Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (15 page)

Where decomposition has begun and excess fluid abounds, the dreaded “skin slip” becomes a real possibility. Its technical name is desquamation, but in practice it is called skin slip, a phrase that can be given credit for calling it like ya see it. The decomposition process had caused gas and pressure to build up inside Elena, her skin to loosen, and the top layer of skin to slip away, like it wanted to abandon ship. If this situation happened to a living person, the skin would eventually regrow and regenerate. For Elena, this was it: until cremation her skin would remain fresh, pink, and covered in a thin layer of slime.

It was safe to say that Elena’s body would not look like her irate daughter imagined it would. Yet Westwind Cremation & Burial had absolutely no right to keep Elena Ionescu locked in our refrigeration unit. Corpses, by law, are quasi-property. Elena’s family
owned
her dead body until burial or cremation. Which leads us to another popular reason to sue funeral homes—lawsuits arise after some scorned funeral director illegally holds a dead body as corpse collateral until the family can pay.

If Elena’s daughter said, “Hand her over this instant, I’m putting Mother in the backseat of my car and driving away from this Godless place,” I would have done it, no questions asked. There were days when I might have applauded such a decision.

“Ms. Ionescu, I’m sorry. You’re absolutely welcome to go elsewhere, I encourage you to call around. But I think that you will find the hundred-and seventy-five-dollar charge to be the case wherever you go in the area,” I said, making one last pitch.

“I guess we don’t have a choice, do we?” she replied, her rings clanking together as she signed her name at the bottom of the contract.

Two hours later, Elena Ionescu was laid out before me on the preparation-room table, about to be made “natural” for her viewing the next day. It is a not-so-well-kept funeral industry secret that the processes used to make someone appear natural are often highly
unnatural
.

I stood in front of the same metal cabinet where several months prior Mike had presented me with my first corpse-shaving razor. I pulled out two “eye caps,” which looked like small plastic spaceships, rounded and flesh-colored. The tiny spikes sticking up from the plastic made it look like a miniature Inquisition-era torture device. The purpose of the eye caps was twofold: first, by placing a cap under Elena’s eyelid, her eyes would appear rounded, masking the sunken, flattened eyeballs hiding below; second, the torture spikes served the important function of catching the back of the eyelids, preventing them from floating up into a postmortem wink.

With Q-tips and cotton I cleaned out Elena’s nose, ears, and mouth—a deeply unpleasant task. In the last throes of life, basic hygiene is often ignored. This is reasonable, but reason does not make the aftermath any less abhorrent. In moving the corpse, there is always a chance there may be a sudden burst of “purge”—a frothy, reddish-brown liquid expunged from the lungs and stomach. I did not envy nurses, whose living patients produced these disagreeable fluids every day.

Without her dentures, which had been left soaking in a glass by her hospital bed, Elena’s lips had rolled in on empty gums. To counteract this, we used a mouth former, a curved piece of plastic that looked like a larger (mouth-shaped) eye cap. I gently lifted her upper lip to insert the mouth former, but the device was far too big for an elderly woman. It made her look like an ape, or a football lineman wearing a mouth guard. Appalled, I quickly removed it and trimmed it down with a heavy pair of scissors.

Next came the needle injector. The needle injector was a mouth-closing gun, a metal device used to shoot wires into the decedent’s gums so they could be tied together to hold the mouth shut. I began by choosing a sharp pin with a long wire attached to the end, like a tiny metal tadpole. It was placed into the tip of a large metal needle, which shot the barb into the top and bottom gums. Our injector at Westwind was of somewhat shoddy quality, a bit rusty. It didn’t inject with the level of oomph one would desire. This meant I had to climb on top of Elena and use my whole body weight to inject the wires with a mighty “Hoo-AH!”

At ninety years old, Elena was lacking in the gums department, necessitating several tries to get the barbs to stay put. Once the barbs were lodged in place, the two wire tadpole tails were twisted together through the plastic of the mouth former, bringing the upper and lower jaw together.

