Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (12 page)

Per Mike’s instructions, my first stop was the nurses’ station. At this point, addressing the topic of death was still a struggle for me. My natural inclination when meeting new people is a warm smile and a little small talk, but when the goal is to collect baby corpses, any smile seems gauche and out of place. “How are you today? I’m here for the baby corpses. By the way, girl, your earrings are
fabulous.
” On the other hand, if you keep your head bowed and your hands crossed and glumly state your reason for being there, you become the creepy girl from the funeral home. A delicate balance is required: happy but not
too
happy.

After the nurses conferred and decided I had the proper authority to abscond with the babies, I was escorted by security to the hospital morgue. The security guard was a stern woman who knew my dastardly purpose and would have none of it. After several botched attempts and small slams into the wall, I successfully wheeled my gurney into the elevator and we began our awkward descent to the morgue.

The guard’s first question was reasonable: “Why do you have that gurney?”

“Well,” I replied, “you know, um, for the babies—to get them out?”

Her reply was quick: “The other guy brings a little cardboard box. Where’s the other guy?”

A cardboard box
. Bloody genius. A discreet, portable, and
sensible
multi-baby conveyance. Why had Mike not mentioned this? I had failed already.

The security guard unlocked the morgue to let me in and stood there with her arms crossed, her distaste palpable. The rows of identical stainless-steel coolers gave me no inkling of where the babies might be hiding. As much as it pained me, I was forced to inquire where they were.

“You don’t know?” came her response. She slowly raised a single finger, pointing to a cooler. She proceeded to watch as I removed the babies one by one and strapped them to the gurney in the most nonsensical way possible. I silently prayed my fairy deathmother would magically turn my gurney into a cardboard box or a milk crate or
something
so I wouldn’t have to roll these formaldehyde fetuses down the hall on a gurney made for a full-sized adult.

I thought I was going to be able to slink away with my babies, head hung low but dignity intact. And then, she dealt the final blow: “Ma’am, you’re gonna need to sign for those.” Had I remembered to bring a pen? No, no I had not.

Noticing several pens hanging from the guard’s shirt pocket, I asked, “Well, could I borrow your pen?” Then came the look—perhaps the most derisive, scornful look that has ever been directed at me. As if I had personally taken the lives of each one of these infants with zero regret.

“Maybe when you take those gloves off,” she said, looking at my hand, still covered with baby-transferring rubber gloves.

To be fair, I’m not sure I would want to hand over my pen (precious commodity in a bureaucracy like an American hospital) to a girl who had just been handling baby corpses. But the way she said it gave me palpable knowledge of this woman’s fear of death. It didn’t matter how many times I smiled at her, expressed my new-on-the-job status with bumbling Hugh Grant–esque apologies. This woman had decided that I was dirty and deviant. Handmaiden to the underworld. Her regular duties as a security guard didn’t faze her, but these trips to the morgue were too much. I removed the gloves, signed the release papers, and pushed the babies out to my van, a sad excuse for a final stroller ride.

Infant cremations were carried out in much the same way as adult cremations. We logged their names, if they even had names. Often they would be labeled only as “Baby Johnson” or “Baby Sanchez.” It was sadder when they had full names, even when they were something terrible, like Caitlin spelled KateLynne. Full names showed how ready their parents were for them to be born and become a part of the family.

There is no mechanical loading device to deposit babies neatly into the chamber’s fiery arms, as there is for adults. You, the crematory operator, had to perfect the toss: the baby leaving your hand and coming to rest right below the main flame as it shot down from the ceiling of the retort. You had to make sure the baby landed in the sweet spot. With practice, you came to be very good at it.

Baby cremations were done at the end of the workday. The bricks lining the chamber grew so hot by the end of the day that the tiny babies practically cremated themselves. It was not uncommon for Mike to ask me to forgo cremating another adult and “knock out a couple of babies” before the end of the day.

Adults could take hours to cremate, including the cremation itself and the cool-down process. Babies cremated in twenty minutes, tops. I found myself setting goals:
All right, Caitlin, it’s what? Three fifteen p.m.? I bet you can do five babies before five o’clock. C’mon, girl, five before five. You get after that goal!

Appalling? Absolutely. But if I let myself be sucked into the sorrow surrounding each fetus—each wanted but wasted tiny life—I’d go crazy. I’d end up like the security guard from the hospital: humorless and afraid.

I was a big proponent of unwrapping the larger babies, the ones kept in the blue plastic. I opened them not to gawk or engage in macabre curiosity. It just seemed wrong to not look at them—to toss them in like they never existed, like it was easier to pretend they were medical waste, hardly worth a second thought.

More than once I opened the plastic and received the garish surprise of a deformity: an enlarged head, overlapping eyes, a twisted mouth. In Europe before the Enlightenment, deformities aroused all manner of colorful explanations, including the mother’s corrupt nature or the combination of the mother and father’s evil thoughts. The child’s monstrosity was a reflection of its parents’ sin.

Ambroise Paré gave a long list of reasons for birth defects in his mid-sixteenth-century treatise
Des monstres et prodiges
: the wrath of God, an excess of semen, problems of the womb, and immodest cravings of the mother. These reasons seem irrelevant today, unless you count serious drug abuse while pregnant as an “immodest craving” (which may indeed describe it perfectly).

Many such babies were clearly unwanted, their mere existence a burden. They were not all the precious apples of their parents’ eyes who happened to go wrong somewhere in the biological trip from fetus to baby. Oakland has a much higher poverty rate than California as a whole—there are drugs, there are gangs. The babies came to Westwind in all colors and races; nefarious behavior touches many communities in Oakland.

