Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

No such luck. Even the students with the crazy eyes, the ones you could just tell enjoyed the transgressive proximity to dead bodies, had to talk about their desire to help people. Finally the sharing circle arrived at me. I imagined myself yelling, “A new dawn is upon us, join me while you still can, fools!” Instead I said something about having worked at a crematory and, you know, seeing a “good future in the death industry.” Then it was over. Everyone grabbed their Nightmare Before Christmas messenger bags and left in a thoughtful mood.

There were roughly fifty of us starting the program. I quickly befriended Paola, a first-generation Colombian American. One woman I did not have the pleasure of befriending was Michelle McGee. Nicknamed “Bombshell,” her image was later plastered all over the media for her role in breaking up the marriage of America’s sweetheart Sandra Bullock and her tattooed husband Jesse James, a tabloid dream of a cheating scandal. Michelle dropped out two weeks into the program. It may have been the fact that her whole body was covered in tattoos, including her face (not the traditional look a family is expecting when choosing someone to look after their deceased mother). Michelle was the first to go, but others followed at an alarming rate.

One thing that was immediately apparent about the professors at Cypress College of Mortuary Science was that they believed in the work they were doing. Professor Diaz, a short blond woman, was the most aggressively cheerful person I had ever met in my life. Her enthusiasm for embalming, caskets, and all the available swag of the modern funeral industry bordered on the threatening. In her lectures she described embalming as an ancient art and said things like, “Do we have to embalm our bodies? No, but we do. It is who we are.”

In one class, Professor Diaz showed us lengthy slideshows of different caskets, gushing over her own purchase of a $25,000 Batesville Gold Protection casket with a forest-green interior, the same model the singer James Brown had been buried in. When she died, it would be slid into a pre-paid aboveground vault. Her soaring rhetoric seemed to refer to something far different from the caskets I had seen at Westwind, with crepe pillows and lumpy beds filled with shredded office paper like my cat used in her litter box.

At the end of the casket slideshow, Professor Diaz briefly showed us a picture of the dirtiest, most soot-stained cremation retort I had ever seen. Paola slid over to me and whispered, “Why does that cremation chamber look like it’s from the Holocaust or something?”

“I think it’s a veiled warning,” I whispered back.

“Yeah, like, ‘So, anyone here want to be cremated instead of buried? Well, come on down, this is where you’ll end up. Muahaha.’”



IN THE SECOND SEMESTER we began embalming lab, the class I feared the most. I had seen embalming in action many a time, but had little interest in performing it myself. Our embalming instructor wore a tie covered in the books of the Bible and would bless us all with the sign of the cross as he dismissed the class. He had faith that, as soon-to-be embalmers, we were doing God’s work.

It was evident I had no place in “traditional” funeral service. I hated embalming lab and the head-to-toe biohazard-resistant protective gear we were forced to wear. The personal protective equipment, or PPEs, were only available in a sickly shade of light blue, making the students look like a cross between the stars of a deadly-disease-outbreak film and overweight Smurfs. More than the outfits (admittedly a frivolous concern), I also hated that our lab bodies were the indigent and homeless dead of Los Angeles County.

The county of Los Angeles has, depending on the year, upward of 80,000 homeless men and women living within its borders. More citizens live on the streets in L.A. than in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. A mere ten minutes away from the latest big-budget film premiere is a section of downtown known as Skid Row, a popup-tent city of homeless men and women, many of them mentally disturbed and dependent on drugs. In L.A., the gap between the haves and the have-nots is more like a chasm.

When a celebrity dies in Los Angeles, the news is greeted with tremendous fuss. Michael Jackson’s body warranted a private helicopter escort to the L.A. County Coroner’s and hundreds of thousands of mourners observed his funeral in person and on the Internet. His body, like those of the medieval saints, was a relic, an object of public adoration.

Not so the bodies of the homeless. They are a rotting burden that must be disposed of on the government’s dime. I know these bodies well. They were embalming practice.