Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Four years after leaving my job at Westwind Cremation & Burial, I stood, once again, outside the front gate. I rang the bell, the prodigal daughter returned home to the corpse-burning hearth. After a few moments, Mike came out to let me in.

“Well, look at who it is,” he said with a smirk. “You keep coming back like a bad penny. Come inside with me, I’m fingerprinting a body.”

We passed through the lobby and back into the crematory, and I still felt some of the same reverence I’d had when I first walked into that cavernous room five years earlier. In the middle of the room was a cot holding the body of an elderly woman. She was surrounded by four sheets of white paper, filled along the edges with black thumbprints.

“OK, so you’re literally fingerprinting a body,” I said. “I was wondering if that was a metaphor or something. Is this for one of those Thumbie necklaces?” I asked, recalling the company that laser-etches fingerprints into memorial necklaces. It seemed even Westwind couldn’t escape the funeral industry’s siren song to personalization.

“Yeah, you got it,” Mike said as he lifted the woman’s hand and gently wiped the black ink off her thumb. He applied a fresh coat and pressed her thumb to paper for the umpteenth time. “This is the stuff I get obsessed with, man. None of these are right yet. I’m cremating the body today—I have to get a good print.”

Mike went to answer the phone, and I pulled out my notebook. I had come to research this book, to ask questions, to confirm stories. I had even made an official appointment, like a professional. Mike walked back into the room and asked, deadpan, “So are you around here for the afternoon? We need you to go on a removal out in Piedmont. I have a service today, I can’t do it, and Chris needs a second person.”

I had been back for all of five minutes and already I was being sent out on a removal. It was as if I had never left, death’s indomitable schedule sending me straight back to work.

“What the hell, yeah, I’ll go,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant at the prospect. To be honest, I was pretty excited to be back on the team.

“Good. Chris is on his way back from the coroner’s now. By the way, I didn’t tell him you were coming. It’s a surprise.”

When Chris walked through the door, a look of disbelief flickered over his face. The look passed quickly. “I knew you’d be back, Cat.”

Later, as we drove through the winding hills up to Piedmont, Chris asked where I was staying.

“Oakland, with friends,” I answered.

“That’s good, it means you don’t have to go to that devil city,” he replied, pointing vaguely in the direction of San Francisco.

“So I hear that you’re writing a ‘book,’” he continued, making air quotes with his fingers.

“Well, it’s a real book, Chris. Not a hypothetical one.”

“Why would you ever write about us? We’re dull. You should make it fictionalized characters. Like us, but better.”

“I would argue that you guys are pretty interesting.”

“It’s dull as tombs here. It’s a good thing you got out while you still could. Shame you didn’t leave the industry altogether.”

We pulled up to a large old house with a white picket fence covered in vines.

“Well, this is nice place. You got lucky, Cat. The body I picked up yesterday was a decomp. It purged all over me. Although that guy was in a pretty nice apartment too. You just never know what’s inside,” Chris mused, pulling the gurney out from the back of the van.

We returned to Westwind with the body of Ms. Sherman, a beautiful woman in her mid-eighties with thick white hair. Her body had been washed by her family and covered in fresh flowers. Before sliding her onto the cot I grabbed her hand, colder than a living human’s, warmer than a mere inanimate object. My reaction to seeing her laid out this way was a reminder of how much I had changed since I first started at Westwind; whereas before bodies had scared me, now there was nothing more elegant in my eyes than a corpse in its natural state, prepared with dignity by her own family.

After unloading Ms. Sherman, Chris went out again to retrieve the latest batch of babies. Mike was up front making funeral arrangements with a family. With no one to talk to, I decided to put Ms. Sherman away in the refrigeration unit. As I taped and labeled her cremation container, the cardboard edge gave me the same razor thin paper cut it had a million times in the past. “Oh, what the—really?” I said to no one in particular.