Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

With as much time as I was spending on the road, my main fear was getting into an accident, crashing on the freeway. I imagined the back doors of my van flying open, all eleven passengers hurling out. The police show up amid chaos and confusion. Eleven fatalities—but why are these people so cold, with no signs of bodily trauma?

Once the smoke cleared and they discovered that all these fatalities were pre-dead, I’d become an Internet meme, my little head grimacing in a Photoshopped Wizard of Oz–style corpse tornado.

But every day I made it back to the crematory with my eleven bodies. When I pulled up behind the warehouse, Emiliano would be playing his accordion in the parking lot along with the Norte?o music blasting from the stereo in his Cadillac. The soundtrack to my body unloading.

But the day I almost died, I wasn’t in the body van. I was driving my ancient Volkswagen through Salton Sea, California. Salton Sea is a man-made saltwater lake smack dab in the middle of the Southern California desert. One idea in the 1960s had been to redesign it as a resort destination, an alternative to Palm Springs. Now, instead of martinis, Hawaiian shirts, and water-skiing, abandoned mobile homes line a morass of brown water with an unbelievable stench. Massive fish die-offs have littered the shoreline with fish and pelican corpses. The satisfying crunch of the sand beneath your feet comes courtesy of thousands of dried bones. I had made the four-hour pilgrimage from Los Angeles to visit this monument to decay. Some consider it gauche to visit so-called ruin porn, but I like to witness firsthand the way nature will declare war against our hubris, building in places unintended for human habitation.

As I drove toward the northern shore of the thirty-five-mile-long Salton Sea, I chanced upon a dead coyote by the side of the road. This wasn’t one of the petite, doglike coyotes sometimes found in urban Los Angeles—it was a beast with a blackened tongue and distended stomach. I made a U-turn and returned to inspect him, undaunted by the suspicious locals in their trucks and ATVs.

Perhaps this coyote was an omen. The coyote and/or the fish graveyard at the Salton Sea. And/or the old women riding golf carts in pink Juicy Couture tracksuits. They all might have been omens.

Darkness had fallen before I departed for Los Angeles. The four westbound lanes of the I-10 freeway passed through Palm Springs, filled with Sunday revelers heading home. I was driving my Volkswagen in the far-left lane at a steady 75 miles per hour. The back left side of the car began to shake, and I felt the dull thud of a tire blowout. I put on my blinker to move into the median, miffed at my bad luck.

But it turned out a flat tire wasn’t the problem. The bearings had slipped loose and the entire wheel had begun spinning off the axle. Finally, bolts snapped and off it came, leaving a gaping hole where the wheel once was.

With only three wheels, the car spun wildly out of control. I spiraled across four lanes, raising a rooster tail of sparks as bare metal scraped against asphalt. Time seemed to slow as the Volkswagen performed its deadly dance across the highway. There was a complete, throbbing silence inside the car. The lights from oncoming traffic whirled in a blur around me, the vehicles missing me as if blocked by some miraculous buffer.

More than the loss of control, more than the crushing loneliness of contemporary life, this was my worst fear, what Buddhists and medieval Christians referred to as “the bad death”—a death for which there is no preparation. In the modern era it takes the form of bodies ripped apart in a searing crunch of metal. Never to tell their loved ones how passionately they are loved. Affairs out of order. Funeral desires unknown.

Yet, as I spun and my hands pulled the wheel in some attempt at control, my mind was miles away. At first, a voice said, Ah, here we go, and a gentle peace descended. The “Moonlight Sonata” played and slow motion began. I had no fear. I realized as the car spun that this would not have been a bad death. My four years working with bodies and the families attached to them had made this moment a transcendent experience. My body went limp, waiting to accept the violent impact. It never came.

I slammed into a dirt hill bordering the shoulder of the highway. Facing oncoming traffic head-on, upright, and alive, cars and semis whizzed by me at dizzying speed, any (or many) of which could have hit me during my swirling journey across the highway. But they hadn’t.

Once I had been terrified at the thought of my body being fragmented. No longer. My fear of fragmentation was born from fearing the loss of control. Here was the ultimate loss of control, flung across the freeway, but in the moment there was only calm.





THE ART OF DYING