Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(17)

Families would go through the chapel or arrangement room, even the front office, but the crematory itself was my space. Most days I was alone “in the back,” as Mike called it.

On our price list we offered something called a “Witness Cremation,” but no one took us up on this offer the first few weeks I was at Westwind. Then, one day, there was the Huang family. When I showed up to work at eight thirty there were already a dozen older Asian women, in the supply closet of all places, setting up a makeshift altar.

“Mike?” I called out, walking toward his office.

“What’s up?” he called back with his usual deadpan indifference.

“Hey, why are there people in the supply closet?” I asked.

“Oh, right, they’re here for the witness this afternoon. There’s not going to be enough room in the chapel for all their stuff, so I gave them the supply closet for the altar,” he said.

“I—I didn’t know there was going to be a witness,” I fumbled, terrified at the invasion of my space and routine.

“I thought Chris told you, man. Don’t worry about it, I got this one,” he said.

Mike had no qualms about the day’s events. Maybe he could perform a witness cremation with one hand tied behind his back, but the whole premise seemed incalculably dangerous to me. A witness cremation followed a sequence: the family was given time in the chapel with the deceased, the body was wheeled into the crematory, and the cremation process was begun with the whole family standing right there. With the whole family standing right there. About as much room for error as in the transport of nuclear weapons.

When Western cremation evolved from open pyres to enclosed industrial machines, the first of these new machines were built with peepholes in the side so the family could peek in and watch the process like a naughty show. Some funeral homes even required that family members be there to witness the body being loaded into the machine. But as time went on the peepholes were covered and sealed, the families kept out of the crematory altogether.

Over the last few decades the funeral industry has evolved a number of methods to distance the family from any aspect of death that might potentially offend them, and not just in the crematory.

When my friend Mara’s grandmother suffered a fatal stroke, Mara was on the next flight to Florida to hold vigil at the deathbed. Over the next week, Mara watched her grandmother struggle to breathe, unable to swallow or move or make a sound. When death mercifully took the old woman, Mara expected she would be there through the whole funeral as well. She wasn’t. I received this message from her: “Caitlin, we just stood there next to the open grave. Her casket was there and the dirt was covered up with Astroturf. I kept thinking they were going to lower the casket into the grave. They never did. We had to walk away while the casket was still sitting there, unburied.”

Only after Mara’s family had left the cemetery would Grandmother’s casket be lowered into the ground and the yellow construction backhoes brought in to dump the dirt back on top.

These modern denial strategies help focus mourners on positive “celebrations of life”—life being far more marketable than death. One of the largest funeral-home corporations keeps small toaster ovens near their arrangement rooms so fresh-baked cookie smells will comfort and distract families throughout the day—fingers crossed that the chocolate chips mask the olfactory undertones of chemicals and decomposition.

I passed back through Westwind’s supply closet, nodding at the women who were making remarkable progress on the altar. They worked to arrange multiple bowls of fruit and circular flower wreaths at the base of a large framed picture of the deceased Mr. Huang, the patriarch of the family. The picture was in the style of a shopping-mall portrait, the head and shoulders of an older Chinese man in a sharp suit and abnormally rosy cheeks. Airbrushed clouds floated in the background.

On Mike’s instructions, Chris and I brought Mr. Huang’s wooden casket into the chapel. When we opened the lid, Mr. Huang was waiting for us in his best suit. He had the stiff, waxy appearance of an embalmed corpse, no longer the stern dreamer in his cloud portrait.

Throughout the morning, more and more of Mr. Huang’s family arrived, bearing more fruits and gifts for the supply-closet altar. “You,” an older woman barked at me with disapproval, “why you wear red?”

The color red, associated with happiness, is poor form at a Chinese funeral. The cherry-red dress I wore all but screamed, “Ha, grievers! I laugh in the face of cultural sensitivity!”

I wanted to protest that I didn’t know the Huang family would be there that day, especially for something as terrifying as a witness cremation. Instead I mumbled an apology and shuffled away with her bowl of oranges.

Mike had already gone into the back to preheat one of the retorts. When the time came for Mr. Huang’s cremation, he had me follow him into the chapel. We threaded our way through throngs of Mr. Huang’s relatives, clucking with displeasure at my red dress. The casket was rolled out of the chapel and into the crematory. The family streamed in behind us, thirty people at least, invading what until now had been my sacred space.

As we filed into the crematory, everyone (elderly women included) fell to their knees on the ground, wailing. The howls of the mourners mixed in with the roar of the cremation machine. The effect was eerie. I stood in the back, my eyes wide, feeling like an anthropologist privy to some unknown rite.