Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Isaac was entirely unmoved. “This isn’t for other people,” he explained. “This is for me. I’m terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don’t want to die. I want to live forever.”


Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation. Isaac was getting his PhD, exploring the boundaries of science, making music because of the inspiration death provided. If he lived forever, chances are he would be rendered boring, listless, and unmotivated, robbed of life’s richness by dull routine. The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death. He didn’t seem to realize the fire beneath his ass was mortality—the very thing he was attempting to defeat.



THE MORNING I GOT the call about Tutu’s death, I was in L.A. at a crematory, labeling boxes of ashes. After almost a year driving the body van, I had recently moved to a job at a mortuary, running their local office. I was now working with families and coordinating funerals and cremations with doctors, the coroner’s office, the county death-certificate office.

The phone rang, with my mother’s voice on the other end: “Valerie just called. She’s hysterical. She said Tutu’s not breathing. I think she’s dead. I used to know what to do, but now I don’t. I don’t know what to do.”

The remainder of my morning was spent on the phone with family members and the funeral home. It was exactly the same thing I did at work every day, except this was my grandmother, the woman who had lived a block away when I was growing up, who had put me through college and mortuary school, and who called me Caiti-pie.

While they waited for the morticians to arrive, Valerie laid Tutu’s corpse out on her bed and dressed her body in a green cashmere sweater and a colorful scarf. My mother texted me a picture. “Here’s Tutu,” it read. Even through the phone, I could tell Tutu looked more peaceful than she had in years. Her face was no longer screwed up in confusion, struggling to understand the rules of the world around her. Tutu’s mouth hung open and her face blanched white, but she was a beautiful shell. A relic of the woman she once was. I still treasure this picture.

On my flight to Hawai’i that afternoon I had one of those somnial visions that live between dream and nightmare. I was at the funeral home to see Tutu, and I was led into a room where her emaciated body lay in a glass coffin. Her face was decomposed, bloated and black. She had been embalmed, but something had gone horribly wrong. “Is she to your liking?” the funeral director asked. “My God, no! She isn’t!” I cried, and grabbed a sheet to cover her. I had told them not to embalm her, and they had done it anyway.

In real life, my family had let me handle the funeral arrangements, as I was, technically, the professional. We had decided on a simple viewing for our family and then a witness cremation. When we came into the viewing room I understood what the man from New Zealand (or was it Australia? I’ll probably never know) at Westwind had meant by “Mom looked better before.” Tutu didn’t look like the woman in the picture my mother sent me. Her mouth had been pulled into a grimace with wires and superglue. I knew the tricks. She wore bright-red lipstick in a color she never wore when she was alive. I couldn’t believe I had let my own grandmother’s body fall victim to the postmortem tortures I was fighting against. It demonstrated just how strong a hold the mortuary industry has over our way of death.