Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Every week a volunteer from Cypress College went to retrieve bodies from the L.A. County Morgue. We fetched our victims from a special fridge (really a vault) full of the unclaimed. The morgue attendant opened the refrigeration unit to reveal hundreds of identical white body bags, stacked five shelves high. They are what mortician Thomas Lynch calls “larger than life-size sperm” for the way hospitals and coroners’ offices tie the bags tight around the deceased’s feet. It is an entire city of dead bodies, a frozen sperm necropolis.

This fridge is where the dead wait. Weeks pass into months as the county tries to find someone to claim the body. When the trail ends, a county-provided cremation will take place. Starting early in the morning, while some young starlet stumbles drunkenly out of a Hollywood club, bodies are already burning. Having been reduced to ash, they are placed in a container, labeled, and put on a shelf. That shelf is a burgeoning necropolis of its own, and the remains will wait there even longer. They’ll wait until the bureaucratic channels have run dry, and the government is finally satisfied that nobody is coming to retrieve the anonymous tin of ashes.

In bad economies, major cities see a drastic increase in unclaimed bodies, not all of them homeless, or even without a family. A son may have loved his mother, but if his house is in foreclosure and his car repossessed, his mother’s body might shift from relic to burden very quickly.

Evergreen Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Los Angeles, established in 1877. Buried on its grounds are former Los Angeles mayors and congressmen and even film stars. Once a year, in a small section where the grass is brown and the markers almost unnoticeable, L.A. County workers dig a large hole. Into the hole they will dump, one after another, almost two thousand sets of unclaimed cremated remains, a thick, gray cloud of dust rising above the backhoe. They replace a thin layer of topsoil and mark the area with a plaque stating the year they were put in the ground.

Some bodies are “lucky” enough to visit Cypress College before this anonymous ceremony, where they are laid out on embalming tables and surrounded on all sides by the student Smurf brigade in our protective outfits. We spent the first semester of embalming lab learning where the arteries and veins were, often through trial and error. Someone would slice open the upper thigh in the incorrect place, only to say, “D’oh! The femoral artery is actually down here.” If at first you don’t succeed, slice, slice again.

Outside the embalming laboratory was a stack of trade magazines from the Dodge Company (no relation to the automobiles), which sells embalming and restorative chemicals. Their trade magazine is full of tips ’n’ tricks to use with their products.

“Fills! Plumps! Firms!”

“Dryene! Stay Cream! Looks like a dream!”

There were products for sealing skin, hydrating skin, dehydrating skin, firming skin, and bleaching skin. Products to prevent the body from leaking, smelling, and turning strange shades of orange (mental note). Products for curling hair and blushing cheeks and moisturizing lips.

My personal favorite was Tim Collison’s article “Cosmetic Considerations for the Infant Death,” a fancy way of saying “Makeup for Dead Babies.” The three pictures accompanying the article were of a darling living baby, Mr. Collison himself, and a well-lit shot of Dodge’s patented Airbrush Cosmetics Deluxe Kit, presumably perfect for use with infants.

If you are like me, your first response might be, “Gosh, I don’t think dead babies really need makeup.” Mr. Collison disagrees with you. He wants to ensure that funeral professionals place “the tiny body in the casket to look as natural as possible.”

Mortuary schools no longer teach students that they are embalming to make the dead bodies look “lifelike.” “Lifelike” makes people think the dead might actually come back to life. The word of choice in the industry is now “natural.” Embalmers “restore the body to a natural appearance.”

According to Mr. Collison, the first step to applying “natural” baby makeup is to preserve the heck out of the baby in question: “The use of a cosmetic arterial chemical with a humectant base such as Plasdopake or Chromatech, along with sufficient amounts of accessory chemicals, will supply the needed preservation.”

Plasdopake or Chromatech might provide an excellent base for cosmetics, but the downy hair on a newborn’s face can be such an impediment. Best to go ahead and shave the baby. Be careful, though, “the shaving of an infant requires extra care.”

Finally, be aware that a baby’s facial pores are much smaller than their adult counterparts. You might think you can use the same old oil-or paraffin-based cream cosmetics you use on adults, but nay. They would make the baby look waxy and not “produce a natural appearance.” There’s that natural again.