The deformed babies stared up with twisted features. I always wondered if they were the victims of the cruel caprices of biology or the products of mothers whose addictions and lifestyles were unstoppable even with a child growing inside them. It did no good to try to guess which was correct, though sometimes insight came months later when, after multiple phone calls, there was still no one willing to come pick up the baby’s ashes.

I only wept once. It was for an older infant. I went into the office one afternoon to ask Mike what I could do while I waited for my current victims to cremate. His reply was, “You know actually, you could maybe . . . yeah, you know what, never mind.”

“Wait, what do you mean, never mind?” I asked.

“I was gonna say you should go shave the hair off that baby, but don’t worry, I’m not gonna make you do that.”

“No, I can do it!” I said, still frantic to prove my death-acceptance moxie.

The baby, a girl, was already eleven months old when she died of a heart defect. She was heavy, fully identifiable as a creature of the world. Her parents wanted her hair before she was cremated, hopefully to save and put in a locket or ring in the style of the Victorians. I admired the way people used to make beautiful jewelry and mementos out of the hair of the dead. We’ve lost that tradition somewhere along the way, and it is now considered gross to keep any part of the dead, even something as harmless as hair.

I had to cradle this infant’s little body in my arms by logistical necessity, it being the best angle to clip and shave the tiny blond curls from her head. I put the locks in an envelope and walked the baby into the crematory. As I stood before the cremation machine, about to place her in, all of a sudden I started to cry—a rarity in this industrial work environment where efficiency is essential.

Why did this particular baby fill me with such woe?

Maybe it was because I had just shaved her head and wrapped her in a blanket and was about to consign her to the cremation flames, performing a hallowed ritual from some imaginary place. A place where a young woman is chosen to collect dead babies, shave their heads, and then burn them for the good of society.

Maybe it was because she was beautiful. With little bow lips and chubby cheeks, she looked like a 1950s Gerber baby in every way it is possible to look like the Gerber baby while also being dead.

Maybe she acted as a symbol for every other baby I didn’t cry for. Those I didn’t have time to cry for if I wanted to do my job and cremate five before five.

Or maybe it was because her blue eyes reminded me in some primal, narcissistic way of myself, and the fact that I somehow lived not to
be
cremated but to cremate. My heart beat and hers did not.

I could see why Mike wanted to delegate the baby-hair shaving to me, even if he hesitated to make the request. Mike had a son of his own, an angelic five-year-old boy. The process of cremating children was hard enough for a childless twenty-three-year-old, but it had to be torture for a loving father. He never said it, but there were times when his veneer would crack ever so slightly, when you could see that it affected him.

Months had passed with me believing Mike was pure hard-ass. But the ogre Mike I had created in my head wasn’t anything close to the actual Mike. Actual Mike had a New-Agey wife named Gwaedlys, an adorable young child, and an organic garden in his backyard. He had taken the job at the crematory after years of working to secure amnesty for refugees. I viewed him as an ogre because no matter how hard I worked he remained stern, unimpressed by my efforts. It wasn’t that Mike gave me negative feedback, but the absence of feedback was just as crippling for an insecure millennial. I projected onto him the fear that a weakling like me couldn’t handle the work, couldn’t handle the real death I had been so desperate to be in the presence of.

I asked Bruce about Mike not wanting to handle the babies. He looked at me like I was crazy for even asking. “Well, yeah, duh Mike wants you to do it; he’s got a kid. You don’t have a kid. You see your baby in that baby. When you get older your own mortality starts to creep in on you. Watch out, children are going to bother you the older you get,” he said, as if in warning.

When my Gerber baby was done cremating, all that was left of her—all that was left of any of the babies we cremated—was a tiny pile of ash and bone fragments. The bones of a baby are too small to be reduced to powder in the same Cremulator (bone grinder) used for adults. But cultural expectations (and again, the law) dictated that we couldn’t return a tiny sack of identifiable, obvious bones to the parents either. So after the bones cooled down, each baby had to be “processed” by hand. Using a small piece of metal like a wee pestle, I ground their little femurs and skull fragments until they were uniform. The bones produced maybe an eighth of a cup of cremated remains, but the parents could bury them, put them in a mini urn, scatter them, hold them in their hands.

I had written my thesis on medieval witches accused of roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. A year later I found myself literally roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. The tragedy of the women who were accused of witchcraft was that they never actually ground the bones of babies to help them fly to a midnight devil’s Sabbath. But they were unjustly killed for it anyway, burned alive at the stake. I, on the other hand, did grind the bones of babies. Often I was thanked by their poor parents for my care and concern.

Things change.

DIRECT DISPOSAL

M
ark Nguyen was only thirty years old when he died. His body was under cold storage awaiting an autopsy at the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office when his mother arrived to arrange his cremation at Westwind.

“For the death certificate—was Mark married, Mrs. Nguyen?”

“No, dear, he wasn’t.”

“Did he have children?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“And what was Mark’s most recent career?”

“No, he didn’t have one of those. He never worked.”

“I’m so sorry Mrs. Nguyen,” I said, thinking a woman with a dead thirty-year-old son would be understandably destroyed.

“Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head in resignation, “trust me, it’s for the best.”

Mrs. Nguyen had done her mourning for her son long ago: when he first started using drugs, first went to jail, had his first . . . second . . . sixth relapse. Every time Mark went missing she worried he had overdosed. Just two days earlier she had found Mark dead on the floor in a rent-by-the-hour motel room in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. After discovering his body, she no longer had to worry. Her worst fears had come true—and she was relieved.