Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

I expected this is how my love life would proceed, minus the evil sea witch and the wise but sarcastic musical crab. My teen years disabused me of this notion.

As a teenager with morbid proclivities, my only real social outlets in Hawai’i were the gothic and S&M fetish clubs with names like “Flesh” and “The Dungeon” that took place on Saturday nights in warehouses down by the airport. My friends and I, all uniform-wearing private-school girls by day, would tell our parents we were having a sleepover and instead change into black vinyl ball gowns we ordered off the Internet. Then we’d go to the clubs and get tied to iron crosses and publicly flogged amid puffing fog machines. After the clubs closed at two a.m. we’d go into a twenty-four-hour diner called Zippy’s, invariably get called “witches” by some confused late-night patrons, wash off our makeup in the bathroom, and sleep for a few hours in my parents’ car. Since I was also on my school’s competitive outrigger canoe paddling team, the next morning I would have to peel off the vinyl ball gown and paddle in the open ocean for two hours as dolphins leapt majestically next to our boat. Hawai’i is an interesting place to grow up.

As an American (well, American-ish) child in the late twentieth century, I had no idea that the stories from my beloved Disney movies were pilfered from brutal, macabre European fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Fairy tales that didn’t end with the familiar “and they lived happily ever after,” but with conclusions like this, from “The Goose-Girl” by the Brothers Grimm: “she deserves no better fate than to be stripped entirely naked, and put in a barrel which is studded inside with pointed nails. . . two white horses should be harnessed to it, which will drag her along through one street after another, till she is dead.”

The plot of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1836 story “The Little Mermaid” is, in fact, entirely devoid of tuneful sea animals. In Andersen’s story, the young mermaid falls in love with a prince and goes to the sea witch for help. (So far we’re on track with the Disney version.) The mermaid is given human legs, but each step is made to feel like sharp knives slicing into her feet. The sea witch, requiring payment for these services, “cut off the mermaid’s tongue, so that she became dumb, and would never again speak or sing.” The bargain is that if our mermaid cannot convince the prince to love her, she will die, turning to sea foam on the water and losing her chance to have an immortal soul. Luckily, the prince does appear enamored with her, “and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion.” Because nothing says love like being allowed to sleep in a man’s doorway on a dog bed.

The prince, not sold on the silent woman who sleeps outside his door, marries a princess from another kingdom. Having failed to win the love of her human prince, the mermaid knows she will die the morning after the wedding. At the last minute her sisters swoop in and cut off all their hair, trading it to the sea witch for a knife. They give it to her, telling her, “Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart of the prince; when the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again, and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid.” The mermaid can’t bring herself to slaughter her beloved prince, so she leaps over the side of the boat to her death. The End. Try selling that one as an animated children’s film.

This is the version of the story I wish had informed my childhood. Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. Children of the Disney princess era grew up with a whitewashed version of reality filled with animal sidekicks and unrealistic expectations. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

Disintegration and death have never been the most popular endings with the general public. It’s far easier to swallow a good old-fashioned love story. So it is with great trepidation that I tell you my own love story, the one that started the day I walked in on Bruce preparing an autopsied body.

“Hey Bruce, did you get the clothes the family brought in for Mrs. Gutierrez yesterday?” I asked.

“Oh man, did you see that underwear?” He sighed. “Now, family, your grandma isn’t Bettie Page. Don’t bring in a G-string.”

“Why would they do that? That’s seriously bizarre.”

“People do that shit all the time. The g in G-string does not stand for ‘grandma,’ c’mon.”