Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Without her dentures, which had been left soaking in a glass by her hospital bed, Elena’s lips had rolled in on empty gums. To counteract this, we used a mouth former, a curved piece of plastic that looked like a larger (mouth-shaped) eye cap. I gently lifted her upper lip to insert the mouth former, but the device was far too big for an elderly woman. It made her look like an ape, or a football lineman wearing a mouth guard. Appalled, I quickly removed it and trimmed it down with a heavy pair of scissors.

Next came the needle injector. The needle injector was a mouth-closing gun, a metal device used to shoot wires into the decedent’s gums so they could be tied together to hold the mouth shut. I began by choosing a sharp pin with a long wire attached to the end, like a tiny metal tadpole. It was placed into the tip of a large metal needle, which shot the barb into the top and bottom gums. Our injector at Westwind was of somewhat shoddy quality, a bit rusty. It didn’t inject with the level of oomph one would desire. This meant I had to climb on top of Elena and use my whole body weight to inject the wires with a mighty “Hoo-AH!”

At ninety years old, Elena was lacking in the gums department, necessitating several tries to get the barbs to stay put. Once the barbs were lodged in place, the two wire tadpole tails were twisted together through the plastic of the mouth former, bringing the upper and lower jaw together.

If all these tricks failed and the eyes or mouth still insisted on falling open, there was always the secret weapon: superglue. We used those little green tubes of liquid magic for everything. Even if, by some miracle, the eye caps and needle injector worked as intended, it was wise to reinforce. Milky blue eyes and exposed gums were not what the family wanted, but they were less terrifying than catching an unwanted glimpse of the flesh-toned spiked plastic or the thick tadpole wires that now held their loved one’s face intact.

Once the Ionescu family had resigned themselves to paying the “one last time” charge, they came back to Westwind with a set of clothes so we could dress Elena for her visitation. Not only had Elena’s edema swelled her to twice her normal size, her family—like many families—had brought in clothes from her fashionable, svelte past. There is a reason why the newspaper obituary pages are littered with glamour shots, wedding pictures, and portraits from long-ago debutante balls. We want people to remain forever in their prime like a beautiful rosy-cheeked Kate Winslet meeting Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic heaven decades after the ship had sunk.

Mike had to help me squeeze Elena into her opulent, Glasnost-era eastern European dress. He had a bag of helpful tricks, e.g., saran-wrapping her arms like a 1950s B-picture mummy. But the odyssey was not yet complete. As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year-old deceased Romanian woman with edema, your answer should be no.

“Mike,” I said with a sigh, “we know her lower half is going to be covered with the sheets during the visitation. I hate to say it, but we could probably forego the stockings.”

Mike, to his credit as a professional, wasn’t having it. “Nope, the family paid for the dressing and viewing, man. We can get these on.”

As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of “dignity.” Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening’s performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion.

Service Corporation International, the largest American funeral home and cemetery corporation, based in Houston, Texas, has even managed to trademark dignity. Go to any of their “Dignity Memorial?” facilities, and that pesky ? shows up every time, subtly letting you know they’ve cornered the market on postmortem poise.