Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

There was a huge gap between what the Ionescu family expected and what the Ionescu family would actually get if we rolled Elena directly out of the refrigeration unit to visit with her waiting family. That gap of expectation has become a problem for funeral homes, under constant threat of being sued by families when a body doesn’t look how they expect it to look. It is challenging, of course, to feel sorry for the funeral industry, as the rise of embalming was what created this gap in the first place.

Untreated, a dead person’s face looks horrific, at least by our very narrow cultural expectations. Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The color drains from their faces. These images reflect the normal biological processes of death, but they are not what a family wants to see. As part of their price lists, funeral homes generally charge anywhere from $175 to $500 for “setting the features.” That is how corpses come to look “peaceful,” “natural,” and “at rest.”

The cruel fact was that Elena Ionescu, a ninety-year-old Romanian woman, had been in the hospital for over two months prior to her death. The combination of being bedridden for eight weeks and hooked up to IV drips and machines had caused Elena’s body to slide into full-blown edema, a postmortem condition in which fluid swells beneath the skin. She was puffed up like the Michelin man, edema having taken over the lower parts of her legs, arms, and back. Her skin leaked fluid. What’s worse, the overwhelming moisture from the edema had expedited decomposition.

Where decomposition has begun and excess fluid abounds, the dreaded “skin slip” becomes a real possibility. Its technical name is desquamation, but in practice it is called skin slip, a phrase that can be given credit for calling it like ya see it. The decomposition process had caused gas and pressure to build up inside Elena, her skin to loosen, and the top layer of skin to slip away, like it wanted to abandon ship. If this situation happened to a living person, the skin would eventually regrow and regenerate. For Elena, this was it: until cremation her skin would remain fresh, pink, and covered in a thin layer of slime.

It was safe to say that Elena’s body would not look like her irate daughter imagined it would. Yet Westwind Cremation & Burial had absolutely no right to keep Elena Ionescu locked in our refrigeration unit. Corpses, by law, are quasi-property. Elena’s family owned her dead body until burial or cremation. Which leads us to another popular reason to sue funeral homes—lawsuits arise after some scorned funeral director illegally holds a dead body as corpse collateral until the family can pay.

If Elena’s daughter said, “Hand her over this instant, I’m putting Mother in the backseat of my car and driving away from this Godless place,” I would have done it, no questions asked. There were days when I might have applauded such a decision.

“Ms. Ionescu, I’m sorry. You’re absolutely welcome to go elsewhere, I encourage you to call around. But I think that you will find the hundred-and seventy-five-dollar charge to be the case wherever you go in the area,” I said, making one last pitch.

“I guess we don’t have a choice, do we?” she replied, her rings clanking together as she signed her name at the bottom of the contract.

Two hours later, Elena Ionescu was laid out before me on the preparation-room table, about to be made “natural” for her viewing the next day. It is a not-so-well-kept funeral industry secret that the processes used to make someone appear natural are often highly unnatural.

I stood in front of the same metal cabinet where several months prior Mike had presented me with my first corpse-shaving razor. I pulled out two “eye caps,” which looked like small plastic spaceships, rounded and flesh-colored. The tiny spikes sticking up from the plastic made it look like a miniature Inquisition-era torture device. The purpose of the eye caps was twofold: first, by placing a cap under Elena’s eyelid, her eyes would appear rounded, masking the sunken, flattened eyeballs hiding below; second, the torture spikes served the important function of catching the back of the eyelids, preventing them from floating up into a postmortem wink.

With Q-tips and cotton I cleaned out Elena’s nose, ears, and mouth—a deeply unpleasant task. In the last throes of life, basic hygiene is often ignored. This is reasonable, but reason does not make the aftermath any less abhorrent. In moving the corpse, there is always a chance there may be a sudden burst of “purge”—a frothy, reddish-brown liquid expunged from the lungs and stomach. I did not envy nurses, whose living patients produced these disagreeable fluids every day.