If all these tricks failed and the eyes or mouth still insisted on falling open, there was always the secret weapon: superglue. We used those little green tubes of liquid magic for everything. Even if, by some miracle, the eye caps and needle injector worked as intended, it was wise to reinforce. Milky blue eyes and exposed gums were not what the family wanted, but they were less terrifying than catching an unwanted glimpse of the flesh-toned spiked plastic or the thick tadpole wires that now held their loved one’s face intact.

Once the Ionescu family had resigned themselves to paying the “one last time” charge, they came back to Westwind with a set of clothes so we could dress Elena for her visitation. Not only had Elena’s edema swelled her to twice her normal size, her family—like many families—had brought in clothes from her fashionable, svelte past. There is a reason why the newspaper obituary pages are littered with glamour shots, wedding pictures, and portraits from long-ago debutante balls. We want people to remain forever in their prime like a beautiful rosy-cheeked Kate Winslet meeting Leonardo DiCaprio in
Titanic
heaven decades after the ship had sunk.

Mike had to help me squeeze Elena into her opulent, Glasnost-era eastern European dress. He had a bag of helpful tricks, e.g., saran-wrapping her arms like a 1950s B-picture mummy. But the odyssey was not yet complete. As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year-old deceased Romanian woman with edema, your answer should be no.

“Mike,” I said with a sigh, “we know her lower half is going to be covered with the sheets during the visitation. I hate to say it, but we could probably forego the stockings.”

Mike, to his credit as a professional, wasn’t having it. “Nope, the family paid for the dressing and viewing, man. We can get these on.”

As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of “dignity.” Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening’s performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion.

Service Corporation International, the largest American funeral home and cemetery corporation, based in Houston, Texas, has even managed to trademark dignity. Go to any of their “Dignity Memorial®” facilities, and that pesky ® shows up every time, subtly letting you know they’ve cornered the market on postmortem poise.

At Elena’s visitation the next morning, her daughter pulled her hair and howled in grief. It was a genuine, haunting sound that I wanted to take in and appreciate as profound. But all I could focus on was the gnawing fear that an eye would slide open or a saran-wrapped arm would spring a leak. Elena looked pretty put-together, considering. Nevertheless, the farce of the experience had gotten to me. They say you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig. The same holds true for a dead body. Put lipstick on a corpse and you’ve played dress-up with a corpse.

The Monday after Elena Ionescu’s viewing, I came to work to find that, over the weekend, both cremation machines had received glorious new floors, smooth as a baby’s bottom. Joe, the crematory owner, put in a brief appearance to crawl inside the retort chamber with concrete, rebar, and proverbial balls of steel to complete the job himself. Mind you, I still had never met him, and this little weekend project fueled his legendary status in my mind, as I couldn’t fathom a living person wriggling himself (voluntarily!) into the cremation chamber. Prior to resurfacing, the floors had begun to resemble the topography of the Alps. Large chunks of concrete dislodged themselves from years of wear and tear. With the floors in this condition, sweeping out the bones and ashes had become a test of dexterity and will that outstripped the job description. With these new floors I could rake the bones out with graceful, luxurious strokes, and without even breaking a sweat.

Day one of freshly floored machines went off without a hitch. Day two began with me loading in Mrs. Greyhound. In marked contrast to her sleek surname, Mrs. Greyhound was a pleasantly plump woman in her eighties. Her permed white hair and soft hands reminded me of my paternal grandmother, a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in small-town Iowa who raised seven children and made cinnamon rolls from scratch. One summer when I was a child, I visited her in Iowa and was awoken in the middle of the night to find her crying in the dark living room because she knew “that there are some people who don’t know the love of Jesus.” My grandmother had died almost ten years before I began working at Westwind, but only my father had been able to fly back to Iowa for the funeral. It was easy to see your own grandmother in people . . . well, bodies . . . like Mrs. Greyhound.

