Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

On the cover of my copy of the 1998 reissue of The American Way of Death, Mitford sits in the hallway of an above ground mausoleum. She wears a sensible suit, carries a sensible bag, and bears a sensible, no nonsense expression. She is the middle-aged version of the stern woman featured on the television show Supernanny, where “Nanny” has been imported from England to straighten out a brood of unruly American children who scream things like “But Nanny, bacon is a vegetable!”


Mitford’s Englishness was front and center in her writing. She was proud of the traditions of her birthplace, traditions that in modern times meant precious little interaction with the body at the time of death. She quotes a fellow Englishwoman living in San Francisco who had attended an American wake where the body was viewed: “It shook me rigid to get there and find the casket open and poor old Oscar lying there in his brown tweed suit, wearing a suntan makeup and just the wrong shade of lipstick. If I had not been extremely fond of the old boy, I have a horrible feeling that I might have giggled. Then and there I decided that I could never face another American funeral— even dead.”

Viewing the embalmed body evolved as the cultural norm in the United States and Canada, but the Brits (at least among Mitford’s fellow upperclassmen) chose a complete absence of the corpse. It is difficult to say which custom is worse.

Geoffrey Gorer, the British anthropologist, compared modern death in Britain to a kind of pornography. Where sex and sexuality were the cultural taboo of the Victorian period, death and dying were the taboo of the modern world. “Our great-grandparents were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes or cabbages; our children are likely to be told that those who have passed on . . . are changed into flowers, or lie at rest in lovely gardens.”

Gorer argued that the “natural deaths” of disease and old age were replaced in the twentieth century by “violent deaths”—wars, concentration camps, car accidents, nuclear weapons. If the American optimism led to a prettying-up of the corpse with makeup and chemicals, British pessimism led to the removal of the corpse and the death ritual from polite society.

In Mitford’s foreword to The American Way of Death, two things struck me. First was her statement that the book wouldn’t go into the “quaint death customs still practiced by certain Indian tribes.” Customs that, incidentally, were far from quaint. Native Americans had intensely rich death rituals including the Dakota Sioux’s method of building six-to-eight-foot-tall wooden platforms and depositing the body for exposure to the elements in an elaborate mourning ceremony. Second was Mitford’s firm dismissal that the American public might be partially to blame for the way things had become in the funeral industry. She states confidently: “I am unwilling on the basis of present evidence to find the public guilty.”

Unlike Mitford, I was willing to find the public guilty. Very willing, in fact.

Arranging a funeral at Westwind, the daughter of a deceased woman looked me deeply in the eyes and said, “This planning is so difficult, only because Mother’s death was so unexpected. You have to understand, she had only been on hospice for six months.”

This woman’s mother had been on hospice (end-of-life care) for six months. That’s 180 days of your mother actively dying in your home. You knew she was ill long before she went into hospice care. Why did you not look up the best funeral homes in the area, compare prices, ask friends and family, figure out what’s legal, or most important, talk to your mother about what she herself wanted when she died? Your mother was dying and you damn well knew it. Refusing to talk about it and then calling it “unexpected” is not an acceptable excuse.

When a young person dies unexpectedly, the family will likely face what Mitford called the “necessity of buying a product of which they are totally ignorant.” The sudden death of a young person is a horrible tragedy. In their sorrow, the family should not have to worry that a funeral home will take advantage and upsell them to a more expensive casket or funeral-service package. But anyone who works in the death industry can readily tell you that a slim minority of cases involves the sudden death of a young person. Most deaths come after long, significant diseases or very lengthy lives.

If I showed up at a used-car lot and the salesman said, “It’s $45,000 for this 1996 Hyundai” (market value $4,200) and I bought it, the situation would be my fault. I could shake my fist all I wanted at the con artist who sold me the $45,000 Hyundai, but everyone would agree that I had been taken advantage of because I did not do my research.