Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Mitford was a writer and journalist born into a wildly eccentric family of English aristocrats. She had four famous sisters, one of whom was a Nazi and a “tremendous friend of Hitler.” Mitford influenced everyone from Christopher Hitchens to Maya Angelou. JK Rowling cited Mitford as her biggest influence as a writer.

In 1963, Mitford wrote a book called The American Way of Death, which was not at all kind to funeral directors. A card-carrying Communist, Mitford believed funeral directors were avaricious capitalists who had managed to “perpetrate a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.” The American Way of Death was a massive bestseller, staying at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. In response to her book, Mitford received thousands of letters from citizens who felt cheated by the death industry. She found unlikely allies in Christian clergy members, who thought the focus on the expensive funeral was “pagan.”

Mitford grudgingly admitted that Forest Lawn’s Hubert Eaton “probably had more influence on the trends of the modern cemetery industry than any other human being,” and thus, he was the funeral man she hated most.

To protest the evil wrought by Forest Lawn and their ilk, Mitford announced that when she died she would forego the expensive “traditional” funeral service and choose an inexpensive cremation instead. It is safe to say that 1963 was cremation’s year. The American Way of Death came out in 1963, as did Pope Paul VI’s overturning of the Catholic Church’s ban on cremation. These two factors turned the death trends of the entire country toward cremation. When The American Way of Death came out, the vast majority of Americans were opting for embalming followed by burial. Rates of cremation have risen steadily in the years following Mitford’s book, however. Sociologists believe 50 percent of Americans, if not the majority, will choose it within the coming decade.

When Mitford died in 1996, her husband made good on her request and sent her body for a direct cremation—$475.00 for a no-frills, straight cremation, with no funeral and no family present. Her ashes were placed in a disposable plastic urn. As Mitford saw it, a direct cremation was the clever, inexpensive way to go. The old-timers in the death industry—mostly men—called this type of direct cremation “bake ’n’ shake” or “direct disposal.” Mitford’s last request was one final dig at this group who hated everything she stood for.

Although she had grown up in England, Mitford’s second husband was an American and they had been living for years in Oakland, California. So where did she get this $475.00 direct cremation? Good ol’ Westwind Cremation & Burial. Chris picked up her body himself.

Working as the operator of the very cremation machine that had reduced Jessica Mitford to ash made me self-satisfied with my little place in death history. I knew that, like Mitford, I didn’t agree with the large, expensive traditional funerals of the past. I wasn’t sold on eternal preservation, either, despite Bruce’s open enthusiasm for the art of embalming. It was an admirable thing for Mitford to pull back the “formaldehyde curtain” of embalming and to reveal to the public that behind the scenes the average dead person was “in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”

She wasn’t afraid to use vivid details, to the point where her original publisher warned her that she made the book “harder to sell by going at too much length and in too gooey detail into the process of embalming.” To her credit, Mitford switched publishers and forged ahead.

But the longer I worked at Westwind, I found that I wasn’t entirely in agreement with Mitford, though it felt like a betrayal to question her. After all, she was the undisputed queen of the alternative funeral industry, a crusader with a love for the consumer. If embalming and expensive funerals were bad, then surely her call for simple, affordable funerals must be good?

Yet I found something disturbing about a death culture based on direct cremation alone. Although Westwind offered embalmings and burials, the driving source of business was direct cremation—corpse to ashes for less than a thousand dollars. Now Bayside Cremation and Internet servicing had emerged as Mitford’s greatest ally in the quest to cut out the funeral director.