Joan took us on a brief tour of the cremation room, including the fifteen-year-old cremation machine used for family-witnessed cremations. It was significantly nicer than the industrial warehouses back home. “The walls are marble from Italy, the floor is granite from Brazil,” he explained.
“Sixty percent of our families come to witness the cremation,” Joan announced. Here’s where my jaw hit the polished granite floor.
“I’m sorry, 60 percent?” I reeled.
That is an enormous number—far higher than the percentage in the United States, where many families don’t even know they have the option of witnessing the cremation.
Before the cremation began, Joan brought us just outside the room, behind—are you ready for it?—three panes of glass stretching floor to ceiling. They were identical to the three panes of glass that had separated us from the body at the funeral home. “Why do you use the glass for cremations?” I asked Joan.
“The angle is such that you can’t see fully inside the oven, to the flames,” he replied.
It was true. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite see the fire, just the edge of the cremation machine. The two men slid the coffin into the brick-lined machine. When the heavy metal door came down, they pulled a classy wooden door across the front of the retort, hiding the machine’s industrial fa?ade.
Barcelona was the land of almost. They had initiatives for eco-cemeteries, animal conservation, and the growth of native trees. Their bodies were not embalmed, and were buried in wooden coffins. Almost a green burial, except for the granite fortress the coffin was required to be placed in. They had witness cremations that 60 percent of families attended, and funeral homes in which the family could stay the whole day with their loved one. Almost a paragon of family interaction at death, yet there was glass separating the family from the body at the viewing and at the cremation, setting up Mom as a museum exhibit.
I wanted to be self-righteous about the use of glass, but couldn’t, for this simple reason: with its elegant marble and glass, Altima had provided the one thing the United States needs more than anything—butts in the seats. People showed up for death here. They showed up for daylong viewings, sitting close vigil with the body. They showed up for witness cremations: 60 percent at this location. Perhaps the barrier of glass was the training wheels required to let a death-wary public get close, but not too close.
The cremation process would take approximately ninety minutes. Joan took Jordi, my publisher, to the back of the machine, where the family does not come. Pulling open a hinged metal window, he allowed us to peer inside the cremation chamber. Fierce blasts of fire shot down from the ceiling and devoured the top of the coffin. Jordi’s eyes widened as he took his turn peeking in, his pupils reflecting the flames.
For his trouble in showing me around Barcelona, poor Jordi had been rewarded with multiple close encounters with the dead. As we ate what seemed like a fourteen-course dinner in the city, I inquired what the day had been like for him. He thought, and replied that “when your bills come due, you have to pay them. At my company, I pay my bills. Here at this restaurant, I pay my bill. It is the same with feelings. When the feelings come, the fear of death, I must feel those feelings. I must pay my bill. It is being alive.”
JAPAN
TOKYO
Tokudane!, the Japanese morning television show, cut to a commercial break. Women in grape suits danced to a pulsing electronic beat. Animated bunnies clipped a toupee onto an astounded man’s head. Tokudane! returned and the hosts introduced the next segment, which began with a white-robed monk praying in a temple. There were flowers and incense; he appeared to be presiding over a funeral.
The temple was crammed with distraught mourners. The image pulled back to reveal the altar and the source of all this sorrow—nineteen robotic dogs. The camera zoomed in on their broken paws and snapped-off tails. I watched the TV at the hotel breakfast buffet in rapt attention, eating fried eggs shaped like hearts.
Electronics giant Sony released the Aibo (“companion” in Japanese) in 1999. The three-and-a-half-pound robocanine had the ability to learn and respond based on its owner’s commands. Adorable and charming, the Aibo also barked, sat, and mimicked peeing. Their owners claimed the pups helped combat loneliness and health issues. Sony discontinued the Aibo in 2006, but promised to keep making repairs. Then, in 2014, they discontinued repairs as well, a harsh mortality lesson for the owners of the roughly 150,000 Aibos sold. A cottage industry of robotic vets and online grief support forums sprang up, culminating in funerals for Aibos tragically beyond repair.
Once the Tokudane! segment ended, I headed into Tokyo full of heart-shaped eggs to meet my interpreter, Emily (Ayako) Sato. She had suggested we meet at the statue of Hachikō in the Shibuya railway station. Hachikō is a national hero in Japan. Hachikō was also a dog (a real one). In the 1930s he would meet his owner, an agriculture professor, at the rail station each day after work. One day, the professor never came to meet Hachikō; he had died of a brain hemorrhage. Undeterred, Hachikō returned to the station every day for the next nine years, when his own death halted the ritual. Dogs are a solid meeting point from a cross-cultural perspective. Everyone respects a devoted canine.
Sato-san was waiting when I arrived, a woman in late middle age who did not look a day over forty. She wore a power pantsuit and sensible walking shoes. “My secret is walking ten thousand steps each day.” I almost lost her several times as we descended into the labyrinthine bowels of the Shibuya station, swept up in the throngs of Tokyo’s well-dressed denizens. “Perhaps I need to hold up one of those flags that tour group leaders carry, with a skull on it, just for you,” she grinned.
After two turnstiles, three staircases, and four escalators, we reached our platform. “We’re safer down here from earthquakes,” Sato-san announced. This wasn’t a non sequitur. Just that day there had been a 6.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast. I couldn’t speak to anyone in Tokyo without them referencing the psychological impact of the 2011 earthquake, with its subsequent tsunami that roared through northeast Japan and killed more than 15,000 people.
On the subway platform, sliding glass barriers separated the riders from the rails below. “Those barriers are somewhat new,” Sato-san explained. “For one thing they prevent”—she lowered her voice—“the suicides.” Japan’s rate of death by suicide is one of the highest in the developed world. Sato-san continued, “Unfortunately, the workers have become very efficient in cleaning up the train suicides, collecting the body parts and whatnot.”