Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

“So these are the cremation machines?” I asked Mike.

“They take up the whole room. You’d be pretty surprised if these weren’t the machines, wouldn’t you?” he replied, ducking through a nearby doorway, abandoning me once again.

What was a nice girl like me doing in a body-disposal warehouse like this? No one in her right mind would choose a day job as a corpse incinerator over, say, bank teller or kindergarten teacher. And it might have been easier to be hired as a bank teller or kindergarten teacher, so suspicious was the death industry of the twenty-three-year-old woman desperate to join its ranks.

I had applied for jobs concealed by the glow of my laptop screen, guided by the search terms “cremation,” “crematory,” “mortuary,” and “funeral.” The reply to my job inquiries—if I received any reply at all—was, “Well, do you have any cremation experience?” Funeral homes seemed to insist on experience, as if corpse-burning skills were available to all, taught in your average high school shop class. It took six months and buckets of résumés and “Sorry, we found someone better qualified” before I was hired at Westwind Cremation & Burial.

My relationship with death had always been complicated. Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind. As a little girl I would lie awake for hours waiting for my mother’s headlights to appear in the driveway, convinced that she was lying broken and bloody on the side of the highway, flecks of shattered glass stuck to the tips of her eyelashes. I became “functionally morbid,” consumed with death, disease, and darkness yet capable of passing as a quasi-normal schoolgirl. In college I dropped the pretense, declared my major as medieval history, and spent four years devouring academic papers with names like “Necro-Fantasy & Myth: Interpretation of Death Amongst the Natives of Pago Pago” (Dr. Karen Baumgartner, Yale University, 2004). I was drawn to all aspects of mortality—the bodies, the rituals, the grief. Academic papers had provided a fix, but they weren’t enough. I wanted the harder stuff: real bodies, real death.

Mike returned, pushing a squeaky-wheeled gurney bearing my first corpse.

“There’s no time to learn the cremation machines today, so you can do me a favor. Give this guy a shave,” he requested, nonchalant. Apparently the dead man’s family wanted to see him one more time before he was cremated.

Motioning for me to follow, Mike wheeled the gurney into a sterile white room just off the crematory, explaining that this was where the bodies were “prepared.” He walked over to a large metal cabinet and pulled out a pink plastic disposable razor. Handing it to me, Mike turned and left, disappearing for the third time. “Good luck,” he called over his shoulder.

As I said, I hadn’t expected the corpse shaving, but there I was.

Mike, though absent from the preparation room, was watching me closely. This was a test, my introduction to his harsh training philosophy: sink or swim. I was the new girl who had been hired to burn (and occasionally shave) corpses, and I would either (a) be able to handle it or (b) not be able to handle it. There was to be no hand-holding, no learning curve, no trial period.

Mike returned a few minutes later, stopping to glance over my shoulder. “Look, here . . . no, in the direction his hair was growing. Short strokes. Right.”

When I wiped the last bits of shaving cream from Byron’s face, he looked like a newborn babe, not a nick or razor burn in sight.

Later that morning, Byron’s wife and daughter came to see him. Byron was wheeled into Westwind’s viewing room and draped in white sheets. A floor lamp fitted with a rose-colored lightbulb cast a calm glow over his exposed face—far more pleasant than the harsh fluorescent bulbs in the preparation room.

After my shave, Mike had worked some kind of funerary magic to close Byron’s eyes and gaping mouth. Now, under the rose lighting, the gentleman seemed almost serene. I kept expecting to hear cries from the viewing room of “Dear God, who shaved him like this!” but to my relief, none came.

I learned from his wife that Byron had been an accountant for forty years. A fastidious man, he probably would have appreciated the close shave. Toward the end of his battle with lung cancer he couldn’t get out of bed to use the bathroom, let alone wield a razor.