Using the principles of Cremation 101, Mrs. Greyhound went in at the beginning of the day, when the cremation retorts were still cool. We needed the cremation chambers stone cold in the morning to accommodate our larger men and women. Without a cold chamber, the flesh would burn up too quickly, going up the smokestack in thick, dark puffs, potentially summoning the fire department. People with additional body fat (such as the zaftig Mrs. Greyhound) were cremated first, while smaller, older ladies with zero body fat (and babies) were generally saved for the end of the day.

I loaded Mrs. Greyhound into the cold retort and went about my morning business. When I returned moments later, there was smoke pouring out the door. Billowing, black smoke. I made my “assessing an emergency situation” noise, a cross between a choke and scream, and ran to get Mike in his front office.

“Oh shit, the floor,” he said, steely-eyed.

Mike and I came screeching around the corner back into the crematory. At that same moment, from the chute where the bones are swept out, came a sluice of
gushing molten fat
. Mike pulled out the bone-collecting container, roughly the size of a large shoebox, to find a pool of what had to have been a gallon of opaque slop. And it kept coming. And coming. The two of us replaced container after container at the bottom of the bone chute like we were bailing out a leaky boat.

Mike ran the containers to the prep room, washing the fat down the same drain as the blood from the embalming process. Meanwhile I plunked down on the floor with a pile of rags, sopping and swabbing up the fat as it cascaded out.

Mike kept apologizing, the first time Mike had apologized for anything in my whole time at the crematory. Even he was on the verge of heaving after the tenth round of smoke, heat, scrub, swab, repeat.

“It’s the floor,” he said, defeated.

“The floor? The beautiful new retort floor?” I said.

“The old floor had all those craters, the fat could pool there and burn up later in the cremation. Now the fat has nowhere to go, so it’s gliding out the front door.”

When at last the situation was under control, I looked down to find my dress stained with warm human fat. (Would you call this color burnt sienna, or is it more of a marigold? I wondered.) I was sweaty, defeated, and drenched in lard, but I felt alive.

Cremation was supposed to be the “clean” option, bodies sanitized by fire into a pile of inoffensive ashes, but Mrs. Greyhound would not go, as Dylan Thomas said, gentle into that good night. We did not succeed in making her disposal tidy, despite all the tools of the modern death industry, the hundreds of thousands of dollars of industrial machinery. I wasn’t sure we should be trying as hard as we were for the perfect death. After all, “success” meant using all the plastic and wires to present the idealized corpse of Elena Ionescu. “Success” meant dead bodies taken from their families by professionals whose job was not ritual but obfuscation, hiding the truths of what bodies are and what bodies do. For me, Mrs. Greyhound blew the truth of the matter wide open: Death should be
known.
Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.

“Jesus, do you need, like, a dry-cleaning stipend or something?” Mike asked, standing over me.

I cackled helplessly, sitting on the crematory floor in my fat-stained dress, my legs sprawled in front of me, surrounded by rags. It was a moment of release. “I think this dress is done, man. You can buy me lunch or something. Fucking hell.”

I was horrified that this had happened to Mrs. Greyhound, but it would be a lie to describe the experience as anything less than exhilarating, the repulsive going hand in hand with the wondrous.

My work at Westwind had given me access to emotions I didn’t know I was capable of. I would start laughing or crying at the drop of a damn hat. Crying at a particularly beautiful sunset or a particularly beautiful parking meter, it didn’t matter.

It felt as if my life up to this point was spent living within a tiny range of sensations, rolling back and forth like a pinball. At Westwind that emotional range was blasted apart, allowing for ecstasy and despair like I had never experienced.

Everything I was learning at Westwind I wanted to shout from the rooftops. The daily reminders of death cast each day in more vivid tones. Sometimes in mixed company I would share the story of molten fat or some other cringe-inducing tale from the crematory. People performed their scandalized reactions but I felt less and less connected to their revulsion. The most salacious stories—bones ground in a metal blender or torture-spike eye caps—had the power to disrupt people’s polite complacency about death. Rather than denying the truth, it was a revelation to embrace it, however disgusting it might sometimes be.