Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Walking out of the redwoods into the parking lot, somewhat stunned, I ran into a woman, the first person I had seen in hours. She asked for directions. “My husband always handled that sort of thing,” she apologized. “He died last year. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself.”


We talked for some time about death, the cremation process, and our culture’s negative relationship with mortality. At her request, I described what had happened to his body at the crematory. “Knowing all that stuff makes me feel better,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know why, but it does. I’m glad I met you.”

The only other car in the parking lot was a beat-up old van, filled to the brim with canned food and supplies. Its owner, a rotund woman, walked her black Pomeranian on a nearby patch of grass.

“That’s a darling dog,” I said as I climbed into my car.

“So, you think this one is cute, do you?” she croaked.

She walked to the side of her van and returned with two Pomeranian puppies, a gold one and a black one, two perfect balls of fluff. She thrust them into my arms.

That evening, I wandered back to the Redwoods Hostel, dazed and drained by the day, Pomeranian puppy spittle on my cheek from where they had licked my face. On the porch was a tall, handsome nineteen-year-old named Casey, hitchhiking across Canada and down the West Coast of the United States.

Two days later he was at my apartment in Koreatown, lying beside me in my bed, just young and uncomplicated enough to relieve the turmoil in my brain.

“Dude, I could really mow down on some pasta or something right now,” he mused.

“Yeah, that can be arranged.”

“Seriously, this is, like, crazy, right? I never expected to meet some random awesome chick like this.”

Well, Casey, expect anything. The only thing that’s certain is that nothing ever is.





DETH SKOOL





A week before I started classes at Cypress College of Mortuary Science, I was poked, prodded, and shot up with tetanus and tuberculosis vaccines—all part of the orientation physical. I was sick, which the doctor at the clinic found wildly unimpressive. “Well, your nodes aren’t swollen,” he said. Well, thank you for your opinion, Doctor, I thought. You’re not the one taking your mortuary school ID photo looking like a bog monster.

All the disease testing and immunizations caught me off guard. Westwind Cremation had never seemed too concerned with the possibility of me giving syphilis to a corpse or vice versa. The only time Mike would tell me to put on any biohazard protection beyond a pair of rubber gloves was when he thought I might ruin a nice dress. A rare area of sensitivity for him, really.

The morning of my first day of school I left my apartment in Koreatown early and drove the forty-five minutes south to Orange County. I hadn’t budgeted for the gridlock traffic in the school parking lot, so of course I was five minutes late. I burst in just as the head of the program was explaining how tardiness of any kind would be counted as an absence.

“And where exactly are you supposed to be?” he asked as I bumbled in.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be here,” I replied, slinking to a seat in the back.

There had been a mortuary school group orientation session a few weeks earlier, which I had missed in order to indulge my despair in the redwoods. This was the first time I was able to see the people I would be spending the next eighteen months with. Looking around the room I was surprised to discover that most of my fellow classmates were women, and women of color, no less. Hardly the bastion of creepy white men in suits I associated with the American funeral industry.

At the end of our first day we were corralled into a large room with the second-and third-semester students and given instructions to introduce ourselves and tell the group why we had come to the illustrious concrete halls of deth skool. I was hoping this sharing exercise would help ferret out my fellow death revolutionaries. Surely they would boldly refuse to give the same cheesy, party-line answer, “I just really want to help people.”