Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(20)
When I began working at Westwind, modern embalming wasn’t something I could clearly define. I knew it was what was “done” with bodies, one thread in my own web of significance. When I was ten years old, my cousin’s husband’s father died. Mr. Aquino was a good Catholic, the elder statesman of an enormous Hawaiian-Filipino family. His funeral was held at an old cathedral in Kapolei. When we arrived, my mother and I joined the line to file past his casket. As we reached the front of the line, I peered over the edge and saw Papa Aquino laid out. He was so made up that he no longer looked real. His gray skin was stretched tight, a by-product of the embalming fluid pumped through his circulatory system. Hundreds of candles burned around his casket, and the light from their flames reflected off his shiny, bright-pink lips, contorted into a grimace. He was a dignified man in life but looked like a waxen replica of himself in death. It was an experience I share with thousands upon thousands of other American children, trundling past a casket and getting this brief, waxy vision of death.
As to the type of person who would choose a career performing this dismal process, I vaguely imagined a gaunt man with hollowed cheeks, tall and thin like Lurch from the Addams Family. I crossed this vision of Lurch with the archetypal undertaker from a 1950s horror movie, wearing a lab coat and watching neon-green liquid slide through tubes into a dead body.
The embalmer at Westwind Cremation couldn’t have been further from this image. Bruce, the trade embalmer who came in several times a week to prepare bodies, was an African American man with graying hair and a boyish face—positively cherubic. He looked like a six-foot-tall Gary Coleman, fifty going on twenty. His voice fluctuated wildly in pitch and rhythm and carried across the crematory. “Hey there, Caitlin!” he greeted me with enthusiasm.
“Hey, Bruce, how you doing?”
“You know how it is, girl, just another day. Just another day with the dead.”
Technically I was training to be a crematory operator under Mike, but Bruce had been the assistant embalming instructor at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, the embalming school that closed its doors not long after Westwind underbid them on the homeless-and-indigent-dead contract. Although there was no longer a mortuary school in San Francisco, Bruce still had the instructor in him and was eager to share the secrets of the trade. Not that he had all that much respect for mortuary schools these days.
“Caitlin, when you learned this stuff in the old days it was an art,” he said. “Embalming meant preserving the body. I’m telling you, I’m beginning to wonder what they actually teach people at these mortuary colleges. Students come out of there who can’t even find a vein for drainage. Back in the ’70s, you worked on the bodies every day. Everything you did was bodies—bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies.”
There is a narrative, created mostly by the North American funeral industry, that situates modern embalming practices within an age-old tradition, an art form passed down through the millennia from the ancient Egyptians, original masters of corpse preservation. The present-day funeral director acts as the bearer of their ancient wisdom.
Needless to say, that narrative has a number of problems. Embalmers may claim their trade descended from the ancient Egyptians, but that neglects the quantum gap between the era of Tutankhamun and the time Americans began to perform embalmings in the early 1860s.
The embalming practiced by the ancient Egyptians was a very different animal from what is practiced down the street in your local funeral home. Some 2,500 years ago, bodies of the Egyptian elite were treated to an elaborate postmortem process that took months to complete. In contrast, the embalming at your funeral home takes three to four hours from start to finish. That is, if you’re lucky enough to get three to four hours of an embalmer’s time. Large funeral corporations have been buying up mom-and-pop mortuaries for years, keeping the mom-and-pop name the community trusts, but upping their prices and centralizing their embalming facilities. This gives body preparation the atmosphere of an assembly line, with embalmers pressured to knock out a completed corpse in record time.
The Egyptians embalmed for religious reasons, believing that every step of their process—from removing the brain through the nose with a long iron hook to placing the internal organs in animal-head vases called Canopic jars to drying the body out for forty days with natron salt—had profound significance. There are no brain hooks or organ-storage jars in modern North American embalming, which instead involves the removal of blood and fluids from the body cavity and replacing them with a mixture of strong preservative chemicals. More important, modern embalming was born not from religion but from stronger forces altogether—marketing and consumerism.
On this particular day, lying on Bruce’s embalming table, was a man of vastly different social station from the privileged citizens once embalmed by the Egyptians. His name was Cliff, a Vietnam War veteran who had died alone at the Veterans’ Administration (VA) Hospital in San Francisco. The US government pays for the embalming and burial (at a national cemetery) of veterans like Cliff—the men, and occasionally women, who die with no friends or family.
Bruce approached with a scalpel, bringing it down at the base of Cliff’s throat. “All right, now, first thing you have to do is get the blood out. Flush the system. Like flushing a radiator system in a car.”
Bruce made an incision. I was expecting blood to come gushing out like in a slasher film, but the wound was dry. “This guy isn’t exactly fresh; the VA keeps bodies for a long time,” Bruce explained, shaking his head in frustration.