deathbed. Over the next week, Mara watched her grandmother struggle to breathe, unable to swallow or move or make a sound. When death mercifully took the old woman, Mara expected she would be there through the whole funeral as well. She wasn’t. I received this message from her: “Caitlin, we just stood there next to the open grave. Her casket was there and the dirt was covered up with Astroturf. I kept thinking they were going to lower the casket into the grave. They never did. We had to walk away while the casket was still sitting there, unburied.”

Only after Mara’s family had left the cemetery would Grandmother’s casket be lowered into the ground and the yellow construction backhoes brought in to dump the dirt back on top.

These modern denial strategies help focus mourners on positive “celebrations of life”—life being far more marketable than death. One of the largest funeral-home corporations keeps small toaster ovens near their arrangement rooms so fresh-baked cookie smells will comfort and distract families throughout the day—fingers crossed that the chocolate chips mask the olfactory undertones of chemicals and decomposition.

I passed back through Westwind’s supply closet, nodding at the women who were making remarkable progress on the altar. They worked to arrange multiple bowls of fruit and circular flower wreaths at the base of a large framed picture of the deceased Mr. Huang, the patriarch of the family. The picture was in the style of a shopping-mall portrait, the head and shoulders of an older Chinese man in a sharp suit and abnormally rosy cheeks. Airbrushed clouds floated in the background.

On Mike’s instructions, Chris and I brought Mr. Huang’s wooden casket into the chapel. When we opened the lid, Mr. Huang was waiting for us in his best suit. He had the stiff, waxy appearance of an embalmed corpse, no longer the stern dreamer in his cloud portrait.

Throughout the morning, more and more of Mr. Huang’s family arrived, bearing more fruits and gifts for the supply-closet altar. “You,” an older woman barked at me with disapproval, “why you wear red?”

The color red, associated with happiness, is poor form at a Chinese funeral. The cherry-red dress I wore all but screamed, “Ha, grievers! I laugh in the face of cultural sensitivity!”

I wanted to protest that I didn’t know the Huang family would be there that day, especially for something as terrifying as a witness cremation. Instead I mumbled an apology and shuffled away with her bowl of oranges.

Mike had already gone into the back to preheat one of the retorts. When the time came for Mr. Huang’s cremation, he had me follow him into the chapel. We threaded our way through throngs of Mr. Huang’s relatives, clucking with displeasure at my red dress. The casket was rolled out of the chapel and into the crematory. The family streamed in behind us, thirty people at least, invading what until now had been my sacred space.

As we filed into the crematory, everyone (elderly women included) fell to their knees on the ground, wailing. The howls of the mourners mixed in with the roar of the cremation machine. The effect was eerie. I stood in the back, my eyes wide, feeling like an anthropologist privy to some unknown rite.

It is a Chinese practice to hire professional mourners for a ceremony to help facilitate grief, to whip the crowd into a frenzy. It was difficult to tell if some of the people on the crematory floor were such professional mourners, hired by the family to promote sorrow through their excess emotion. Were professional mourners even available in Oakland? Their grief appeared genuine. But then again, I had never been in a situation like this before, where such a large group of people allowed themselves to be emotionally vulnerable. No stiff upper lips here.

Suddenly, a man I had somehow missed began weaving his way through the crowd with a video camera, filming the mourners. He would stop in front of a wailer and wave his hands upward, indicating what he wanted from them was more, more wailing! The mourner would let out a louder, more anguished cry and beat the ground. It seemed that no one wanted to get caught on camera looking calm or stoic.

The Huang family was engaged in ritual in the classic sense, mixing belief with tactile, physical action. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, two researchers of the human brain from the University of Pennsylvania, explained that for a ritual to work, the participants must engage “all parts of the brain and body, it must merge behavior with ideas.” Through their wailing, their kneeling, their grief, Mr. Huang’s family were connecting to something greater than themselves.