Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

The new guard of embalming undertakers began to outline a new narrative: that with their technical training they protected the public from disease, and through their art they created a final “memory picture” for the family. Sure, they made money off the dead. But so did doctors. Did not embalmers also deserve to be paid for their good work? Never mind that corpses had been kept quite safely in the home, prepared by the family, for hundreds of years. Embalming was what made the professionals professional—it was the magic ingredient.

Shinmon Aoki, a modern undertaker in Japan, described being ridiculed by society for his job washing and casketing the dead. His family disowned him and his wife wouldn’t sleep with him because he was “defiled” by corpses. So Aoki purchased a surgical robe, mask, and gloves and began showing up to homes dressed in full medical garb. People began responding differently; they bought the image he was selling and called him “doctor.” The American undertaker had done something similar: by making themselves “medical” they became legitimate.

Watching Cliff go through the embalming process, I thought back to the Huang family’s witness cremation and the vow I’d made to be the one to cremate the members of my family.

“I’ve been thinking about this, Bruce,” I said, “and I think I could cremate my mother, but there’s no way in hell I could embalm her like this.”

To my surprise, he agreed. “No way, no way. Maybe you think you could, till you see her layin’ there dead on the table. You think you can slice your mom’s neck and get to the vein? Think you could trocar her? This is your mother we’re talking about. You’d have to be a tough sister to do that.”

Then Bruce stopped working, looked me in the eyes, and said something that made me think, and not for the last time, that he saw his work as more than a trade. Though he hid his ideas under a boisterous personality and get-rich-through-funeral-doves schemes, Bruce was a philosopher. “Think of it this way: your mom’s stomach is where you lived for nine months, it’s how you got into this world, it’s your origin, where you came from. Now you’re gonna trocar that? Stab her? Destroy where you came from? You really wanna go there?”

High in the mountains of Tibet, where the ground is too rocky for burial and trees too scarce to provide wood for cremation pyres, Tibetans have developed another method of dealing with their dead. A professional rogyapa, or body breaker, slices the flesh off the corpse and grinds the remaining bones with barley flour and yak butter. The body is laid out on a high, flat rock to be eaten by vultures. The birds swoop in, carrying the body in all different directions, up into the sky. It is a generous way to be disposed of, the leftover flesh nourishing other animals.

Every culture has death rituals with the power to shock the uninitiated and challenge our personal web of significance—from the Wari’ roasting the flesh of their fellow tribesmen to the Tibetan monk torn apart by the beaks of vultures to the long, silver trocar stabbing Cliff’s intestines. But there is a crucial difference between what the Wari’ did and the Tibetans do with their deceased compared to what Bruce did to Cliff. The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.

If embalming were something a tradesman like Bruce would never perform on his own mother, I wondered why we were performing it on anyone at all.





DEMON BABIES





The nightmare revealer of madness unknown,

Of fetuses cooked for the Satanists’ feast,

Old witches look on as a baby reveals,

A stretch of her leg to the lust of the Beast.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Beacon Lights


When you graduate from college with a degree in medieval history, shockingly few employers come knocking at your door. Type “medieval” and “historian” into Craigslist, and the best career option you’ll find is mead wench at Medieval Times. Really, your only choice is to go to graduate school and spend another seven years toiling away among dusty piles of illuminated manuscripts from thirteenth-century France. You squint at the faded Latin and develop a hunched back and pray that you can trick a university into letting you teach.