Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Eventually. When Bruce comes in this afternoon to embalm him. There’s a service tomorrow, so he’ll soak them in embalming sludge and stick them back in,” he explained.

After hoisting Juan onto the table with a theatrical heave, Mike brought out a tape measure. “The family bought a casket, too. I’m going to measure him. I hope he fits because I really don’t want to call this family back and tell them they need the oversized casket. Maybe I’ll make you do it,” Mike said, smiling at the thought.

The World Health Organization (along with any of the forty-five extreme-weight-loss television programs) tells us that the United States has more overweight adults than any other country in the world. It’s no surprise that the market for oversized caskets is booming.

The website for Goliath Casket, Inc. features this charming origin story:


Back in the 70’s and 80’s oversize caskets were hard to get and poorly made. In 1985, Keith’s father, Forrest Davis (Pee Wee), quit his job as a welder in a casket factory and said, “Boys, I’m gonna go home and build oversize caskets that you would be proud to put your mother in.” . . . The company started in an old converted hog barn on their farm, by offering just two sizes and one color.


We could have used Pee Wee’s ingenuity, because there was no way Juan was going to fit into a regular-sized casket. The man, bless his departed soul, was almost as wide as he was tall. “Go ahead, cross his arms, like he’s in the casket,” Mike instructed.

I stretched myself across Juan’s body to access both appendages. “No, cross them harder, harder, harder,” Mike insisted, extending the tape measure across his shoulders. By now I was fully spread out over the body. “Keep going, keep—there we are! Boom. He will totally fit.”

“Oh, c’mon, he will not!” I said.

“We’ll make him fit. The family is already paying more than they can afford for this service. I’m not going to tack on the extra $300 for an oversized casket if I can help it. Just telling them their son needs an oversized casket is hard enough.”

Later that day, as the Cremulator whirred through the backlog of bones, Bruce arrived to embalm Juan. After seeing him laid out, Bruce, always one for tact, yelled into the crematory: “Caitlin! Caitlin, this is a lot of Mexican. It’s gonna stink. Bigger people always stink.”

“Why does everyone keep calling him Mexican?” I yelled back over the rumble of the cremation machines.

Bruce was wrong about Juan’s country of origin, and surely he was also wrong about fat people stinking. Yet emanating from the preparation room was the most ferocious smell my nostrils e’er had smell’d. You would think such an odor would have repelled me, but for some reason it aroused a desire in me to find the pot of gold at the end of the olfactory rainbow.

I had seen Bruce embalm bodies, but I was in no way intellectually or emotionally prepared to see 450 pounds laid out before me. Autopsied bodies require the embalmer to cut open the stiches from the Y-shaped incision and, as Mike had said, to chemically treat the deceased’s internal organs from Santa Chris’s red hazmat bag. Bruce had just begun that portion of the preparation when I walked in.

To describe the scene as a “swampy mire” simply would not do it justice. It was more guts and blood and organs and fat I could ever have imagined a single human body containing. Bruce, who was pulling the organs out of the bag, launched into a narrative immediately: “I told you it would stink, Caitlin. Bigger people just decompose faster. That’s science, girl. It’s the fat; the bacteria love the fat. By the time they get here after going in for an autopsy, phew.”

To Bruce’s credit, this turned out to be true. His “bigger people always stink” comment wasn’t based on prejudice, it was a fact.

“All that stuff is bubblating in that body. I call it bubblating. At least this guy didn’t die in the tub. Tubs are the worst. The worst. You go to take a body out of the tub and the skin just pulls right off. The tissue gas bubbles up, all oily, and the smell.” Bruce whistled for dramatic effect. “Psychologically, you’ll be smelling that for the rest of the day, rest of your life sometimes.”

He kept on talking. “Look at this guy. Cocaine overdose? More likely he had a heart attack. Look at this,” Bruce said as he reached into Juan’s chest cavity, picked up his heart, and presented it to me. “Look at his heart! All this fat around it. You know he was sittin’ there with his friends at the bar eating a hamburger and doin’ his lines of coke. All this stuff”—he pulled his gloved hands apart to reveal the yellowed deposits—“this is why you can’t be fat!”

I must have looked insulted at this accusation, because he quickly added, “Naw, I don’t mean you specifically can’t be fat, girl, you got a good figure. But I know you must have fat friends. Tell your fat friends.”