Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

One memorable evening Tutu thought my father, whom she had known for forty years, was a maintenance man attempting to make off with her jewelry. My grandfather, who had died several years prior of Alzheimer’s, would pay her postmortem visits to share classified information from the beyond. According to Tutu, the government had assassinated Grandpa Dayton to cover up the fact that he alone knew the structural reason the levees had failed after Hurricane Katrina.

Tutu was what you’d call a “tough old broad.” She drank martinis and smoked until the day she died, yet her lungs remained as pink as a baby’s bottom (results not typical). She grew up in the Midwest during the Depression, forced to wear the same skirt and blouse every day for an entire year. After she married my grandfather, they lived all over the world, from Japan to Iran, settling in Hawai’i in the 1970s. Their house was one block away from mine.

After the accident, Tutu spent her remaining years living like the Queen of Sheba in her retirement condominium downtown. She had 24/7 care from a Samoan woman named Valerie, who bordered on sainthood. Even toward the end of Tutu’s life, as my grandmother slipped further and further into the fog, Valerie would get Tutu out of bed every morning, bathe her, dress her (never forgetting the pearl necklace), and take her on outings about town. When Tutu wasn’t well enough to leave the house, Valerie lovingly propped her up with her cigarettes and left CNN on the television set.

The unfortunate truth, and one of the reasons why openly acknowledging death is so crucial, is that most people who linger into extreme old age are nowhere near as lucky as Tutu, with her good retirement plan, devoted caretaker, and Tempur-Pedic adjustable memory-foam bed. Tutu is the exception that proves the tragic rule. Because this ever-growing geriatric army reminds us of our own mortality, we push them into the shadows. Most elderly women (our gender represents the distinct majority of elderfolk) end up in overcrowded nursing homes, waiting in agonizing stasis.

By not talking about death with our loved ones, not being clear through advanced directives, DNR (do not resuscitate) orders, and funeral plans, we are directly contributing to this future . . . and a rather bleak present, at that. Rather than engage in larger societal discussions about dignified ways for the terminally ill to end their lives, we accept intolerable cases like that of Angelita, a widow in Oakland who covered her head with a plastic bag because the arthritic pain of her gnarled joints was too much to bear. Or that of Victor in Los Angeles, who hung himself from the rafters of his apartment after his third unsuccessful round of chemotherapy, leaving his son to discover his body. Or the countless bodies with decubitus ulcers, more painful for me to care for than even babies or suicides. When these bodies come into the funeral home, I can only offer my sympathy to their living relatives, and promise to work to ensure that more people are not robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence.

Even with the knowledge that they may die a slow, grueling death, many people still wish to remain kept alive at all costs. Larry Ellison, the third wealthiest man in America, has sunk millions of dollars into research aimed at extending life, because, he says, “Death makes me very angry. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Ellison has made death his enemy and believes that we should expand our arsenal of medical technology to end it altogether.

It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely. I even went on a date with one of them, a PhD candidate in computational biology at the University of Southern California. Isaac started his graduate career in physics, but made the switch once he discovered that, biologically, man does not have to age. Perhaps “discovered” is too strong a word. “I had the idea that, using the principles of physics and biology, we can engineer and maintain a state of indefinite youth. But when I realized that there were other people already working on it, I was almost like, fuck it,” Isaac explained to me over our organic chicken sandwiches, revealing not a trace of irony.

Though he had seriously pursued rock stardom and considered writing a great novel, Isaac now waxed poetic on mitochondria and cell death, and the idea of slowing the aging process to a snail’s pace. But I was ready for him. “There is already overpopulation,” I said. “So much poverty and destruction, we don’t have the resources to take care of the people we already have on Earth, forget everyone living forever! And there will still be death by accident. It will just be even more tragic for someone who is supposed to live until three hundred to die at twenty-two.”