Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (10 page)

“Hey, Bruce, how you doing?”

“You know how it is, girl, just another day. Just another day with the dead.”

Technically I was training to be a crematory operator under Mike, but Bruce had been the assistant embalming instructor at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, the embalming school that closed its doors not long after Westwind underbid them on the homeless-and-indigent-dead contract. Although there was no longer a mortuary school in San Francisco, Bruce still had the instructor in him and was eager to share the secrets of the trade. Not that he had
all
that much respect for mortuary schools these days. 

“Caitlin, when you learned this stuff in the old days it was an art,” he said. “Embalming meant preserving the body. I’m telling you, I’m beginning to wonder what they actually t
each
people at these mortuary colleges. Students come out of there who can’t even find a vein for drainage. Back in the ’70s, you worked on the bodies every day. Everything you did was bodies—bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies.”

There is a narrative, created mostly by the North American funeral industry, that situates modern embalming practices within an age-old tradition, an art form passed down through the millennia from the ancient Egyptians, original masters of corpse preservation. The present-day funeral director acts as the bearer of their ancient wisdom.

Needless to say, that narrative has a number of problems. Embalmers may claim their trade descended from the ancient Egyptians, but that neglects the quantum gap between the era of Tutankhamun and the time Americans began to perform embalmings in the early 1860s.

The embalming practiced by the ancient Egyptians was a
very
different animal from what is practiced down the street in your local funeral home. Some 2,500 years ago, bodies of the Egyptian elite were treated to an elaborate postmortem process that took months to complete. In contrast, the embalming at your funeral home takes three to four hours from start to finish. That is, if you’re lucky enough to get three to four hours of an embalmer’s time. Large funeral corporations have been buying up mom-and-pop mortuaries for years, keeping the mom-and-pop name the community trusts, but upping their prices and centralizing their embalming facilities. This gives body preparation the atmosphere of an assembly line, with embalmers pressured to knock out a completed corpse in record time.

The Egyptians embalmed for religious reasons, believing that every step of their process—from removing the brain through the nose with a long iron hook to placing the internal organs in animal-head vases called Canopic jars to drying the body out for forty days with natron salt—had profound significance. There are no brain hooks or organ-storage jars in modern North American embalming, which instead involves the removal of blood and fluids from the body cavity and replacing them with a mixture of strong preservative chemicals. More important, modern embalming was born not from religion but from stronger forces altogether—marketing and consumerism.

On this particular day, lying on Bruce’s embalming table, was a man of vastly different social station from the privileged citizens once embalmed by the Egyptians. His name was Cliff, a Vietnam War veteran who had died alone at the Veterans’ Administration (VA) Hospital in San Francisco. The US government pays for the embalming and burial (at a national cemetery) of veterans like Cliff—the men, and occasionally women, who die with no friends or family.

Bruce approached with a scalpel, bringing it down at the base of Cliff’s throat. “All right, now, first thing you have to do is get the blood out. Flush the system. Like flushing a radiator system in a car.”

Bruce made an incision. I was expecting blood to come gushing out like in a slasher film, but the wound was dry. “This guy isn’t exactly fresh; the VA keeps bodies for a long time,” Bruce explained, shaking his head in frustration.

Bruce showed me how to mix the salmon-pink cocktail that would replace Cliff’s blood: a blend of formaldehyde and alcohol splashed into a large glass tank. Bruce stuck his gloved fingers into the new hole in Cliff’s throat and sliced open the carotid artery, then inserted a small metal tube. The small tube connected to an even larger rubber tube. Bruce flipped a switch at the base of the tank and it began to vibrate and hum as the pink liquid burst through the tube, sending chemicals shooting through Cliff’s circulatory system. As the liquid flowed into his artery, the displaced blood spurted forth from Cliff’s jugular vein and slid down the table to the sink’s drain.

“Isn’t it dangerous, the blood just going down the drain like that?” I asked.

“Naw, it ain’t dangerous. You know what else goes in the sewer?” Bruce said. I had to admit, this made the blood less disgusting by comparison.

