Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or community to confirm our meaning in the world, so we seize a love partner instead, someone to distract us from the fact of our animal existence. French existentialist Albert Camus said it best: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”


On the day I saw Faux Luke in the crematory I was alone, having moved to San Francisco not knowing a soul. The morning of my twenty-fourth birthday I walked to my car and found a single flower tucked under the windshield wiper. I experienced a moment of euphoria, thinking that someone had remembered. This was followed by a deep sadness when I realized it wasn’t possible; there was no one in San Francisco who would have known. Perhaps the wind had brought it there.

After I came home from work that night I bought a pizza and ate it alone. My mother called to wish me happy birthday.

The only other people I saw regularly, other than Mike, Chris, and Bruce, were a group of teenagers. In addition to my nine to five at the funeral home, I moonlit as an English and history tutor for wealthy high-schoolers in Marin County (recently described by the New York Times as being “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth”). My students were innocent kids with manicured lawns and well-meaning helicopter parents who performed backflips to avoid hearing the details of my day job. Often I would go straight from the Westwind in Oakland across the San Rafael Bridge to various mansions overlooking the Bay. It was the only way I could live off my body-burning salary while living in San Francisco.

It was a double life I lived, shuttling between the worlds of the living and the dead. The transition was so abrupt that some days I wondered if they could see it in my eyes. “Good afternoon, here I am in your multimillion-dollar home covered in people dust and smelling vaguely of rot. Please pay me a large sum of money to mold the impressionable mind of your teenager.” If the parents noticed the dust covering my body, they were kind enough not to mention it. People! It’s made of people.

When you know that death is coming for you, the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love. I decided the moment I saw his doppelg?nger lying on the table that what I felt for Luke was love. My feelings were strong, more intense than I had ever experienced. The heavens struck me with their clichéd bolt of lightning. Luke became my ideal, and I desperately hoped he would bring me security and relief from the emotions that had assaulted me over the past months. If I could be with him, I wouldn’t die alone; someone would plan my funeral and hold my hand and wipe the bloody purge from my dying mouth. I wouldn’t be like Yvette Vickers, the B-movie actress and star of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, who was found completely mummified in her Los Angeles home more than a year after her death. She had been a recluse while alive; no one had bothered to check on her. Instead of worrying that my own cat would end up eating my dead body to survive, I projected my loneliness onto Luke.

I was still thinking about Luke when I cremated Maureen. She was in her mid-fifties, diagnosed with a lightning-fast cancer and dead in a little over a year. Maureen left behind a husband, Matthew. By all rights, Matthew should have been the first to go. He was wheelchair-bound and unable to leave his home; Chris had to drive to his apartment to make the arrangements for Maureen’s cremation. Written on the wall calendar in big, tragic letters was “September 17th: Maureen Dies.”

I was the one who delivered Maureen’s cremated remains to Matthew’s apartment. He wheeled himself down to the lobby, a man with long graying hair and a small, strange voice. As I handed him Maureen’s ashes he didn’t move, or even look up. He just thanked me in his thin voice, and cradled the brown box in his lap like a child.



FAST-FORWARD TO MONDAY MORNING, and who turns up in our fridge at the crematory but Matthew. Dead. Given up. His sister came by the mortuary with a small bag of personal items that Matthew had wanted to be cremated with.