Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Often our assigned research papers required us to consult and interview “funeral industry professionals.” Mike and Bruce served as my funeral professionals. Phone calls with them made me think that perhaps I had left Westwind too soon. After a year there I was still learning so much; it was imprudent for me to waltz out.

Most of all I missed their straight talk. When I asked Bruce about whether a corpse is going to “go bad” if not embalmed right away, he laughed derisively, even though he was a longtime embalmer and educator himself. “The whole ‘body going bad’ thing has really gotten blown out of proportion. Granted, if you’re in a hundred and ten degrees with no air conditioning, like, the middle of the Amazon rain forest, you gonna want to take care of that. Otherwise, that body isn’t going to go rotten in the next hour. It’s crazy how funeral homes really think that.”

Mortuary school made me tense to the point of physical illness. The longer you spend doing something you don’t believe in, the more the systems of your body rebel. The months drifted by and I was plagued by sore throats, muscle spasms, canker sores in my mouth. As Dr. Frankenstein ruminated while working to create his monster, “My heart often sickened at the work of my hands.” It was a stressful environment and a financially foolish decision on my part. But I would have forked over my life savings to anyone who could have let me skip embalming lab and not fail the class.

Granted, I was far from the only student made tense by mortuary school. There was a woman in the program who would stand outside the building chain-smoking, her hands trembling. She often broke down crying during exams and twice, notably, during labs: once while viciously jamming a metal suction tube into a dead man’s foot and once while applying practice curls to a plastic head. I had named my plastic head Maude. My classmate was not on a first-name basis with hers.

More and more I began to cherish the idea of the home funeral. I had never forgotten about my original dream of owning a funeral home. The dream of La Belle Mort had morphed into the dream of Undertaking L.A. At Undertaking L.A., families could reclaim the process of dying, washing, dressing, and attending to the body as humans had done for thousands of years. Family members would remain with the body, free to mourn and care for their loved one in a supportive, realistic environment. Such an idea was taboo at mortuary school, where wisdom held that embalming kept a corpse “sanitary.” No wonder Bruce said funeral directors were telling families that dead bodies were a threat to public health: they were learning that dead bodies were a threat to public health.



I INCHED TOWARD GRADUATION and passed the exams to become a licensed funeral director in the state of California. My reveries of galloping into the sunset to start Undertaking L.A. were dampened by financial realities. I had put myself in debt to go to Deth Skool and thus lacked the capital, and perhaps the experience, to open my own funeral home. I had to get another job in the death industry.

One option was moving to Japan, where they were desperate to hire trained embalmers from the United States and Canada. Embalming is a recent development in Japan, where they call it “death medicine.” One Canadian embalmer who moved to Japan to work described placing bandages on the embalmed corpse to make it look like a medical procedure. Appealing as it would have been to live overseas, I wasn’t about to act as the colonialist bearer of ill-advised deathways.

Professor Diaz told me that it would be hard to get hired at a crematory in Southern California. For that type of physical work, “they can just get an immigrant to do it.” Though insensitive, she was being honest; this was what crematory owners had told her.

On the opposite end of the death spectrum was someplace like Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Jessica Mitford’s archnemesis, the “Disneyland of Death.” Forest Lawn had expanded to multiple locations across Southern California. Everyone knew Forest Lawn. Their billboards soar high over Los Angeles, picturing a forty-foot-tall elderly couple dressed in white linen. Their heads thrown back in laughter, the couple holds hands and walks along the beach at sunset. They’re reveling in their golden years, beaming at each other, just here to gently remind you (in tiny print at the bottom of the billboard) that there is a memorial park available should you wish to prepay for your funeral.

A group of Forest Lawn representatives filled the lobby of Cypress College. It was billed as a job fair, although the “fair” element fell somewhat flat, as only Forest Lawn was represented. One of the representatives gave a talk to our graduating class.