“That isn’t even that much blood, Caitlin,” he continued. “You should see when I embalm a case that’s been autopsied. You get
covered
in blood, and it’s not all nice and neat like on TV. It’s like with OJ.”

“Wait, like OJ Simpson? How is this like OJ?”

“Now, I’m a mortician right? Sometimes when I cut up people I get
covered
in blood. You get one of those arteries where blood is shootin’ out everywhere—well, you know how blood is. They said OJ cut up two people while they were still alive and walked out of there but there were only three drops of blood on the car?”

“OK, Bruce, but didn’t somebody have to kill them?” I asked.

“Whoever did that business had to be wearing a body suit from head to toe. When you get soaked with blood, that stuff don’t just wash off; it stains. Did you see the crime scene on CNN? That scene was a bloody mess. All I’m saying is there should have been a blood trail.”

While Bruce acted as forensic detective, he was, at the same time, gently soaping and massaging Cliff’s limbs to disperse the chemicals through his vascular system. It was a bizarre image, a grown man giving a corpse a sponge bath, but I by now I had grown accustomed to Westwind’s peculiar tableaux.

The tilt in the porcelain embalming table helped Cliff’s blood slide down into the drain as the formaldehyde solution diffused through his body. Formaldehyde, a colorless gas in its pure form, has been classified as a carcinogen. Cliff the corpse was long past caring about cancer, but Bruce was a sitting duck if he didn’t take proper precautions. The National Cancer Institute has found that funeral embalmers are at an increased risk for myeloid leukemia, abnormal growth in the bone-marrow tissue, and cancer of the blood. The irony is that embalmers make a living draining the blood of others, only to have their own blood mutiny against them.

What was happening to Cliff, this chemical preservation of the corpse, had no place in American death customs prior to the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. Death in America began as an entirely homegrown operation. A person would die in their own bed, surrounded by their family and friends. The corpse would be washed and shrouded by the man or woman’s closest living relations and laid out for several days in the home for a wake—a ritual named for the Old English word for “keeping watch,” not, as it is often believed, the fear that the corpse might suddenly wake up.

To prevent decomposition while the body remained at home, innovations like vinegar-soaked cloths and tubs of ice beneath the corpse were developed in the nineteenth century. During the wake there was food to be consumed, alcohol to be imbibed, and a sense of releasing the dead person from their place in the community. As Gary Laderman, scholar of American death traditions, put it, “Although the body had lost the spark that animated it, deeply rooted social conventions demanded that it be given proper respect and care from the living.”

During the wake, a wooden coffin was constructed either by the family or perhaps a local cabinetmaker. The hexagonal coffin was tapered at the bottom, indicating this was indeed a container for a dead human, unlike today’s rebrand of both the shape (a plain rectangle) and the name (casket). After several days had passed, the corpse was placed in the coffin and carried on the shoulders of family members to a nearby grave.

By the mid-nineteenth century bigger, industrial cities like New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston became large enough to support death industries. Unlike farms or small towns, large cities maintained specialized trades. Undertaking emerged as a profession, though the job entailed little more than selling funeral props and decorations. The local undertaker might build you a coffin, rent you a hearse or funeral carriage, or sell you mourning clothes or jewelry. They often took other jobs to supplement their income, leading to some amusing nineteenth-century ads: “John Jensen: Undertaker, Tooth Puller, Lamp Lighter, Frame Builder, Blacksmith, Cabinetmaker.”

Then came the American Civil War, the deadliest war in United States history. The Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, holds the dubious honor of having been the Civil War’s (and American history’s) single bloodiest day, during which 23,000 men died on the battlefield, their maggot-ridden corpses bloated amidst the equally bloated bodies of horses and mules. When the 137th Pennsylvania Regiment arrived four days later, its leader requested that his men be allowed to consume liquor as they buried the bodies, there being only one state in which it was possible to do the job: drunk.

During the four years of battles between the North and South, many of the soldiers’ families had no way to retrieve their dead sons and husbands from the battlefields. The corpses could be transported on trains, but after a few days in the Southern summer heat, the dead entered the deepest throes of decomposition. The smell emanating from a body left in the sun would have been far worse than a mere olfactory inconvenience.

