Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Miss Nakazawa had contacted another funeral home before Westwind, but was told her mother absolutely had to be embalmed if the family wanted to see her again. “We don’t want Mom embalmed,” she said. “She was a Buddhist and didn’t want that, but the funeral director told me we had to embalm the body for health reasons.”


Great. So two “professionals” in one day told this woman that her dead mother was a ticking time bomb of highly hazardous deadness that was going to infect her whole family. Embalmers embalm because they think it makes the corpse look better, because they’ve been told it’s what’s “right” and “decent,” and because it makes it easier to control the viewing. Also, they get paid for it. Not because the microorganisms present in an un-embalmed body pose any threat to a family. Now that we have a sophisticated understanding of germ theory and the science of death, police detectives and funeral professionals have no excuse for saying that proximity to the dead will harm the living.

Because of superstition, unquestioned even among those who should know better, this woman wasn’t given the opportunity to sit with her mother until, as a friend of mine put it, her grieving “felt . . . done, somehow.” She missed her chance for closure. A corpse doesn’t need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn’t need anything anymore—it’s more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom.

When a death occurs on the Indonesian island of Java, the whole town is obligated to attend the funeral. The body is stripped of clothing, the jaw closed with a cloth tied around the head, and the arms crossed over the chest. Close relatives of the deceased wash the body, holding the corpse on their laps, positioned so the living are soaked in the water as well. The idea of cradling the dead this way, according to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “is called being tegel—able to do something odious, abominable, and horrible without flinching, to stick it out despite an inward fear and revulsion.” The mourners perform this ritual to become iklas, detached from the pain. Embracing and washing the corpse allows them to face their discomfort head-on, and moving to a place where “their hearts are already free.”

Even if she didn’t realize it, this is the type of closure Jeremy’s sister wanted as well. After she left Westwind, at last convinced Jeremy’s body hadn’t been cremated on the sly, I stood over him in the prep room. I read the story his tattoos told and forced out of my head the uneasy voice that had narrated my rookie months at Westwind, suggesting that perhaps his hand would rise up and seize mine, keeping me forever on edge. Nor did I worry that I was somehow going to mishandle or break his body. I thought instead of what his tattoos meant, and about how some people would look at this man and judge him as dirty, a criminal.

He had been a criminal, but he was also beautiful. I wasn’t there to judge, only to make him clean and dress him in his powder-blue polyester suit with the ruffled tuxedo shirt. Holding up his arm to wash it, I paused: I was comfortable. I wanted other people to know that they could do this too. The washing, the comfort. This confident, stable feeling was available to anyone, if society could overcome the burden of superstition.

Ten months into my job at Westwind, I knew death was the life for me. I wanted to teach people to take care of their own dead like our ancestors used to. Washing the corpse themselves. Taking firm control of their fear. Several options presented themselves. The first was to pack my bags and steal away in the night, leaving the crematory to join the death midwives. This would mean abandoning the funeral industry and the security and legitimacy (deserved or not) it provided. I didn’t mind leaving behind the commercialism and up-selling parts of the industry. The problem was, as a general rule, the midwives were far more, shall we say, spiritual than I was. I had no moral objection to sacred oils, incense, and death chakras, but as much as I respected these women, I did not want to pretend death was a “transition” when I really thought of it as, well, a death. Done. Finito. Secular to a fault.

My second option was to attend mortuary school, but that meant going even deeper into the industry and all its ghastly practices.

“You know you don’t need to go to mortuary school, Caitlin,” Mike told me. “Why would you put yourself through that?”