Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Early the next morning, after my night of live-action telenovela, I drove away from Rondel Place in a rented U-Haul truck, carrying all my worldly possessions. Together with my cat and my python, our motley crew made the six-hour journey south from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Luke had asked me to stay at his place while I searched for an apartment. It was painful to even be in his presence, so overwhelming was my desire to divulge the way I felt about him. Afraid that these feelings would upset the delicate balance of our relationship, I declined his offer and quickly settled in Koreatown. Several people had warned me that Koreatown was a “bad neighborhood,” but after living on Rondel Place, it seemed like heaven. I could walk down the street without once encountering a naked man defecating behind my car or a woman in a full intergalactic space-clown costume smoking a crack pipe. There may have been some light drug deals and gang violence on Catalina Street, but in comparison to Rondel Place it was a verdant oasis.

In Los Angeles, I plunged headlong into research on death and culture—not only how it affected our behavior but why. Death practice was a calling, and I followed it with an earnestness that my cynical nature would have never allowed before. Having a purpose was nothing short of exhilarating.

But for every bit of exhilaration, my emotions would also swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. I believed so intensely in the importance of death ritual that I worried it might come across as morbid or pathological. Worse still was the fear of isolation—I was a leader in the cult of the corpse, but so far there was no one else at the temple. A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

But I did have Luke. He represented the comfortable place where I could escape the bonds of death and crawl into the blissful distraction of love. Or so I thought.

I finally lived in the same city as Luke, but I still couldn’t speak the words to him directly—they were too loaded. When I could stand it no longer, I wrote him a letter telling him how much I needed him, how his support was the only thing keeping me together in a world where it was all too easy to hand yourself over to despair. The letter was equal parts sappy and nihilistic. Fitting, I thought, as Luke and I were both equal parts sappy and nihilistic. I left it for him in his mailbox in the middle of the night. I felt sure that he was expecting this, and that his response would be as ardent as my declaration.

And then—silence.

After several days, I received a single-line e-mail from Luke:


Don’t ask me for this. I can’t see you again.


Somewhere in the world, Luke was technically alive. But the relationship I knew, the friendship I cherished, crumbled to dust before my eyes. It was a type of death, and the pain was acute. It didn’t take long for my mind to start up the old standby, my running inner monologue. Some sections were similar to the voice of my childhood: People out there are starving, dying for real. This one guy doesn’t want you, well boo-de-hoo, dumb bitch. And new material was added to the script: You thought you could escape, didn’t you? Well, you can’t. You belong to death now, and no one can love someone like that. Everything smells of corpses here.



MY JOB AT WESTWIND lasted until the end of November, and mortuary school didn’t begin until January; in between, I felt aimless. I drove up to the far north of California to hike through the giant redwood trees, intending to get my mind off of what had happened with Luke. I wrote my friends (and my mother) a lighthearted e-mail detailing what I wanted done with my body (and my cat) were I to perish on the winding mountain roads.

I checked into the Redwood Hostel, an old house along the jagged Northern California coast. The next day I set off to find the Cathedral Trees Trail, where I had hiked several years before, but for some reason I couldn’t find it. I drove up and down the highway, unable to locate the entrance. Suddenly my frustration gave way to rage, and I slammed my foot all the way down on the accelerator and drove full-speed toward the edge of a cliff, swinging the wheel at the very last moment to avoid driving off. Pulling off to the shoulder to catch my breath, I marveled at my own fury. I wasn’t prone to outbursts of violence. I had certainly never tried to drive off a cliff before.