Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(18)
It is a Chinese practice to hire professional mourners for a ceremony to help facilitate grief, to whip the crowd into a frenzy. It was difficult to tell if some of the people on the crematory floor were such professional mourners, hired by the family to promote sorrow through their excess emotion. Were professional mourners even available in Oakland? Their grief appeared genuine. But then again, I had never been in a situation like this before, where such a large group of people allowed themselves to be emotionally vulnerable. No stiff upper lips here.
Suddenly, a man I had somehow missed began weaving his way through the crowd with a video camera, filming the mourners. He would stop in front of a wailer and wave his hands upward, indicating what he wanted from them was more, more wailing! The mourner would let out a louder, more anguished cry and beat the ground. It seemed that no one wanted to get caught on camera looking calm or stoic.
The Huang family was engaged in ritual in the classic sense, mixing belief with tactile, physical action. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, two researchers of the human brain from the University of Pennsylvania, explained that for a ritual to work, the participants must engage “all parts of the brain and body, it must merge behavior with ideas.” Through their wailing, their kneeling, their grief, Mr. Huang’s family were connecting to something greater than themselves.
Mr. Huang’s casket slid into the cremation chamber and Mike gestured at Mr. Huang’s son to push the button to start the flames. It was a symbolic gesture, but one of incredible power.
Mike said to me later, “You gotta let ’em push the button, man. They love the button.”
Mr. Huang got something crucial that Jacob did not: someone he loved, not the random crematory operator in her culturally insensitive dress, to push the button that would take him out of this world.
As the door closed, locking Mr. Huang into the fiery chamber, Chris swooped in to set a large burning candle in front of the machine. Mike and Chris had done this part as a team before. The Huangs had wailed in grief before. I was the only one who was out of place.
Mr. Huang forced me to think about what I would do if my own father died. Frankly, I hadn’t a clue. There was a good chance that not everyone taking part in this witness cremation felt quite the intensity of grief they were displaying. For some it may have been more performance than genuine sorrow. But that didn’t matter; the Huang family had ritual. They knew what to do and I envied them for it. They knew how to cry louder, mourn harder, and show up with bowls of fruit. At the time of death, they were a community, rallied around ideas and customs.
My father taught history at a public high school for more than forty years. Even though the school where he taught was on the other side of the island, he would wake up at five thirty every morning to drive me an hour to my private school in Honolulu, and then another hour to his own school. All so I wouldn’t have to take the city bus. He had carried me for thousands of miles—how could I just hand him off to another person when he died?
As I gained more experience in the crematory I no longer dreamt of the gracious cover-ups of La Belle Mort Funeral Home. I began to realize that our relationship with death was fundamentally flawed. After only a few months at Westwind I felt na?ve for having ever imagined putting the “fun” back in funerals. Holding “celebration of life” ceremonies with no dead body present or even realistic talk of death, just Dad’s favorite old rock-n’-roll songs playing while everyone drank punch, seemed akin to putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one. As a culture it was time to go after the bullet.
No, when my father died he would go to a crematory. Not a warehouse like Westwind, but a beautiful crematory with huge windows that let in gobs of natural light. But it would not be beautiful because death was hidden or denied; it would be beautiful because death would be embraced. It would be a place of experience, with rooms for families to come and wash their dead. Where they could feel safe and comfortable being with a body until its final moment, inserted into the flames.
In 1913, George Bernard Shaw described witnessing the cremation of his mother. Her body was placed in a violet coffin and loaded feet-first into the flames. “And behold!” he wrote. “The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like Pentecostal tongues, and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.”
I pictured my father, the door of the cremation chamber rising and the reverberation filling the room. If I was still alive when he died, I would be there to watch him become “that beautiful fire.” I didn’t want anyone else to do it. The more I learned about death and the death industry, the more the thought of anyone else taking care of my own family’s corpses terrified me.
PINK COCKTAIL
Once upon a forgotten time, the Wari’ people lived in the jungles of western Brazil with virtually no contact with Western civilization. Then, in the early 1960s, the Brazilian government arrived in Wari’ territory alongside evangelical Christian missionaries, both groups trying to establish relations. The outsiders brought with them a host of diseases (malaria, influenza, measles) that the Wari’ immune system had no precedent for fighting. In the span of a few years, three out of every five Wari’ were dead. Those who survived became dependent on the Brazilian government, who supplied them with Western medicine to fight the new Western diseases.