Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

The embalming tents on the battlefield often contained only a simple plank of wood atop two barrels. The embalmers injected chemicals into the arterial systems of the newly dead, their own special blends of “arsenicals, zinc chloride, bichloride of mercury, salts of alumina, sugar of lead, and a host of salts, alkalies, and acids.” Dr. Thomas Holmes, still regarded by many in the funeral industry as the patron saint of embalming, maintained that during the Civil War he personally embalmed more than 4,000 dead soldiers in this fashion, at the cost of $100 a body. The discount option, for those not inclined toward the highbrow methods of chemicals and injections, might be to eviscerate the internal organs and fill the body cavity with sawdust. Defiling the body in this way was considered a sin in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, but the desire to see the face of a loved one again sometimes trumped religious ideology.

The full evisceration of the body cavity is not so different from what is done today, minus the sawdust. Perhaps the dirtiest secret about the process of modern embalming is the occult use of a skinny, lightsaber-sized piece of metal known as the trocar. Bruce raised his trocar like the sword Excalibur and pushed its pointed tip into Cliff’s stomach, stabbing him just below his belly button. He jabbed the trocar in, breaking the skin, and went to work puncturing Cliff’s intestines, bladder, lungs, and stomach. The trocar’s job in the embalming process is to suck out any fluids, gases, and waste in the body cavity. The brown liquid slid up the trocar’s tube with an uncomfortable gurgling and sucking noise before splashing down the drain of the sink and into the sewers. Then the trocar reversed directions, no longer sucking but dumping more salmon-pink cocktail, of an even stronger chemical concentration this time, into the chest cavity and abdomen. If there had been any doubt Cliff was dead, the trocar dispelled it.

Bruce remained stoic as he violently jabbed Cliff with the trocar. Like Chris, who compared transporting bodies to “moving furniture,” Bruce saw embalming as a trade that he had mastered over many years. It wouldn’t do to be invested emotionally in every body. Bruce was able to perform this trocar work with no hesitation, all the while chatting with me like we were two old friends having a cup of coffee.

“Caitlin, you know what I need to figure out?” Stab. “Those damn doves. You know what I’m talking about, those white doves that they release at the funerals?” Stab. “That’s where the money is, for sure. I gotta get some doves.” Stab, stab, stab.

There was, no doubt, a practical element to the embalming procedures of the Civil War. Families wanted to see the bodies of their dead relatives—an important aspect of ritual and closure. Embalming provided that opportunity. Even today the process can still be helpful for the corpse-about-town. As Bruce put it, “Look, do you need embalming? No. But if you want him to have a big Weekend at Bernie’s–style day, moving to different services and churches around the city, that body better be embalmed.” But the procedure didn’t make sense for Cliff, who was going directly into the ground the next day at the veterans’ cemetery in Sacramento.

When we speak of embalming, the stakes are not small. Though there is no law that requires it, embalming is the primary procedure in North America’s billion-dollar funeral industry. It is the process around which the entire profession has revolved over the last 150 years. Without it, undertakers might still be the guys selling coffins, renting hearses, and pulling teeth on the side.

So how did we get to the place where we venerate embalming, decorating our dead as lurid, painted props on fluffy pillows, like poor Papa Aquino? The place where we embalm a man like Cliff as standard procedure, not bothering to question whether he needs it? Undertakers in the late nineteenth century realized that the corpse was their missing link to professionalism. The corpse could, and would, become a product.

Auguste Renouard, one of the earliest American embalmers, said in 1883 that “the public had once believed that any fool could become an undertaker. Embalming, however, makes people marvel at the ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’ process of preservation, and made them respect the practitioner.”

During embalming’s early years, the public perceived the undertaker as a fool, since the profession required no national standards or qualifications. Roving “professors” traveled from town to town holding three-day courses that ended with the professor attempting to sell you embalming fluid from the manufacturer he represented.

But in just a few decades the embalmer went from a huckster making money on the battlefield to a “specialist.” Manufacturers of embalming chemicals aggressively marketed the image of the embalmer as a highly trained professional and a technical mastermind—an expert in both sanitation and the arts, creating beautiful corpses for public admiration. Nowhere else were art and science so expertly combined. Companies pled their case in trade magazines like The Shroud, The Western Undertaker, and The Sunnyside.