Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

I tried to imagine my parents receiving word of my death. My mother would turn to my father and say, “Now, John, I wonder if we could find an inexpensive online cremation for Caiti? Remember how easy it was to order the Chinese food online last week? Since I don’t need to discuss any questions or concerns about my precious offspring with an actual human being, I’m sure the Internet option will be just fine.”


I was beginning to doubt that my own body would be well cared for were I to die young. The very idea of Bayside Cremation crushed me with loneliness. I was burdened with the thought that any of my Facebook friends would be quick to comment “Yummy!” on a photo of my Ni?oise salad, but wouldn’t step up to wipe the sweat from my dying brow or the poop off my corpse.

It was my job to wrap up the Bayside Cremation ashes for mailing. The United States Postal Service required that the urns be packaged a certain way, with heavy brown packing tape covering all sides and what felt like forty separate labels. When there were several packages ready to be mailed I’d trundle into the post office and set them out on the linoleum counter. The elderly Asian lady behind the counter shook her head at me while covering the boxes with the “Human Remains” stamp.

“Look, the families want them sent, I don’t make the rules!” I insisted.

Her judgmental expression didn’t soften, she just continued to stamp. Stamp. Stamp.

Even with the mailing boxes sealed, boxed, and taped up like a citadel, we still had family members trying to convince us they received them in poor condition. Anything to avoid paying. One gentleman in Pennsylvania claimed his brother had arrived in a package actively leaking remains, a situation that deteriorated when he set his brother in the backseat of his convertible and ash flew out into the air as he drove down the interstate. While I appreciated the homage to The Big Lebowski, he gave up on his story and stopped threatening lawsuits when I told him how the urn was packaged. We came to find out he had never even gone to the post office to pick it up.

There was a special fax sound when a Bayside Cremation request came down through the Internet tubes. It elicited a Pavlovian response from Westwind employees because we had been promised a company cocktail party and dinner when we hit our first 100 online cremation cases.

One Tuesday morning the fax rang, and Chris stood up with his usual grumble (cocktail parties and social gatherings in general holding no appeal for him) and went over to pick it up.

“Oh, what the hell, Cat, she’s nine.”

“Wait, Chris, she’s what?”

“She’s nine.”

“Like nine years old?” I asked, horrified. “What’s her name? Jessica?”

“Ashley,” Chris said, shaking his head.

“Jesus.”

A nine-year-old girl named Ashley, who had just finished the third grade, died at a hospital, where her parents left her body, went home, typed their credit card into a website, and waited two weeks for her to appear in a box by mail.

I did end up talking to Ashley’s mother on the phone, because no matter how many e-mails we sent back and forth, the credit card she provided wouldn’t work. It turned out she had been trying to use her Sears department store card to pay for the cremation. Who, really, is to say that Sears won’t offer a similar one-click cremation in the future? If they do, they will surely think of a euphemism for cremation like “heat fragmentation procedure” to spare us the reality of the offer. Perhaps Ashley’s family members were death visionaries of the future, not the thoughtless people I made them out to be.

The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks. But Joe, Westwind’s owner, thought Bayside Cremation was the future of low-cost death care. It wouldn’t be the first time California had witnessed the future of death.