According to the account of a doctor for the Union army, “during the battle of Vicksburg the two sides called for a brief armistice because of the stench of corpses disintegrating in the hot sun.” Transporting bodies hundreds of miles in this odious condition was a nightmare for train conductors, even the most patriotic among them. Railroads began refusing to transport bodies not sealed in expensive iron coffins—not a viable option for most families.

The situation brought out the entrepreneurial impulses of men, who, if a family could pay, would perform a new preservative procedure called embalming—right there on the battlefield. They followed the skirmishes and battles looking for work, America’s first ambulance chasers. Competition was fierce, with stories of embalmers burning down one another’s tents and placing advertisements in local papers reading, “Bodies Embalmed by Us NEVER TURN BLACK.” To market the effectiveness of their services, the embalmers would display real preserved bodies they had plucked from the unknown dead, propping the corpses up on their feet outside the tents to better demonstrate their talents.

The embalming tents on the battlefield often contained only a simple plank of wood atop two barrels. The embalmers injected chemicals into the arterial systems of the newly dead, their own special blends of “arsenicals, zinc chloride, bichloride of mercury, salts of alumina, sugar of lead, and a host of salts, alkalies, and acids.” Dr. Thomas Holmes, still regarded by many in the funeral industry as the patron saint of embalming, maintained that during the Civil War he personally embalmed more than 4,000 dead soldiers in this fashion, at the cost of $100 a body. The discount option, for those not inclined toward the highbrow methods of chemicals and injections, might be to eviscerate the internal organs and fill the body cavity with sawdust. Defiling the body in this way was considered a sin in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, but the desire to see the face of a loved one again sometimes trumped religious ideology.

The full evisceration of the body cavity is not so different from what is done today, minus the sawdust. Perhaps the dirtiest secret about the process of modern embalming is the occult use of a skinny, lightsaber-sized piece of metal known as the trocar. Bruce raised his trocar like the sword Excalibur and pushed its pointed tip into Cliff’s stomach, stabbing him just below his belly button. He jabbed the trocar in, breaking the skin, and went to work puncturing Cliff’s intestines, bladder, lungs, and stomach. The trocar’s job in the embalming process is to suck out any fluids, gases, and waste in the body cavity. The brown liquid slid up the trocar’s tube with an uncomfortable gurgling and sucking noise before splashing down the drain of the sink and into the sewers. Then the trocar reversed directions, no longer sucking but dumping more salmon-pink cocktail, of an even stronger chemical concentration this time, into the chest cavity and abdomen. If there had been any doubt Cliff was dead, the trocar dispelled it.

Bruce remained stoic as he violently jabbed Cliff with the trocar. Like Chris, who compared transporting bodies to “moving furniture,” Bruce saw embalming as a trade that he had mastered over many years. It wouldn’t do to be invested emotionally in every body. Bruce was able to perform this trocar work with no hesitation, all the while chatting with me like we were two old friends having a cup of coffee.

“Caitlin, you know what I need to figure out?” Stab. “Those damn doves. You know what I’m talking about, those white doves that they release at the funerals?” Stab. “That’s where the money is, for sure. I gotta get some doves.” Stab, stab, stab.

There was, no doubt, a practical element to the embalming procedures of the Civil War. Families wanted to see the bodies of their dead relatives—an important aspect of ritual and closure. Embalming provided that opportunity. Even today the process can still be helpful for the corpse-about-town. As Bruce put it, “Look, do you need embalming? No. But if you want him to have a big
Weekend at Bernie’s
–style day, moving to different services and churches around the city, that body better be embalmed.” But the procedure didn’t make sense for Cliff, who was going directly into the ground the next day at the veterans’ cemetery in Sacramento.

When we speak of embalming, the stakes are not small. Though there is no law that requires it, embalming is the primary procedure in North America’s billion-dollar funeral industry. It is the process around which the entire profession has revolved over the last 150 years. Without it, undertakers might still be the guys selling coffins, renting hearses, and pulling teeth on the side.