Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

“For the death certificate—was Mark married, Mrs. Nguyen?”


“No, dear, he wasn’t.”

“Did he have children?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“And what was Mark’s most recent career?”

“No, he didn’t have one of those. He never worked.”

“I’m so sorry Mrs. Nguyen,” I said, thinking a woman with a dead thirty-year-old son would be understandably destroyed.

“Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head in resignation, “trust me, it’s for the best.”

Mrs. Nguyen had done her mourning for her son long ago: when he first started using drugs, first went to jail, had his first . . . second . . . sixth relapse. Every time Mark went missing she worried he had overdosed. Just two days earlier she had found Mark dead on the floor in a rent-by-the-hour motel room in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. After discovering his body, she no longer had to worry. Her worst fears had come true—and she was relieved.

When it came time to pay for the cremation, Mrs. Nguyen handed me a credit card, pulled it back, and said, “Wait, hold on hon, use this one instead. I get airline miles on it. At least Mark can get me some miles.”

“You should go somewhere tropical,” I blurted without thinking, as if she had come to see a travel agent. After all, when you find your son deceased in a seedy motel room, don’t you deserve a mai tai?

“I think that would be lovely, dear,” she said, signing her receipt. “I’ve always wanted to go to Kauai.”

“I’m from Oahu originally, but I’ve really come to like the Hilo side of the Big Island,” I replied, and we slipped into a natural conversation about the pros and cons of the different Hawaiian islands that Mrs. Nguyen could visit on her son Mark’s cremation miles.

Mrs. Nguyen’s was my first airline miles request, but Westwind Cremation & Burial was no stranger to the marriage of technology and death. Inside Westwind’s garage, on the wall above the extra boxes of urns, hung the framed city business license for Bayside Cremation. The garage technically stood at a different street address, and Bayside Cremation was technically a different business, but they operated out of the same facility. Bayside distinguished itself by offering the cutting-edge option of ordering a cremation over the Internet.

If your father died in a local hospital, you could visit the Bayside Cremation website, type in the location of Dad’s body, print out some forms, sign them, fax them back to the number provided, and input your credit card number to the website. All of this without ever having to speak to a real person. In fact, you weren’t allowed to speak to a real person even if you wanted to: all questions had to be sent by e-mail to [email protected]. Two weeks later, the doorbell would ring and the postman would hand over Dad’s ashes, shipped by registered mail, signature required. No funeral home, no sad faces, no need to see Dad’s body—total avoidance for the low, low price of $799.99.

Nothing was different behind the scenes, mind you. Either Chris or I still went to pick up the body, still filed the death certificate, still cremated in the same cremation machine. Bayside Cremation offered Westwind’s model of direct cremation—already pretty low on human interaction—minus the human interaction altogether.

Bruce, our embalmer, had strong feelings about the need for actual live humans to take care of dead humans: “Look, Caitlin, a computer can’t cremate a body.” He had worked at another cremation facility before Westwind, where they had the workers run the cremation machines off computerized timers. “You’d think that’s a good idea, right, for efficiency and whatnot? But it wouldn’t work if that body wasn’t in there perfect. If it wasn’t perfect, that machine goes, ‘Oh, ding-ding, cremation is over!’ and that body ain’t cremated. Open it up, there’s a half-charred body in there. That’s what you get with a computer, man.”

Most of the families who chose to use Bayside Cremation were looking for the rock bottom price at which to dispose of their sixty-five-year-old estranged brother-in-law whose arrangements California legally required them to pay for. Mark Nguyen might have been an ideal Bayside Cremation case, a long-term drug addict with a mother who had mentally buried him long before his actual death. But there were troubling cases, too. One gentleman cremated by Bayside was just twenty-one—close to my age at the time. Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause.