Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (11 page)

So how did we get to the place where we venerate embalming, decorating our dead as lurid, painted props on fluffy pillows, like poor Papa Aquino? The place where we embalm a man like Cliff as standard procedure, not bothering to question whether he needs it? Undertakers in the late nineteenth century realized that the corpse was their missing link to professionalism. The corpse could, and
would
, become a product.

Auguste Renouard, one of the earliest American embalmers, said in 1883 that “the public had once believed that any fool could become an undertaker. Embalming, however, makes people marvel at the ‘mysterious’ and ‘incomprehensible’ process of preservation, and made them respect the practitioner.”

During embalming’s early years, the public perceived the undertaker as a fool, since the profession required no national standards or qualifications. Roving “professors” traveled from town to town holding three-day courses that ended with the professor attempting to sell you embalming fluid from the manufacturer he represented.

But in just a few decades the embalmer went from a huckster making money on the battlefield to a “specialist.” Manufacturers of embalming chemicals aggressively marketed the image of the embalmer as a highly trained professional and a technical mastermind—an expert in both sanitation and the arts, creating beautiful corpses for public admiration. Nowhere else were art and science so expertly combined. Companies pled their case in trade magazines like
The Shroud
,
The Western Undertaker
, and
The Sunnyside
.

The new guard of embalming undertakers began to outline a new narrative: that with their technical training they protected the public from disease, and through their art they created a final “memory picture” for the family. Sure, they made money off the dead. But so did doctors. Did not embalmers also deserve to be paid for their good work? Never mind that corpses had been kept quite safely in the home, prepared by the family, for hundreds of years. Embalming was what made the professionals professional—it was the magic ingredient.

Shinmon Aoki, a modern undertaker in Japan, described being ridiculed by society for his job washing and casketing the dead. His family disowned him and his wife wouldn’t sleep with him because he was “defiled” by corpses. So Aoki purchased a surgical robe, mask, and gloves and began showing up to homes dressed in full medical garb. People began responding differently; they bought the image he was selling and called him “doctor.” The American undertaker had done something similar: by making themselves “medical” they became legitimate.

Watching Cliff go through the embalming process, I thought back to the Huang family’s witness cremation and the vow I’d made to be the one to cremate the members of my family.

“I’ve been thinking about this, Bruce,” I said, “and I think I could cremate my mother, but there’s no way in hell I could embalm her like this.”

To my surprise, he agreed. “No way,
no way
. Maybe you think you could, till you see her layin’ there
dead
on the table. You think you can slice your mom’s neck and get to the vein? Think you could trocar her? This is your
mother
we’re talking about. You’d have to be a tough sister to do that.”

Then Bruce stopped working, looked me in the eyes, and said something that made me think, and not for the last time, that he saw his work as more than a trade. Though he hid his ideas under a boisterous personality and get-rich-through-funeral-doves schemes, Bruce was a philosopher. “Think of it this way: your mom’s stomach is where you lived for nine months, it’s how you got into this world, it’s your origin, where you came from. Now you’re gonna trocar that? Stab her? Destroy where you came from? You really wanna go there?”

High in the mountains of Tibet, where the ground is too rocky for burial and trees too scarce to provide wood for cremation pyres, Tibetans have developed another method of dealing with their dead. A professional
rogyapa
, or body breaker, slices the flesh off the corpse and grinds the remaining bones with barley flour and yak butter. The body is laid out on a high, flat rock to be eaten by vultures. The birds swoop in, carrying the body in all different directions, up into the sky. It is a generous way to be disposed of, the leftover flesh nourishing other animals.

Every culture has death rituals with the power to shock the uninitiated and challenge our personal web of significance—from the Wari’ roasting the flesh of their fellow tribesmen to the Tibetan monk torn apart by the beaks of vultures to the long, silver trocar stabbing Cliff’s intestines. But there is a crucial difference between what the Wari’ did and the Tibetans do with their deceased compared to what Bruce did to Cliff. The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans
practice
embalming, but we do not
believe
in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.

If embalming were something a tradesman like Bruce would never perform on his own mother, I wondered why we were performing it on anyone at all.

DEMON BABIES

The nightmare revealer of madness unknown,

Of fetuses cooked for the Satanists’ feast,

Old witches look on as a baby reveals,

A stretch of her leg to the lust of the Beast.

C
HARLES
B
AUDELAIRE

Beacon Lights

When you graduate from college with a degree in medieval history, shockingly few employers come knocking at your door. Type “medieval” and “historian” into Craigslist, and the best career option you’ll find is mead wench at Medieval Times. Really, your only choice is to go to graduate school and spend another seven years toiling away among dusty piles of illuminated manuscripts from thirteenth-century France. You squint at the faded Latin and develop a hunched back and pray that you can trick a university into letting you teach.

A career in academia had occurred to me, but I had neither the intellect nor the stamina for it. It was a cold, harsh world outside the confines of the ivory tower, and all I had to show for my years of college was a fifty-page bachelor’s thesis titled: “In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory.”

