Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

My position would not be a crematory operator, but a body-transport driver. Most crematories receive bodies in deliveries of one to four at a time, depending on their source of origin. My body van, a tall diesel-fuel Dodge Sprinter with built-in shelves, held eleven dead bodies at once. Twelve in a pinch, with one corpse tilted at a slight angle.

With my eleven corpses in tow I drove hither and thither across Southern California—San Diego, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara—to retrieve the dead and bring them back to the crematory. Hauling, lifting, and driving filled my daily schedule.

In my new job I was no longer the belle of my own little ball as I had been at Westwind. I was a mere piece of a puzzle, a specialized laborer. My position was a product of Jessica Mitford’s influence, the result of her direct-cremation vision achieving ubiquity, on its way to supreme popularity. California was once again the leader in this new way of death, as it had been with Forest Lawn, as it had been with Mitford, as it had been with Bayside Cremation.

The crematory was manned by three young Latino men from East Los Angeles, working in shifts all hours of the day and night (and on weekends) to perform cremations in the colossal machines whose fires constantly burned. There was the good—the very sweet Manuel, who always helped me unload my bodies from the van at the end of the day; the bad—the tattooed Emiliano, who made sure to tell me he was looking to get a white girl pregnant; and the ugly—Ricky, who cornered and threatened me in one of the cooling fridges for stacking the bodies in a manner not to his liking.

There was a never-ending stream of decedents who required fetching. On Christmas Eve I got a call from the woman who ran the facility in San Diego: “Caitlin, there are too many bodies here, we need you tonight.” So in the middle of the night, while others snuggled in their beds, dreaming sugarplum dreams, my van zoomed from Los Angeles to San Diego and back like a depressing Santa Claus with even more depressing cargo. “The bodies were stacked in the reefer with care, with hope that the body van soon would be there . . .”

If there was one luxury I had as captain of the Good Ship Body Van, it was time to think. Driving more than 350 miles a day as a long-haul corpse trucker gives one ample time to ponder. Some days I listened to books on tape (Moby-Dick on eighteen unabridged CDs, thank you very much). Other days it was the Christian talk radio that starts to come in clearly as soon as you leave metropolitan Los Angeles. But mostly I thought about death.

Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives. This need for meaning is why some believe in an intricate system of potential afterlives, others believe sacrificing a certain animal on a certain day leads to healthy crops, and still others believe the world will end when a ship constructed with the untrimmed nails of the dead arrives carrying a corpse army to do battle with the gods at the end of days. (Norse mythology will always be the most metal, sorry.)

But there is something deeply unsettling—or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it—about what is happening to our death values. There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality. There have been times when humans were driven to break tradition by necessity—for example, deaths on a foreign battlefield. But for the most part, when a person dies, they are disposed of like their mother and father were, and like their mothers and fathers were. Hindus were cremated, elite Egyptians entombed with their organs in jars, Viking warriors buried in ships. And now, the cultural norm is that Americans are either embalmed and buried, or cremated. But culture no longer dictates that we must do those things, out of belief or obligation.