Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Westwind’s newest crematory operator, a young woman named Cheryl, came into the crematory, clearly confused by my presence there. After I explained who I was, she clumsily shook my hand and walked back out. Jerry, the man originally hired to replace me when I left Westwind, had died of fast-moving cancer a few months earlier. He was only forty-five.

As I was leaving for the day, Bruce stopped by to pick up a check for several embalmings he had done the week prior. “Caitlin! How you doing? I’ve seen those videos you do online. What’s your website?”

“The Order of the Good Death.”

“Yeah, yeah, and the videos, the Question for a Mortician ones? Yeah, they’re good, they’re good.”

“Thanks, Bruce, I’m glad you like them.”

“You know what you need to do? I have a plan for you. You need to do a show at night, like with monster movies and such. A show like Answer a Mortician . . . is that what it’s called? Anyway, it would be like that. Paired with like, creature features. There was one on cable access in the ’70s. I tried to get my buddy at KTVU to bring it back. Everybody watches these monster movies on a Saturday. Like Svengoolie or who’s that woman—Vampira. Cult classic stuff.”

“I think I’d make a pretty poor Vampira substitute.”

“No! Don’t worry about it, you’ve already got the right hair for it,” he assured me. “I’m gonna talk to my buddy.”



ON MY WAY OUT of San Francisco I drove by Rondel Place. My former apartment had been stripped of its dull pink paint and refashioned as an elegant Victorian, right down to the gilded trimmings. I had a feeling my old room no longer rented for $500 a month. A handcrafted bicycle-messenger-bag shop had opened up across the street, and high-tech cameras at the end of the alley threatened to expose potential miscreants. The sidewalks on the surrounding streets had been repaved with glitter. Glitter. It was a shocking change from the Rondel I knew, but as the joke goes: “Q: What’s the definition of a gentrifier? A: Someone who arrived five minutes after you did.”

Halfway to Los Angeles, I stopped for the night at a small boarding house in the seaside town of Cambria. This was one of my favorite places in California, but I was filled with anxiety that I couldn’t place.

In 1961, a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology laid out the seven reasons humans fear dying:


1. My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends.

2. All my plans and projects would come to an end.

3. The process of dying might be painful.

4. I could no longer have any experiences.

5. I would no longer be able to care for my dependents.

6. I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death.

7. I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.


The anxiety I felt was no longer caused by the fear of an afterlife, of pain, of a void of nothingness, or even a fear of my own decomposing corpse. All my plans and projects would come to an end. The last thing preventing me from accepting death was, ironically, my desire to help people accept death.

I dined at Cambria’s one Thai restaurant and walked back to the boarding house. The streets were quiet and empty. Through the thick fog, I could barely make out a sign above the road: cemetery, 1 mile. I strode up the hill, walking straight down the center of the road with big, bold steps—bigger and bolder than my cardiovascular health should have allowed for. The full moon peeked out from the clouds, lighting up the pine trees and causing the fog to glow an eerie white.

The road came to an abrupt end at the Cambria Cemetery, est. 1870. Stepping over the small metal chain, a rather ineffectual deterrent against trespassers, I walked down through the rows of graves. To my left the leaves crunched, breaking the silence. Standing on the path in front of me was an enormous buck, its antlers framed in the mist. We stood looking at each other for several moments.

The comedian Louis C.K. talks about how “mysterious and beautiful” deer seem until you live in the country and deer are shitting in your yard and causing highway accidents. But this night, framed majestically in the fog, you had better believe that damn deer appeared like a spiritual messenger.

The buck slipped past the headstones and back into the trees. I was exhausted. No matter how bold my steps had been in the climb up to the cemetery, it was adrenaline that could not be sustained. I almost fell to the ground, mercifully covered in soft pine needles, and leaned against a tree between Howard J. Flannery (1903–1963) and a grave marked only with a small metal sign reading A SOARING SPIRIT, A PEACEFUL HEART.