Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty

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directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend.

      So, really, what was a nice girl like me doing working at a ghastly ol’ crematorium like Westwind? The truth was, I saw the job as a way to fix what had happened to the eight-year-old me. The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn’t see her, then he couldn’t take her.

      Not only could I heal myself, but I could develop ways to engage children with mortality from early on so that they didn’t end up as traumatised as I was by their first experience with death. The plan was simple. Picture this: an elegant house of bereavement—sleek and modern, but with an Old World charm. It was going to be called La Belle Mort. “Beautiful death,” in French. At least, I was fairly sure it meant beautiful death. I needed to double-check before opening my future funeral home, so I wasn’t like those girls who think they’re getting the Chinese character for “hope” tattooed on their hip when in fact it is the Chinese character for “gas station.”

      La Belle Mort would be a place where families could come to mourn their dead in exciting new ways and put the “fun” back into “funeral.” Perhaps, I reasoned, our pathological fear of death comes from treating it as so much gloom and doom. The solution was to do away with all the nonsense of the “traditional” funeral.

      Out the door with you, expensive caskets, tacky flower wreaths, and embalmed corpses in suits. Sayonara, canned eulogies featuring “Lo as you walk through the valley of sad stuff,” and stacks of greeting cards with sunsets and saccharine platitudes like “She’s in a better place.”

      Our traditions had held us back for far too long. It was time to get out from underneath the cloud of death denial and into celebration mode. There would be parties and merriment at La Belle Mort. It would usher in the new age of the twenty-first-century spectacle funeral. Dad’s cremated ashes could be sent into space, or tamped into bullets and shot out of a gun, or turned into a wearable diamond. I would likely end up catering to celebrity types; Kanye West was sure to want a laser hologram of himself next to twelve-foot-high Champagne fountains at his memorial service.

      Back in the crematorium at Westwind, as I waited for a pair of decedents to burn, I made lists of what I was going to offer at La Belle Mort Funeral Home: ashes turned into paintings, crushed into tattoo ink, made into pencils or hourglasses, shot out of a glitter cannon. My Belle Mort notebook had a simple black cover, but the front page was covered in pastel stickers of giant-eyed animals like something from a Margaret Keane painting. I thought it made the contents more upbeat, but in retrospect it probably increased the creepy factor tenfold.

      “What are you always writing over here?” Mike asked, peeking over my shoulder.

      “Never you mind, boss. It’s just the death revolution. Never you mind,” I replied with no irony, scribbling the outline of a potential funeral package where an ash-scattering yacht carried your family out into the San Francisco Bay as a string quartet played a movement from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.

      In my imagination, La Belle Mort appeared as the promised land of the postmodern designer funeral experience. Now that I had finally secured a real funeral job at Westwind, all I needed to do was get up every day and put on my ridiculously too-short pants and steel-toed boots and pay my dues in the trenches, burning bodies. If I worked hard enough no one could say I had never actually worked my way up through the death industry.

      There were other eight-year-olds in the world, and if I could make death safe, clean, and beautiful for them, my sins would be absolved, and I too would emerge from the crematorium fires cleansed.

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      TOOTHPICKS IN JELL-O

      Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world’s humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we’re at fourteen. The dead space this process out nicely so that the living hardly even notice they’re undergoing the transformation. Unless a celebrity or public figure dies, we tend to overlook the necro demographic as they slip away into history.

      Someone must take care of these corpses, who have become useless at caring for themselves. Someone must pick them up from homes and hospitals and transport them to the places we hide the bodies—mortuaries and coroners’ offices. In Dante’s Inferno the job fell to Charon, a shaggy-jowled, white-haired demon who piloted sinners by boat across the River Styx into hell.

      At Westwind Cremation, that job belonged to Chris.

      Chris was in his late fifties, tanned with a shock of white hair and sad basset-hound eyes. He was always impeccably clean and wore khakis and a button-down shirt—California formal wear. I took to him immediately. He reminded me of Leslie Nielsen, star of the Naked Gun movies, which were my favourite as a child.

      Chris’s voice was slow and monotonous. He was a bachelor—never married, never had children. He rented a small apartment he would return to in the evening to eat a bowl of ramen and watch Charlie Rose. Chris was pessimistic and borderline curmudgeonly, but in a way that brought me happiness, like watching a Walter Matthau movie.

      As the body-transport driver, Chris technically worked for Mike, even though he was older than his boss and had been in the funeral industry longer. Chris and Mike’s conversations were akin to old-time comedy routines. Chris would walk into Mike’s office and monologue in painstaking detail his planned driving route to pick up the recently deceased Mr. Kim in Berkeley, taking into account possible traffic, construction, and the evils of the modern world. Mike would grunt and half nod, elaborately ignoring him, focused on the computer screen, filing death certificates without really listening.

      Picking up a person who has died at home is known as a house call. Doctors may not make them any more, but morticians are happy to come, day or night. Protocol in the funeral industry says that one person may go alone to pick up bodies from hospitals, nursing homes, and the coroner’s office, but a team of two people must pick up a person who died at home. When a house call came in, I was to be Chris’s number two.

      I appreciated the two-person rule tremendously. The gurney was the most uncooperative, unyielding machine e’er created by man. It tried, in sinister fashion, to embarrass you in front of your boss by being clunky and useless at every turn. The gurney was the only thing in this world less cooperative than the dead bodies that were strapped to them. The thought of having to operate a gurney alone in someone’s private home was horrifying.

      THE FIRST HOUSE CALL I went on, a week into working at Westwind, was in South San Francisco. The deceased was Mrs. Adams, an African American woman in her late forties who had died of breast cancer.

      To pick up Mrs. Adams, Chris and I hopped into the van, his version of Charon’s boat. This particular van, which Chris had owned for more than twenty years, was a white, windowless box of a vehicle, the kind they featured in televised public service announcements to remind children not to accept lifts from strangers. Westwind owned its own removal van—much newer, dark-blue, designed and outfitted with special features for picking up the dead. But Chris liked routine. He liked his van.

      As we drove over the massive Bay Bridge connecting Oakland to San Francisco, I made the mistake of commenting on how beautiful the city looked that day.

      Chris was horrified. “Yeah,” he said, “but you live there, so you know once you get up close it’s just a noisy and dirty hell pit. It would be better if we just firebombed the whole city. That is—if we even make it across.”

      “What do you mean if we make it across?” I asked, still adjusting to the concept of firebombing.

      “Think about the way this bridge is built, Cat”—he called me Cat—“crammed up here on eighty-foot Douglas fir pilings just stuck in the mud. It’s like toothpicks in Jell-O, structurally. We’re just swaying up here. The legs could just snap in half like twigs any second,

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