Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Historically, death rituals have, without question, been tied to religious beliefs. But our world is becoming increasingly secular. The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion”—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even those who identify as having strong religious beliefs often feel their once-strong death rituals have been commoditized and hold less meaning for them. At a time like this, there is no limit to our creativity in creating rituals relevant to our modern lives. The freedom is exciting, but it is also a burden. We cannot possibly live without a relationship to our mortality, and developing secular methods for addressing death will become more critical as each year passes.

I started to put essays and manifestos on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death,” looking for people who shared my desire for change. One such person was Jae Rhim Lee, an MIT-trained designer and artist who created a full-body suit for a human to wear for burial. The “Infinity Burial Suit,” which might be described as ninja couture, features a dendritic pattern of white thread spreading out across the black fabric. Lee crafted the thread from mushroom spores, which she specially engineered to consume parts of the human body using her own skin, hair, and nails. This may sound like a Soylent Green future, but Lee is actually training the mushrooms to remove toxins from our bodies as they decompose the human corpse.

After seeing a demonstration of her work at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, we met at a taco truck and talked for hours on a bus-stop bench on Olympic and La Brea. I was grateful to talk to someone interested in pushing the boundaries of body disposal; she was grateful that someone in the traditional funeral industry was willing to listen to her ideas. We both agreed that inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition was a noble purpose. She gave me a bucket of the flesh-eating mushroom prototype, which I attempted (and failed) to keep alive in my garage. Not feeding it enough flesh, I reckon.

For years, while working at Westwind and attending mortuary school, I had been afraid to discuss cultural death denial in public. The Internet is not always the kindest of forums, especially for young women. Tucked away in the comment section of my kitschy web series “Ask a Mortician,” there are enough misogynistic comments to last a lifetime. Yes, gentlemen, I’m aware I give your penis rigor mortis. It wasn’t just the anonymous basement dwellers who took issue with me. People in the funeral industry weren’t always thrilled that I was sharing what they perceived to be privileged “behind the black curtain” knowledge. “I’m sure she’s just having some fun. But since fun has no place in the funeral industry, I wouldn’t go to her for my loved one.” To this day the National Funeral Directors Association, the industry’s largest professional association, won’t comment on me.

But as I grew bolder, people came out of the woodwork. Crawled out of the coffin, if you will. People from all different disciplines—funeral directors, hospice workers, academics, filmmakers, artists—had wanted to discover how death works in our lives.

I wrote a lot of letters, sometimes out of the blue. One such recipient was Dr. John Troyer, a professor at the University of Bath’s Center for Death and Society. Dr. Troyer, whose PhD dissertation was titled “Technologies of the Human Corpse,” is studying crematoriums that capture the excess heat from the cremation process and put it to use elsewhere—heating other buildings, or even, as one crematory in Worcestershire did, a local swimming pool, saving taxpayers ￡14,500 a year. It is a way to make the cremation process, which uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body, more energy efficient. Luckily Dr. Troyer was willing to talk with me, even with my crude e-mail subject line, “Fan Gurl!”

It was a relief to find others like me; it removed the stigma and alienation. These were practitioners shifting our relationship with death, pulling the shroud off our deathways and getting to the hard work of facing the inevitable.

This work drove me internally. Externally, I was just the body-van driver. Three times a week I would drive my eleven corpses up the I-5 from San Diego and pass through the immigration checkpoint. My large, unmarked white van moved slowly toward the front of the inspection line, looking far more suspicious than the Priuses and Volvos in the other lanes. I would find myself hoping to be stopped, if only as a break from the monotony. In my mind, this is how the scene would go:

“You don’t got any inmigrantes back there, do ya, missy?”

“No inmigrantes, Officer. Just eleven people,” I’d reply, and, whipping off my sunglasses, “former US citizens.”

“Former?”

“Oh, they’re dead, Officer. Real dead.”

Unfortunately, every time the van rolled up and the officer saw a young white woman at the wheel, he or she would wave us right on through. I could have smuggled hundreds of Mexicans into the country in cardboard cremation containers. I could have been a drug mule. I could be a rich woman by now.