Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Hearing these fears took me back to being eight years old and believing spitting into my shirt was keeping my mother alive. I began to experiment with complete honesty. Everyone who asked these sorts of questions got brutally clear answers. If they asked about how the bones became ash, I’d say, “Well, there’s this machine called the Cremulator . . .” If they asked whether their body would rot before cremation, I’d say, “See, the bacteria start eating you from the inside out as soon as you die, but body refrigeration really puts a stop to that.” The strange thing was, the more honest I was, the more satisfied and grateful people were.

Holding a witness cremation—though it gave me palpitations—solved many of these problems. People saw what was actually happening—saw the body, saw it glide into the cremation retort alone, even symbolically took part in the process by pushing the button to start the flames. The retort may have been a huge machine opening its mouth to eat your dead mother, but pushing the button offered a participatory ritual nonetheless.

I felt a growing compulsion to do more, to change how the public understood death and the death industry. There was an admirable group of women in the Bay Area working toward this change, who performed funerals at the dead person’s home, referring to themselves as Death Midwives or Death Doulas. They had not been trained or licensed by the funeral industry but saw themselves as New Agey vestiges of a time past, when the body was taken care of by the family.

Prior to the Civil War, as previously mentioned, death and dying were strongly associated with the home. “Home is where the corpse is,” they would say. (They didn’t say that, I made it up, but they might as well have said it.) Since corpses were a domestic affair, the duty to care for them fell to women. Women baked the meat pies, did the laundry, washed the corpses.

In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but also a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.” Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.

If the matriarch of your family didn’t want to wash and shroud the body herself, the family could hire “layers-out of the dead.” In the early nineteenth century it was mostly women who had this job, a tradition brought over to the American colonies from England, where it had long been the accepted practice. There were midwives for babies and layers-out for corpses; women to bring you into the world and women to take you out of it.

Most of Westwind’s clients didn’t realize the dead body was theirs to take care of as they wished. They didn’t have to hand Dad over to a funeral home, or even hire a death midwife. That body, for better or worse, belonged to them. Not only was caring for your own dead legal in California, dead bodies are far from the nefarious creatures the modern death industry has made them out to be. In Muslim communities, it is considered a “meritorious deed” to wash and shroud the dead in a ritual washing known as Ghusl. The person who performs the Ghusl is chosen by the dying man or woman themselves. Men are washed by men and women are washed by women. Selection is an honor and a sacred obligation to fulfill.

In centuries past, before society fully understood bacteria and germs, outbreaks of disease, from cholera to the Black Death, were believed to originate from “bad air” floating like a mist off corpses. Larger cities took to burying their dead far outside city limits. While it’s true that bodies create offensive sights and smells, a dead human body poses very little threat to a living one—the bacteria involved in decomposition are not the same bacteria that cause disease.

A few weeks before my encounter with tattooed Jeremy and his sister, Westwind received a visit from Miss Nakazawa, a young woman whose mother had died at home. She wanted to keep her mother’s body in the house for a few more hours after she died to say her good-byes, but she said, “The police detective told me I had to call you guys right away because she had diabetes and keeping the body any longer might harm my family.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, he told you what?” I replied, my jaw on the floor.

“He told me we had to have a mortuary come pick her up right away or the body will make us sick.”

To recap: a police detective thought this family was going to be harmed by diabetes caught from a dead body. He might as well have told her she was going to get AIDS from a toilet seat. Putting aside the misguided idea that someone can “catch” diabetes from another person, much less a corpse, most viruses and bacteria, even those that could potentially cause disease, only live for a few additional hours in a dead body. The rare virus that survives longer (for example, HIV, up to sixteen days) poses no more harm in a dead body than in a living body. It’s more dangerous to your health to fly on an airplane than it is to be in the same room as a corpse.