Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

The Egyptians embalmed for religious reasons, believing that every step of their process—from removing the brain through the nose with a long iron hook to placing the internal organs in animal-head vases called Canopic jars to drying the body out for forty days with natron salt—had profound significance. There are no brain hooks or organ-storage jars in modern North American embalming, which instead involves the removal of blood and fluids from the body cavity and replacing them with a mixture of strong preservative chemicals. More important, modern embalming was born not from religion but from stronger forces altogether—marketing and consumerism.

On this particular day, lying on Bruce’s embalming table, was a man of vastly different social station from the privileged citizens once embalmed by the Egyptians. His name was Cliff, a Vietnam War veteran who had died alone at the Veterans’ Administration (VA) Hospital in San Francisco. The US government pays for the embalming and burial (at a national cemetery) of veterans like Cliff—the men, and occasionally women, who die with no friends or family.

Bruce approached with a scalpel, bringing it down at the base of Cliff’s throat. “All right, now, first thing you have to do is get the blood out. Flush the system. Like flushing a radiator system in a car.”

Bruce made an incision. I was expecting blood to come gushing out like in a slasher film, but the wound was dry. “This guy isn’t exactly fresh; the VA keeps bodies for a long time,” Bruce explained, shaking his head in frustration.

Bruce showed me how to mix the salmon-pink cocktail that would replace Cliff’s blood: a blend of formaldehyde and alcohol splashed into a large glass tank. Bruce stuck his gloved fingers into the new hole in Cliff’s throat and sliced open the carotid artery, then inserted a small metal tube. The small tube connected to an even larger rubber tube. Bruce flipped a switch at the base of the tank and it began to vibrate and hum as the pink liquid burst through the tube, sending chemicals shooting through Cliff’s circulatory system. As the liquid flowed into his artery, the displaced blood spurted forth from Cliff’s jugular vein and slid down the table to the sink’s drain.

“Isn’t it dangerous, the blood just going down the drain like that?” I asked.

“Naw, it ain’t dangerous. You know what else goes in the sewer?” Bruce said. I had to admit, this made the blood less disgusting by comparison.

“That isn’t even that much blood, Caitlin,” he continued. “You should see when I embalm a case that’s been autopsied. You get covered in blood, and it’s not all nice and neat like on TV. It’s like with OJ.”

“Wait, like OJ Simpson? How is this like OJ?”

“Now, I’m a mortician right? Sometimes when I cut up people I get covered in blood. You get one of those arteries where blood is shootin’ out everywhere—well, you know how blood is. They said OJ cut up two people while they were still alive and walked out of there but there were only three drops of blood on the car?”

“OK, Bruce, but didn’t somebody have to kill them?” I asked.

“Whoever did that business had to be wearing a body suit from head to toe. When you get soaked with blood, that stuff don’t just wash off; it stains. Did you see the crime scene on CNN? That scene was a bloody mess. All I’m saying is there should have been a blood trail.”

While Bruce acted as forensic detective, he was, at the same time, gently soaping and massaging Cliff’s limbs to disperse the chemicals through his vascular system. It was a bizarre image, a grown man giving a corpse a sponge bath, but I by now I had grown accustomed to Westwind’s peculiar tableaux.

The tilt in the porcelain embalming table helped Cliff’s blood slide down into the drain as the formaldehyde solution diffused through his body. Formaldehyde, a colorless gas in its pure form, has been classified as a carcinogen. Cliff the corpse was long past caring about cancer, but Bruce was a sitting duck if he didn’t take proper precautions. The National Cancer Institute has found that funeral embalmers are at an increased risk for myeloid leukemia, abnormal growth in the bone-marrow tissue, and cancer of the blood. The irony is that embalmers make a living draining the blood of others, only to have their own blood mutiny against them.

What was happening to Cliff, this chemical preservation of the corpse, had no place in American death customs prior to the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. Death in America began as an entirely homegrown operation. A person would die in their own bed, surrounded by their family and friends. The corpse would be washed and shrouded by the man or woman’s closest living relations and laid out for several days in the home for a wake—a ritual named for the Old English word for “keeping watch,” not, as it is often believed, the fear that the corpse might suddenly wake up.