Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

It would be a lie to say I hadn’t had a particular vision of being a crematory operator. I expected the job would involve placing a body in one of the giant machines and settling down with my feet up to eat strawberries and read a novel as the poor man or woman was cremated. At the end of the day I’d take the train home in thoughtful reverie, having come to some deeper understanding of death.

After a few weeks at Westwind, any dreams I had of berry eating reveries were replaced by much more basic thoughts, such as: When is lunch? Will I ever be clean? You’re never really clean at the crematory. A thin layer of dust and soot settles over everything, courtesy of the ashes of dead humans and industrial machinery. It settles in places you think impossible for dust to reach, like the inner lining of your nostrils. By midday I looked like the Little Match Girl, selling wares on a nineteenth-century street corner.

There is not much to enjoy in a layer of inorganic human bone dusted behind one’s ear or gathered underneath a fingernail, but the ash transported me to a world different from the one I knew outside the crematory.

Enky Pat O’Hara was the head of a Zen Buddhist center in New York City at the time of the September 11 attacks, when the towers of the World Trade Center came down in a scream of chaos and metal. “The smell didn’t go away for several weeks and you had the sense you were breathing people,” she said. “It was the smell of all kinds of things that had totally disintegrated, including people. People and electrical things and stone and glass and everything.”

The description is grisly. But O’Hara advised people not to run from the image, but instead to notice, to acknowledge that “this is what goes on all the time but we don’t see it, and now we can see it and smell it and feel it and experience it.” At Westwind, for what felt like the first time, I was seeing, smelling, feeling, experiencing. This type of encounter was an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.

Returning to my first basic concern: When, and where, was lunch? I was given half an hour for lunchtime. I couldn’t eat in the lobby for fear a family would catch me feasting on chow mein. Potential scenario: front door swings open, my head jerks up, wide-eyed, noodles hanging from my lips. The crematory was also out, lest the dust settle into my takeout container. That left the chapel (if it wasn’t occupied with a body) and Joe’s office.

Though Mike now ran the crematory, Westwind Cremation & Burial was the house that Joe built. I had never met Joe (né Joaquín), the owner of Westwind: he retired just before I cremated my first body, leaving Mike in charge. He became somewhat of an apocryphal figure. Physically absent, perhaps, but still a specter in the building. Joe had an invisible pull over Mike, watching him work, making sure he stayed busy. Mike had the same effect on me. We both worried about the iron glare of our supervisors.

Joe’s office sat empty—a windowless room filled with boxes and boxes of old cremation permits, records of each person who’d made their last stop at Westwind. His picture still hung over his desk: a tall man with pockmarked skin, a scarred face, and thick black facial hair. He looked like someone you didn’t want to fuck with.

After pestering Mike for more information about Joe, he produced a faded copy of a local alt-weekly with Joe’s picture splashed across the cover. In the picture he stands in front of Westwind’s cremation machines with his arms crossed and looks, once again, like someone you didn’t want to fuck with.

“I found this in the filing cabinet,” Mike said. “You’ll like this. The article makes Joe sound like some badass renegade cremationist who took on the bureaucracy and won.”

Mike was right, I did like it.

“People in San Francisco eat that kind of story up.”

A former San Francisco police officer, Joe had founded Westwind twenty years prior to my arrival. His original business plan was to fill the lucrative niche of scattering ashes at sea. He purchased a boat and fixed it up to shuttle families into the San Francisco Bay.

“I think he sailed that thing himself. From, like, China or somewhere. I don’t remember,” Mike said.

Somewhere along the line, the guy storing Joe’s boat made some manner of horrible mistake and sank it.

Mike explained, “So Joe’s standing there on the dock, right? Smoking a cigar and watching his boat sink into the bay. And he’s thinking, well, maybe the silver lining here is that I’ll use this insurance money to buy cremation machines instead.”

Fast-forward a year or so and we find Joe as the owner of a small business, the proprietor of the fledgling Westwind Cremation & Burial. He discovered that the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science had been under contract for many years with the city of San Francisco to dispose of their homeless and indigent dead.