Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (29 page)

Halfway to Los Angeles, I stopped for the night at a small boarding house in the seaside town of Cambria. This was one of my favorite places in California, but I was filled with anxiety that I couldn’t place.

In 1961, a paper in the
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
laid out the seven reasons humans fear dying:

1.  My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends.

2.  All my plans and projects would come to an end.

3.  The process of dying might be painful.

4.  I could no longer have any experiences.

5.  I would no longer be able to care for my dependents.

6.  I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death.

7.  I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.

The anxiety I felt was no longer caused by the fear of an afterlife, of pain, of a void of nothingness, or even a fear of my own decomposing corpse.
All my plans and projects would come to an end.
The last thing preventing me from accepting death was, ironically, my desire to help people accept death.

I dined at Cambria’s one Thai restaurant and walked back to the boarding house. The streets were quiet and empty. Through the thick fog, I could barely make out a sign above the road: cemetery, 1 mile. I strode up the hill, walking straight down the center of the road with big, bold steps—bigger and bolder than my cardiovascular health should have allowed for. The full moon peeked out from the clouds, lighting up the pine trees and causing the fog to glow an eerie white.

The road came to an abrupt end at the Cambria Cemetery, est. 1870. Stepping over the small metal chain, a rather ineffectual deterrent against trespassers, I walked down through the rows of graves. To my left the leaves crunched, breaking the silence. Standing on the path in front of me was an enormous buck, its antlers framed in the mist. We stood looking at each other for several moments.

The comedian Louis C.K. talks about how “mysterious and beautiful” deer
seem
until you live in the country and deer are shitting in your yard and causing highway accidents. But this night, framed majestically in the fog, you had better believe that damn deer appeared like a spiritual messenger.

The buck slipped past the headstones and back into the trees. I was exhausted. No matter how bold my steps had been in the climb up to the cemetery, it was adrenaline that could not be sustained. I almost fell to the ground, mercifully covered in soft pine needles, and leaned against a tree between Howard J. Flannery (1903–1963) and a grave marked only with a small metal sign reading
A SOARING SPIRIT, A PEACEFUL HEART.

I sat next to Howard J. Flannery for so long that the fog lifted. The full moon stood out crisp and white and thousands of stars appeared against the black sky.

It was complete, silver silence. Not a cricket, not a breath of wind, just the moon and the old headstones. I thought of the things that culture teaches us to fear about a being in a cemetery at night. A floating specter appearing, its demon red eyes aglow. A zombie pushing its bloated, decaying hand out of a nearby grave. Organ music swelling, owls hooting, gates creaking. They seemed like cheap gimmicks; any one of them would have shattered the stillness and perfection of death. Maybe we create the gimmicks precisely for that reason, because the stillness itself is too difficult to contemplate.

At the moment I was alive with blood coursing through my veins, floating above the putrefaction below, many potential tomorrows on my mind. Yes, my projects could lie fragmented and unfinished after my death. Unable to choose how I would die physically, I could only choose how I would die mentally. Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.

     
Acknowledgments
     

It takes a village to raise a death book. Is this a thing people say? It should be. If you’ll indulge me, there are people to whom tremendous credit is due.

The wonderful team at W. W. Norton, so good at their jobs it makes me uncomfortable. Ryan Harrington, Steve Colca, Erin Sinesky-Lovett, Elisabeth Kerr, and countless others.

Special thanks to Tom Mayer, my editor, who never coddled me and took stern issue with my adverbs. Bless you and your children’s children, Tom Mayer.

The Ross Yoon Agency, especially Anna Sproul-Latimer, who did coddle me, holding my hand like a wee babe in the woods through all parts of this process.

My parents John & Stephanie Doughty, upstanding folk who love and support their daughter even when she’s chosen a life-in-death. Mom, I’m probably not going to win that Oscar . . . so this is it.

I’m loath to think of the poor-sad-no-good-pathetic thing I would be without David Forrest and Mara Zehler.

I realize this book makes it seem like I have no friends. I do, uh . . . promise. They are brilliant, thoughtful people all over the world who went, “You’re going to be a mortician? Yeah, that makes sense.”

Some of those friends were the keen eyes that read and reread this bloated beast through years of drafts: Will C White, Will Slocombe, Sarah Fornace, Alex Frankel, and Usha Herold Jenkins.

Bianca Daalder-van Iersel and Jillien Kahn, both of whom did great things to keep my brain intact and functioning. Paola Caceres, who provided the same service in mortuary school.

Lawyer-extraordinaire Evan Hess, for keeping me out of real bad things.

The members of the Order of the Good Death and the alternative death community at large, who inspire me daily to do better work.

Dodai Stewart at Jezebel, a big reason people care.

Finally, the men who ushered me into the death industry and taught me how to be an ethical, hard-working funeral director: Michael Tom, Chris Reynolds, Bruce Williams, and Jason Bruce. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was out in the cold, harsh death world that I realized just how good I had it at the safe, professional, and well-run funeral home I’ve called Westwind.

     
Notes on Sources
     

The Caribbean American writer Audre Lorde wrote, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Writing this book was a six-year exercise in taking ideas from philosophers and historians, mixing them with my own experience working in death, and attempting to make them, somehow, felt.

Many of the texts that had a huge influence are only cited briefly in the final book. Please visit the original texts, especially those of Ernest Becker, Philippe Ariès, Joseph Campbell, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Viktor Frankl. It will do wonders to advance your relationship with death and mortality.

While working at the crematory I kept a secret blog called Salon of Souls, which caught me as I was in 2008, and didn’t allow me to revise history.

I was fortunate in having the full support of my coworkers at the crematory: Michael, Chris, and Bruce. Not only did they allow me to use their real names, they agreed to sit down for interviews and multiple follow-ups as the book was written. I hope my tremendous respect for these men and what they do comes across as you read.

Through the Order of the Good Death, I am lucky to know the best death academics and funeral professionals working today. Their access to resource libraries, real-world experience, and large pools of arcane and morbid knowledge has been invaluable.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Becker, Ernest.
The Denial of Death.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.

Wales, Henry G. “Death Comes to Mata Hari.” International News Service, October 19, 1917.

SHAVING BYRON

Tennyson, Lord Alfred.
In Memoriam: An Authoritative Text.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

PUPPY SURPRISE

Ball, Katharine. “Death Benefits.”
San Francisco Bay Guardian
, December 15, 1993.

Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.”
Encounter
5, no. 4 (1955): 49–52.

Iserson, Kenneth V.
Death to Dust? What Happens to Dead Bodies
. Galen Press, 1994.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Annabel Lee.” In
The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
New York: Random House, 2012.

Solnit, Rebecca.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.
New York: Penguin, 2010.

Suzuki, Hikaru.
The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

THE THUD

Campbell, Joseph.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Doughty, Caitlin. “Children & Death.”
Fortnight
(2011), fortnightjournal.com/caitlin-doughty/262-children-death.html.

Laderman, Gary.
The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

May, Trevor.
The Victorian Undertaker
. Oxford, UK: Shire Publications Ltd, 1996.

TOOTHPICKS IN JELL-O

Ariès, Philippe.
The Hour of Our Death
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Connolly, Ceci
. “
A Grisly but Essential Issue.”
The Washington Post
, June 9, 2006.

Dante.
The Inferno
. Translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.

Orent, Wendy.
Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Stackhouse, John. “India’s Turtles Clean Up the Ganges.”
Seattle Times,
October 1, 1992.

PUSH THE BUTTON

Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “The Chronology of the Middle Paleolithic of the Levant.” In
Neandertals and Modern Humans in Western Asia
. New York: Plenum Press, 1998.