Three days before Laura’s cremation, volunteers from the Crestone End of Life Project came to her home. They prepared her body, helped her friends wash her, and laid her out on a cooling blanket to slow down any decomposition. They dressed her in natural fabrics—synthetics like polyester don’t perform well on the pyre.
The organization will assist a family with its postmortem logistics regardless of finances. The family doesn’t have to choose open-air cremation, either. The volunteers at Crestone End of Life are prepared to help whether the family chooses a conventional (embalmed) burial, a natural (no vault or embalming) burial, or a cremation at the funeral home several towns over. Paul referred to the last option as “commercial cremation.”
Stephanie interrupted, “Paul, you’re supposed to call it conventional cremation.”
“No,” I argued, “commercial cremation sounds right.”
Crestone was inspiring to me as a practitioner—which is why I kept returning—but there was also a touch of melancholy (that bordered on jealousy). They had this glorious pyre under the blue sky, while I had to take my families to a loud, dusty crematory in a warehouse on the outskirts of town. I’d even promise to invite the didgeridoo player if I could have access to such a spectacular cremation facility for my funeral home.
Industrial, furnace cremation was first proposed in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In 1869, a group of medical experts gathered in Florence, Italy, to denounce burial as unhygienic and advocate a switch to cremation. Almost simultaneously, the pro-cremation movement jumped the pond to America, led by reformers such as the absurdly named Reverend Octavius B. Frothingham, who believed it was better for the dead body to transform into “white ashes” than a “mass of corruption.” (My next drone folk album will be called The Cremation Reforms of Octavius B. Frothingham.)
The first body to undergo a “modern, scientific” cremation in America was that of Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm. (Scratch that, the drone folk album is now The Burning of Baron De Palm.) The good Baron, a penniless Austrian nobleman, whom the New York Tribune called “principally famous as a corpse” (literal and figurative burn), died in May 1876.
His cremation was scheduled for December, six months after his death. In the interim his corpse was injected with arsenic, and when arsenic was deemed too weak to prevent rot, his organs were pulled from his body and his skin was covered with clay and carbolic acid by a local undertaker. On the train journey from New York to Pennsylvania (where he would be cremated), his mummified corpse briefly went missing in the baggage car, launching what historian Stephen Prothero called “a macabre game of hide-and-seek.”
The crematory for this inaugural event was built on a physician’s estate in Pennsylvania. It contained a coal-fired furnace that was supposed to cremate the body without the flames ever having to touch it—the heat alone would disintegrate the corpse. Even though the physician said the cremation would be “a strictly scientific and sanitary experiment,” De Palm’s body was still sprinkled with spices and placed on a bed of roses, palms, primroses, and evergreens. When the body first went into the furnace, observers reported a distinct smell of burning flesh, but the smell soon gave way to the aromas of flower and spice. After an hour in the furnace, De Palm’s body began to glow with a rose mist. The glow turned gold, and finally shone transparent red. After two and half hours, the body had disintegrated into bone and ash. Newspapermen and reviewers at the scene declared that the experiment had resulted in “the first careful and inodorous baking of a human being in an oven.”
From there, cremation machines only grew larger, faster, and more efficient. Almost 150 years later, cremation has reached record heights in popularity (for the first time, in 2017, more Americans will be cremated than buried). But the aesthetics and ritual surrounding the process have hardly changed. Our cremation machines still resemble the models introduced in the 1870s—24,000-pound behemoths of steel, brick, and concrete. They gobble thousands of dollars’ worth of natural gas a month, spewing carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, and highly toxic mercury (from dental fillings) into the atmosphere.
Most crematories, especially in larger cities, are relegated to industrial zones, tucked inside nondescript warehouses. Of the three crematories I have worked at in my nine years in the funeral industry, one was across from the Los Angeles Times distribution warehouse, where freight trucks rumbled out at all hours, one was behind a “Structural and Termite” warehouse (who knows what they do there), and one was next door to a junkyard where cars were torn apart for scrap metal.
One might find a crematory located on the grounds of a cemetery, but those facilities are most often hidden within the cemetery’s maintenance buildings, meaning mourners who wish to attend the cremation must navigate John Deere mowers and piles of rotting flower wreaths collected from the graves.
Some crematories are styled as “celebration of life facilities” or “cremation tribute centers.” Families are kept behind glass windows in air-conditioned rooms, watching as the body disappears into a small metal door in the wall. The machine concealed behind the wall is the same industrial oven found in the warehouses, but the family cannot see the wizard behind the curtain. The camouflage removes the family further from the reality of death and of the clunky, environmentally inefficient machines. For the privilege of taking mom to a “cremation tribute center,” the price may rise above $5,000.
I’m not arguing that a switch to open-air cremation would resolve all of these issues. In countries where pyre cremation is the norm, such as India and Nepal, the many millions of cremations every year burn 50 million-plus trees and release carbon aerosols into the atmosphere. After carbon dioxide, carbon aerosols are the second leading man-made cause of climate change.
But the Crestone model comes close. The nonprofit has received several calls from reformers in India wanting to adopt the structure and methods of their pyre—raised high off the ground to use less wood and release less damaging pollution. If reform is possible for this ancient method, inextricably tied to religion and country, then reform is possible for the modern, industrial cremation machines as well.
LAURA HAD LIVED in Crestone for years, and it seemed as if the whole town had come to the pyre that morning. Her son, Jason, spoke the first words, his gaze focused on the flames. “Mom, thank you for the love,” he said, his voice cracking. “Don’t worry about us now, fly and be free.”
As the fire continued to burn, a woman came forward to describe her own arrival in Crestone eleven years prior. When she moved to town, she had been suffering from years of chronic illness. “I moved to Crestone to find joy. I thought it was the clouds and the open sky that healed me, but I think it really was Laura.”