My thesis—which at the time I considered to be my life’s great masterwork—centered on the late medieval witch trials. When I speak of witches, I don’t mean greeting-card Halloween witches with warts and black pointy hats. I mean women (and men) who were accused of sorcery in the late Middle Ages and then burnt at the stake. And those witches. The numbers are fuzzy, but lowball historical estimates have well over 50,000 people executed in western Europe for crimes of
maleficium
, the practice of harmful magic. And those 50,000 were just the people who were actually
executed
for witchcraft: burned, hanged, drowned, tortured, and so on. Countless more were accused of witchcraft and put on trial for their supposed crimes.

These people—the majority of whom were women—were not accused of simple, entry-level sorcery like lucky rabbits’ feet or love potions. They were accused of nothing less than making a pact with Satan to spread death and destruction. Since Europe was largely illiterate, the only way an aspiring witch could seal a deal with the devil was through a sexual act—an erotic signature, of sorts.

Beyond wantonly giving themselves to Satan at a black Mass, accused witches were thought to raise storms, kill crops, make men impotent, and take the lives of infants. Any uncontrollable event in medieval- and Reformation-era Europe might very well have been a witch’s doing.

It is easy for someone in the twenty-first century to be dismissive and declare, “Dang, those medieval folk are so crazy with their flying demonic minions and sex pacts.” Yet witchcraft was as real to medieval men or women as the Earth being round or smoking causing cancer is real to us. It didn’t matter whether they lived in a city or a small village, whether they were a lowly peasant farmer or the pope himself. They knew that there
were
witches and the witches
were
killing babies and crops and having lewd sex with the devil.

One of the best-known books of the 1500s was a witch-hunting manual by an inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer. The
Malleus Maleficarum
, or Hammer of the Witches, was the go-to guide for finding and getting rid of witches in your town. It is in this book that we learn, supposedly from a firsthand account of a witch in Switzerland, what witches did with the newborn infants:

This is the manner of it. We set our snares chiefly for unbaptized infants . . . and with our spells we kill them in their cradles or even when they are sleeping by their parents’ side, in such a way that afterwards [they] are thought to have been overlain or to have died some other natural death. Then we secretly take them from their graves, and cook them in a cauldron, until the whole flesh comes away from the bones to make a soup which may easily be drunk. Of the more solid matter we make an unguent which is of virtue to help us in our arts and pleasures and in transportation.

According to the confessions of accused witches—most of which were obtained through extensive torture—the malefactors did all manner of things with their murdered infants. A little boiling, a little roasting, a little drinking of their blood. Most popular was grinding their leftover bones into salves to rub on their broomsticks in order to make them fly.

I bring up the history of witches killing babies to illustrate that I was writing about dead babies before I had ever really seen one. When you begin a new part of your life, you think you’re leaving the older part behind. “To hell with you, medieval witchy academic theory; to hell with your death philosophy, you wonky pedantic bastards! No more writing things that no one will ever read; I live in practice now! I sweat and ache and burn bodies and reveal tangible results!” Really though, there is never a way to leave the past behind. My poor dead witch babies came right along with me.

As I mentioned, the first thing you notice when walking into the refrigeration unit at Westwind Cremation were the orderly stacks of brown cardboard boxes, each one labeled and filled with a recently (or not so recently) dead human. What you might
not
see at first are the adults’ tragic little doppelgängers, the babies. They are spread out on a separate metal shelf in the back corner, a little garden of sadness. The older babies are wrapped in thick blue plastic. When you remove the plastic, they often looked just as babies should—little stocking caps and heart pendants and mittens. “Just sleeping” . . . if they weren’t so cold.

The younger babies—fetuses, if we’re being more accurate—were no bigger than your hand. Too small for the blue plastic wrap, they float in plastic containers of brown formaldehyde like a middle school science experiment. In English, with our plentiful euphemisms for difficult subjects, we say a child like this is stillborn, but speakers of other languages are rather more blunt:
nacido muerto
,
totgeboren
,
mort-né—
“born dead.”

These babies arrived at the crematory from the largest hospitals in Berkeley and Oakland. The hospitals would offer parents a free cremation if their baby died in utero or shortly after birth. It’s a generous offer on the hospitals’ part: cremations for babies, while often discounted by funeral homes, can still run several hundred dollars. Regardless, it is the absolute last thing a mother wants the hospital to give her for free.

We would pick the babies up and bring them to our little garden: sometimes only three or four a week, sometimes quite a few more. We would cremate on a per-fetus basis and the hospitals would send us a check. Unlike the procedure for an adult, the hospitals would file the babies’ death certificates with the state of California before the bodies even arrived at our crematory. This kept us from having to ask a newly bereaved mother the required bureaucratic questions (“When was your last period? Did you smoke during your pregnancy? How many packs a day?”).

Once, when Chris was across the Bay in San Francisco picking up a body at the Coroner’s Office, Mike told me I was being sent to fetch the week’s babies. I asked Mike for very specific instructions. The job seemed horribly easy to mess up.

“You just pull the van up to the back loading dock and go into the nurses’ station and tell them you’re there for the babies. They should have the paperwork and stuff there; this one’s easy,” Mike promised.

Ten minutes later I pulled the van into the loading dock behind the hospital and removed my gurney. It was a bit of a farce to use a full-sized adult gurney for a few babies, but I didn’t think walking through the corridors with my arms filled with them was a particularly good plan either. I had an image of fumbling and dropping them, like a stressed-out mom carrying too many grocery bags to avoid the extra trip in from the car.