Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(12)
“Young lady, I am her husband. Not were her husband,” he replied, fixing me with a withering gaze, compounded by the forty other withering gazes from around the room.
This is it, I thought. I’m done. I have shamed myself and my family and all is lost.
However, Chris was, again, unfazed. “Well, I’m Chris, and this is Caitlin,” he said. “Are we ready to take her, here?”
At this point the family usually leaves the room, leaving the funeral-home employees to do whatever they do with the corpse to make it disappear. But this family wanted to watch us. This meant my first time removing a dead body from a home was going to be in front of forty crying people who hated me.
This was the moment I learned the magic of Chris. He began talking me through the process in the same voice he’d told Mike about the day’s elaborate traffic route. He explained how we were going to remove Mrs. Adams as if he were telling the crowd.
“Now we’re going to pull the gurney right alongside the bed, and Caitlin is going to use that handle there to lower her side down. I’m going to take the sheet next to her head and Caitlin is going to take the sheet by her feet and slide it right underneath her. Caitlin is going to pick up her feet onto the gurney in one, two, three. Now she’s going to wrap the second sheet over her and snap her in tightly.”
This continued until Mrs. Adams was swathed and buckled securely to the gurney. The people in the room paid rapt attention to the process, following Chris’s voice step by step. I was grateful that he didn’t expose me as a fraud. I didn’t even really feel like a fraud. The way Chris explained things made me believe I actually knew what I was doing. Surely there had never been a time I hadn’t been an expert body shrouder.
As we wheeled Mrs. Adams out the front door, her son came up to us. He was my age, and his mother was dead. He wanted to lay a flower on the gurney. I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted out, “She must have been a really amazing woman. Trust me, I can just tell about these things.”
This was, of course, a lie. This was my very first house call and I still didn’t know how to properly wrap the body in a sheet, forget measuring the vibe of the room to determine just how “amazing” a dead person was when they were living.
“Um, yeah, thank you,” he said.
Driving away from the house, Mrs. Adams rattling gently in the back, Chris assured me that I hadn’t actually screwed everything up forever. “Look, Cat, we see people at their worst moments. Maybe if someone’s buying a new car, or a new house, they want to be there. But what are they buying from us? Nothing, we’re charging money to take away someone they love. That’s the last thing in the world they want.” This made me feel better.
WESTWIND’S TWO CREMATION MACHINES could handle six bodies (three in each retort) on a typical 8:30–5:00 day—thirty souls a week during busy periods. Each removal took at least forty-five minutes, far longer if the deceased was across the bridge in San Francisco. By all rights Chris and I should have been out fetching bodies constantly. Chris was out constantly, but often just to avoid Mike by volunteering to run petty errands like picking up death certificates and going to the post office. I mostly stayed at Westwind and focused on cremation, since the majority of body pickups didn’t require a number two. Most deaths no longer happen at home.
Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 85 percent of Americans still died at home.
The 1930s brought what is known as the “medicalization” of death. The rise of the hospital removed from view all the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds of death. Whereas before a religious leader might preside over a dying person and guide the family in grief, now it was doctors who attended to a patient’s final moments. Medicine addressed life-and-death issues, not appeals to heaven. The dying process became hygienic and heavily regulated in the hospital. Medical professionals deemed unfit for public consumption what death historian Philippe Ariès called the “nauseating spectacle” of mortality. It became taboo to “come into a room that smells of urine, sweat, and gangrene, and where the sheets are soiled.” The hospital was a place where the dying could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living.
In my high school, my classmates and I had been told in no uncertain terms that we would not get into college and thus would never get a job and thus would end up unsuccessful and alone if we didn’t serve a certain amount of summer volunteer hours. So the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I signed up to volunteer at Queen’s Medical Center, a hospital in downtown Honolulu. They confirmed I was not a drug user and had decent grades, and gave me a hideous bright-yellow polo shirt and a name tag and told me to report to the volunteer office.
The volunteer department allowed you to select two areas of the hospital to rotate between from week to week. I had no interest in popular choices like the gift shop or the maternity ward. “Get Well Soon” balloons and crying babies seemed like a cloying, sappy way to spend the summer. My first choice was working the front desk at the intensive care unit, imagining a glamorous-nurse-wiping-fevered-brows scenario out of World War II.