Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

I understood the impulse for personalization. In fact, I had indulged that impulse when I came to Westwind with the na?ve idea of someday opening La Belle Mort, a funeral home for the one-of-a-kind, personalized death. But what we needed wasn’t more additions to the endless list of merchandise options. Not when we were missing rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions. Rituals that couldn’t be replaced with purchasing power.

Over the months I worked at Westwind, sacks of cremated remains had been piling up on the metal shelf above the tools. They were babies, adults, anatomical parts from Science Support, and the “extra” bits from the machines—a leftover mixture of just about everyone who passed through our doors. One afternoon, when there were enough sacks to make a trip worthwhile, we prepared the little gray warriors for their non-witnessed sea scattering. The bags of bones, decedents with names like Yuri Hirakawa and Glendora Jones and Timothy Rabinowitz, were stacked into crates, their little twist ties standing at stoic attention. Family members, next of kin, and Science Support paid our mortuary to take the ashes of their loved ones out onto San Francisco Bay and toss them to the winds.

The preparation took me a while. In California there are laws and procedures for scattering remains at sea. One has to check and then double-check each decedent, each Authorization for Disposition, each Westwind contract, comparing the little numbers on one form to the little numbers on another. At the end I had three full crates containing the indistinguishable remains of thirty-eight former adults, twelve former infants, and nine former anatomical specimens. I was the leader of my own danse macabre.

The crates were ready to be taken out on Westwind’s ash-scattering boat the next morning. I dropped the hint to Mike that I should be the one to go. I wanted to be the one who took these people all the way through, picking them up from where they fell to placing them into the fire to releasing them into the sea. Alas, Mike got that job. He had been looking forward to the early morning seaside adventure. Someone had to stay at Westwind, answer the phones, and burn the bodies. That someone was the crematory operator, the low woman on death’s totem pole: me.





EROS AND THANATOS





The house I grew up in, on Punalei Place, had a swimming pool where I spent countless hours as a child. During my teenage years, the pool’s cleaning pump broke and my childhood hangout gradually turned green, developed a thick layer of vegetation, and became a wildlife habitat for local frogs and ducks. The flora and fauna were pleased to find a fully developed bog in the midst of a normal suburban street.

I’m sure our neighbors were not impressed with the conservation efforts happening over at the ol’ Doughty estate. The bog frogs croaked at impossible volumes throughout the night and it was no secret that the Kitasakis, our neighbors across the street, loathed the pair of mallards that occasionally waddled from our pool over to their lawn to defecate. When both ducks turned up dead lying side by side in the street (fed rat poison—my unconfirmed theory), I took their postmortem portraits and put a silent hex on the Kitasaki family. They moved out the next year, likely driven mad by their sin and the quality of my hex.

When my parents finally repaired the pool almost fifteen years later, the men who drained it found a thin layer of bones at the bottom: bird, toad, mouse. None of the bones were human, though, meaning my father won a bet. I thought the odds were good we’d find at least two or three of our former neighbors.

In the early days, when our pool still looked like any other pool, the game of choice for the gang of seven-year-old neighborhood girls was based on The Little Mermaid. The Disney film had come out in 1989 and it was our everything. No self-respecting game of make believe could start without strict parameters. “I’m a mermaid with a shiny purple bra, long green hair, and a pink tail with sparkles. My best friend is a singing octopus,” one of us would announce. If you called dibs on green hair and a pink tail, no one else had better try a similar color scheme or soon they’d be ostracized from the group and end up crying behind the banana plant.

The entire Disney oeuvre, The Little Mermaid in particular, gave me a hopelessly warped understanding of love. For those of you who have not seen it, allow me to sum up the plot (which differs considerably from the Hans Christian Andersen version—more on that later): Ariel is a beautiful young mermaid with an even more beautiful voice. She is obsessed with becoming a human due to her profound love for Prince Eric (a human she has only seen once) and for the detritus of human civilization (which she collects in her underwater hoarder cave). An evil hag sea witch tells Ariel she can transform her into a human if she gives up her voice and goes silent. Ariel agrees to the bargain and the sea witch splits her mermaid tail into two human legs. Fortunately, even without her voice Prince Eric still falls for Ariel because she’s cute, and cute women don’t need voices. The evil sea witch tries to keep them apart, but love prevails and Ariel marries the prince and becomes a permanent human. The end.