Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Bruce gestured at the young man who lay on the table in front of him. “This is the guy that Chris picked up at the coroner’s today. Overdose or something.”


That was when I noticed that the man who lay on the table did not have a face. He hadn’t been decapitated, he just did not have a face. The skin from the crown of his head to the bottom of his chin had been pulled down like a Fruit Roll-Up, revealing the vessels and muscles underneath.

“Bruce, why is he like this? What is going on?” I asked, expecting he would lecture me on some kind of flesh-eating, face-rolling disease.

As it turns out, peeling down the face like the lid of a sardine can is quite common. When a medical examiner performs an autopsy, he or she will often remove the brain. An incision is made at the scalp line, and the skin is pulled down so the examiner can open the skull with an oscillating saw. The scalping technique is surprisingly similar to that of the ancient Scythian warriors, who would bring the heads of their enemies to the king to prove their victory before removing the scalp. A good warrior (or medical examiner) might have a whole collection of scalps on his belt.

After removing the brain, the examiner sets the skull cap back on the dead man or woman’s head slightly askance, like a jaunty newsboy cap, and rolls the face back into place. It is the job of the funeral home to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Bruce was having a difficult time of it that day.

“Look, Caitlin, I tell the family I’m a mortician, not a magician. You understand?” he grumbled, trotting out his favorite joke.

Bruce was trying valiantly to make the skull fit in place, cutting strips off a towel to prop up the man’s forehead. He was frustrated because the supply closet in the Westwind preparation room was never stocked with the proper forehead-repair materials.

“Well, what do you need, Bruce?” I inquired.

“Some peanut butter.”

He didn’t need actual peanut butter. What he needed was a type of restorative putty that the old-timers in the funeral industry call peanut butter. I didn’t understand this distinction and spent the next several weeks telling anyone who would listen that morticians spread peanut butter inside our heads as a postmortem beauty remedy. Choosy embalmers choose Jif.

The removal of the young man’s face revealed the wide, menacing smile of his skull. It was unnerving to think this same deranged grin lurks just beneath the flesh of everyone’s face, the frowning, the crying, even the dying. The skull seemed to know that Bruce didn’t need peanut butter, like, you know, peanut butter peanut butter. It watched my face screw up in confusion and laughed at my ignorance.

Bruce gently rolled the skin up like a Halloween mask. Voilà, there he was. My stomach dropped down to somewhere below my knees. With the face set back in place I recognized him. The body belonged to Luke, one of my closest friends, his thick brown hair matted with blood.

The day I found out I had gotten the job at Westwind, Luke, who had never thought my relationship with death was strange, was the first person I told. In his presence I was safe to share my apprehensions about death and life. Our conversations slid easily from the bigger existential questions to slapstick jokes from the British comedies we streamed (ahem, illegally) online. Luke was hysterical, but he was also a listener, a man versed in the art of a well-placed question. Most important, as the months at Westwind wore on and everything I knew about death changed, he understood my doubts and all-too-frequent failures, and never judged me for them.

After an excruciating moment I realized it wasn’t really him. “Peanut butter” wasn’t really peanut butter and this deceased drug addict wasn’t really Luke, who lived hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles. But this man looked shockingly like him, and once seen, the image could not be unseen.

After Bruce had embalmed this pseudo-Luke and gone home for the day, Mike asked me to clean up the body. He lay in the prep room under a white sheet, all sewn back together like a patchwork quilt. I pulled back the sheet to reveal the body and used a warm cloth to wipe the blood from his hair and eyelashes and the backs of his delicate hands. The real Luke was not dead, but now I understood he could die, and I would regret it deeply if my beloved friend died without knowing how vital he was to me.