Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(16)
Jacob came with a backpack. His parents didn’t want it mailed back to Washington, so the only place for it to go was into the flames alongside Jacob.
I set the backpack on a table and pulled open the zipper. Jackpot, I thought, one serving of understanding of the mind of a depressed madman, coming right up. But each item I pulled out was more obscenely normal than the next. Change of clothes, toiletries, a kombucha bottle. Then: a stack of notecards. At last! The scribblings of a suicidal lunatic? No. Chinese language flashcards.
I was disappointed. I had expected answers in that backpack, insight into the human condition.
“Hey, Caitlin, put this wallet back in there before you cremate it,” Mike called from his office.
“Wait, there’s a wallet?” I replied.
“I’m looking at his ID right now. There’s his college ID, his driver’s license, his Greyhound bus ticket to San Francisco. Oh, and a map of the BART train system; that’s depressing. He wrote something on the BART map. Word of the day: ‘anthropophagy.’ What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. I’m going to Google it right now. Spell it,” I said.
“A-N-T-H-R-O-P-O-P-H-A-G-Y.”
“Shit. It means cannibalism. It’s a synonym for cannibalism,” I said.
Mike laughed at the gallows humor of the definition. “No way. Do you think this means he had an insatiable desire for human flesh? This bus ticket says he got in to San Francisco the day before he died. Why not commit suicide back in Washington?”
“Right,” I added, “why would you come all the way to San Francisco to stand in front of a BART train?”
“Maybe he wasn’t trying to die. Just be an ass and dodge the train or something. Like that kid in Stand by Me.”
“Corey Feldman?” I asked.
“No, the other one.”
“River Phoenix?”
“No, not that one either,” Mike said. “Whatever, if that’s what he was trying, shit, he didn’t do a very good job.”
As I slid Jacob into the flames, the only things I knew about him were that he was a twenty-two-year-old from Washington who studied Chinese and was perhaps, at least on the day he died, interested in cannibalism. A few weeks earlier I had invested my first paycheck in the box set of the HBO television series Six Feet Under, the beloved show about a family-run mortuary. In one episode, Nate the funeral director visits a lonely, dying young man to arrange his cremation. The man is angry and bitter about his impending death and the lack of support from his family. He asks Nate who will push the button on the cremation machine when he dies.
“Whomever you specify,” Nate replies. “Buddhists have a family member, and then some people choose no one, in which case the person at the crematory does it.”
“I’ll take that guy.”
That was me. The person at the crematory. I was “that guy” for Jacob. In spite of what he had done, I didn’t want him to be alone.
THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.
Say you are a gazelle, grazing an African plain. The soundtrack from The Lion King plays in the background. A hungry lion stalks you from a distance. He sprints in to attack, but today you manage to outrun him. By instinct, a fight-or-flight reaction, you feel momentary anxiety. Experience and genetics have taught you to run and evade danger, and it does take some time for your heart to stop racing. But soon enough you can return to happy grazing as if nothing had happened. Chomp-chomp, blissful chomps, until the lion comes back for round two.
The human heart rate may decelerate after the lion chase has ended, but we never stop knowing that the game is lost. We know death awaits us, and it affects everything we do, including the impulse to take elaborate care of our dead.
Some 95,000 years ago, a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh Cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. Some of the surviving skeletal remains found at Qafzeh show stains of red ochre, a naturally tinted clay. Archeologists believe the ochre’s presence means that we performed rituals with our dead very early in our species’ history. One of the recovered skeletons, a thirteen-year-old child, was buried with its legs bent to the side and a pair of deer antlers in its arms. We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.
When families came to Westwind to arrange for cremations and burials, they sat in our front arrangement room and nervously drank water out of paper cups, unhappy about the death that brought them there and often even more unhappy about having to pay for it. Sometimes they’d request a viewing in our chapel in order to see the dead body for a final time. Occasionally the chapel was filled with a hundred people weeping over the strains of gospel music; other days it was just a single mourner, sitting quietly for half an hour before seeing themselves out.