Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

If we had been born into the Wari’ tribe, the cannibalism we dismiss as barbarism would have been our own cherished custom, one we engaged in with sincerity and conviction. The burial practice in North America—embalming (long-term preservation of the corpse), followed by burial in a heavy sealed casket in the ground—is offensive and foreign to the Wari’. The “truth and dignity” of the Western style of burial is only the truth and dignity as determined by our immediate surroundings.

When I began working at Westwind, modern embalming wasn’t something I could clearly define. I knew it was what was “done” with bodies, one thread in my own web of significance. When I was ten years old, my cousin’s husband’s father died. Mr. Aquino was a good Catholic, the elder statesman of an enormous Hawaiian-Filipino family. His funeral was held at an old cathedral in Kapolei. When we arrived, my mother and I joined the line to file past his casket. As we reached the front of the line, I peered over the edge and saw Papa Aquino laid out. He was so made up that he no longer looked real. His gray skin was stretched tight, a by-product of the embalming fluid pumped through his circulatory system. Hundreds of candles burned around his casket, and the light from their flames reflected off his shiny, bright-pink lips, contorted into a grimace. He was a dignified man in life but looked like a waxen replica of himself in death. It was an experience I share with thousands upon thousands of other American children, trundling past a casket and getting this brief, waxy vision of death.

As to the type of person who would choose a career performing this dismal process, I vaguely imagined a gaunt man with hollowed cheeks, tall and thin like Lurch from the Addams Family. I crossed this vision of Lurch with the archetypal undertaker from a 1950s horror movie, wearing a lab coat and watching neon-green liquid slide through tubes into a dead body.

The embalmer at Westwind Cremation couldn’t have been further from this image. Bruce, the trade embalmer who came in several times a week to prepare bodies, was an African American man with graying hair and a boyish face—positively cherubic. He looked like a six-foot-tall Gary Coleman, fifty going on twenty. His voice fluctuated wildly in pitch and rhythm and carried across the crematory. “Hey there, Caitlin!” he greeted me with enthusiasm.

“Hey, Bruce, how you doing?”

“You know how it is, girl, just another day. Just another day with the dead.”

Technically I was training to be a crematory operator under Mike, but Bruce had been the assistant embalming instructor at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, the embalming school that closed its doors not long after Westwind underbid them on the homeless-and-indigent-dead contract. Although there was no longer a mortuary school in San Francisco, Bruce still had the instructor in him and was eager to share the secrets of the trade. Not that he had all that much respect for mortuary schools these days.

“Caitlin, when you learned this stuff in the old days it was an art,” he said. “Embalming meant preserving the body. I’m telling you, I’m beginning to wonder what they actually teach people at these mortuary colleges. Students come out of there who can’t even find a vein for drainage. Back in the ’70s, you worked on the bodies every day. Everything you did was bodies—bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies.”

There is a narrative, created mostly by the North American funeral industry, that situates modern embalming practices within an age-old tradition, an art form passed down through the millennia from the ancient Egyptians, original masters of corpse preservation. The present-day funeral director acts as the bearer of their ancient wisdom.

Needless to say, that narrative has a number of problems. Embalmers may claim their trade descended from the ancient Egyptians, but that neglects the quantum gap between the era of Tutankhamun and the time Americans began to perform embalmings in the early 1860s.

The embalming practiced by the ancient Egyptians was a very different animal from what is practiced down the street in your local funeral home. Some 2,500 years ago, bodies of the Egyptian elite were treated to an elaborate postmortem process that took months to complete. In contrast, the embalming at your funeral home takes three to four hours from start to finish. That is, if you’re lucky enough to get three to four hours of an embalmer’s time. Large funeral corporations have been buying up mom-and-pop mortuaries for years, keeping the mom-and-pop name the community trusts, but upping their prices and centralizing their embalming facilities. This gives body preparation the atmosphere of an assembly line, with embalmers pressured to knock out a completed corpse in record time.