Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

The week before I left, Chris’s clunker of a white van was in the shop. I made the mistake of referring to his much-loved van as such. “Clunker? Young lady, don’t insult her integrity. She’s been with me for twenty years,” he said. “She’s my Great White Whale, the beast that drags down careless men.”


I dropped Chris off at his parents’ home. The house was high up in the Berkeley Hills, where his family has lived since the 1950s. “Cat, I want to show you something,” he said, leading me to the base of a tree in the center of the front yard. It was a coastal redwood, maybe fifty feet tall and twenty feet around.

“My mother died when I was really young, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. After my mom died, Grandma gave me one of these leaves and told me that if I planted it in the ground a tree would grow from it. It sounded ridiculous, but I planted the leaf in a Maxwell House coffee container and gave it three cups of water every morning. And here she is,” he said, lovingly patting the base of the tree. “This is my tree. If you ask me what my greatest accomplishment in this world is—well, here you have it.”

He continued: “Of course, it’s so big now that the roots are starting to push into the neighbor’s driveway. Any day now she’s going to call the city and have them come tear out everything that’s on her property and the whole tree will die. Rot and collapse. I have nightmares about that.”

So much for sentimentality.

To my surprise, the staff at Westwind held a party in honor of my departure. Everyone was there. Chris, who didn’t much care for parties, left early, but not before giving me a plastic party bag covered in pastel balloons. The only thing inside was a dried up coconut.

“It’s . . . a coconut? Thanks, Chris.”

“In 1974, when I was living in Hawai’i, my friend threw that coconut into the backseat of my orange Pinto. He said, ‘That’s an important coconut. Keep it, and take it with you wherever you go.’ So I did. And now I’m giving it to you.”

Leave it to Chris to imbue a thirty-five-year-old coconut in a party bag with profundity. I was touched. I gave him an awkward hug.

“Bye, Cat,” he said, and walked out.

Later that evening, when I was about two and a half sheets to the wind, Mike and Bruce got me into a conversation about work. (None of us really had much to talk about apart from work.) But this wasn’t the usual chitchat about the asshole who worked at a competing crematory or the difficult case last week, it was about the existential stuff, the stuff I had wanted to talk about for so long.

Bruce told the story of an arrangement he had made with a pregnant woman ten years prior. She had told him the arrangement was for her baby. “When she came in I said to her, ‘That’s a shame about your baby, but you’re lucky you’re pregnant, and gonna have another child.’ But the baby she was making arrangements for was the baby in her stomach. It had died and they couldn’t take it out yet. That baby was eight months old. That tripped me out. She’s sitting in front of me with a dead baby in her. That was messed up. All these years I remember that. To this day, man. That’s why there’s so many alcoholics and drug addicts in the mortuary business, so you can forget about what’s going on.”

Mike leaned his head against the wall, not looking at me directly. Then, sincerely, as if he really wanted an answer, he asked, “Aren’t there times when the sadness gets to you?”

“Well, I—”

“When the family is so sad and lost, and you can’t do anything to help them?”

I thought I saw tears in his eyes. It was dark. I can’t be sure. Mike was human after all—another soul coping with the strange, hidden world of death, trying to do his job and figure out what it all meant.

As desperate as I had been for someone to talk to about these very things, in the moment all I could do was mumble, “I guess so. It is what it is, right?”

“Sure it is. Good luck in L.A.,” he said.

And with that, my career at Westwind Cremation & Burial came to an end.





THE REDWOODS





The last night I spent on Rondel Place, our landlord—the gay Catholic Filipino vegetarian activist (and collector of angel figurines) who lived in the apartment above us—called the cops on two gentlemen who had stumbled out of Esta Noche in the wee hours of the morning. After urinating on the walls they came to sit on our stoop to smoke and grope each other while whispering fervent Spanish nothings.

Their whispers turned to screams,“?Por qué no me amas?” which turned to vicious blows. The law had to intervene.