Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (23 page)

A:  Oh hell yeah.

These candidates’ qualifications aside, Mike eventually hired Jerry, a tall, attractive African American man. Ironically, Jerry had previously worked for the removal service. He was one of the removal “goons” Mike swore up and down he would never hire just a few weeks prior. I guess when your other candidate’s experience is having played “with the wigy board once,” it shifts your perspective.

The week before I left, Chris’s clunker of a white van was in the shop. I made the mistake of referring to his much-loved van as such. “Clunker? Young lady, don’t insult her integrity. She’s been with me for twenty years,” he said. “She’s my Great White Whale, the beast that drags down careless men.”

I dropped Chris off at his parents’ home. The house was high up in the Berkeley Hills, where his family has lived since the 1950s. “Cat, I want to show you something,” he said, leading me to the base of a tree in the center of the front yard. It was a coastal redwood, maybe fifty feet tall and twenty feet around.

“My mother died when I was really young, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. After my mom died, Grandma gave me one of these leaves and told me that if I planted it in the ground a tree would grow from it. It sounded ridiculous, but I planted the leaf in a Maxwell House coffee container and gave it three cups of water every morning. And here she is,” he said, lovingly patting the base of the tree. “This is my tree. If you ask me what my greatest accomplishment in this world is—well, here you have it.”

He continued: “Of course, it’s so big now that the roots are starting to push into the neighbor’s driveway. Any day now she’s going to call the city and have them come tear out everything that’s on her property and the whole tree will die. Rot and collapse. I have nightmares about that.”

So much for sentimentality.

To my surprise, the staff at Westwind held a party in honor of my departure. Everyone was there. Chris, who didn’t much care for parties, left early, but not before giving me a plastic party bag covered in pastel balloons. The only thing inside was a dried up coconut.

“It’s . . . a coconut? Thanks, Chris.”

“In 1974, when I was living in Hawai’i, my friend threw that coconut into the backseat of my orange Pinto. He said, ‘That’s an important coconut. Keep it, and take it with you wherever you go.’ So I did. And now I’m giving it to you.”

Leave it to Chris to imbue a thirty-five-year-old coconut in a party bag with profundity. I was touched. I gave him an awkward hug.

“Bye, Cat,” he said, and walked out.

Later that evening, when I was about two and a half sheets to the wind, Mike and Bruce got me into a conversation about work. (None of us really had much to talk about apart from work.) But this wasn’t the usual chitchat about the asshole who worked at a competing crematory or the difficult case last week, it was about the existential stuff, the stuff I had wanted to talk about for so long.

Bruce told the story of an arrangement he had made with a pregnant woman ten years prior. She had told him the arrangement was for her baby. “When she came in I said to her, ‘That’s a shame about your baby, but you’re lucky you’re pregnant, and gonna have another child.’ But the baby she was making arrangements for was the baby in her stomach. It had died and they couldn’t take it out yet. That baby was eight months old. That tripped me out. She’s sitting in front of me with a dead baby in her. That was messed up. All these years I remember that. To this day, man. That’s why there’s so many alcoholics and drug addicts in the mortuary business, so you can forget about what’s going on.”

Mike leaned his head against the wall, not looking at me directly. Then, sincerely, as if he really wanted an answer, he asked, “Aren’t there times when the sadness gets to you?”

“Well, I—”

“When the family is so sad and lost, and you can’t do anything to help them?”

I thought I saw tears in his eyes. It was dark. I can’t be sure. Mike was human after all—another soul coping with the strange, hidden world of death, trying to do his job and figure out what it all meant.

As desperate as I had been for someone to talk to about these very things, in the moment all I could do was mumble, “I guess so. It is what it is, right?”

“Sure it is. Good luck in L.A.,” he said.

And with that, my career at Westwind Cremation & Burial came to an end.

THE REDWOODS

T
he last night I spent on Rondel Place, our landlord—the gay Catholic Filipino vegetarian activist (and collector of angel figurines) who lived in the apartment above us—called the cops on two gentlemen who had stumbled out of Esta Noche in the wee hours of the morning. After urinating on the walls they came to sit on our stoop to smoke and grope each other while whispering fervent Spanish nothings.

Their whispers turned to screams,“
¿Por qué no
me
amas?
” which turned to vicious blows. The law had to intervene.

Early the next morning, after my night of live-action telenovela, I drove away from Rondel Place in a rented U-Haul truck, carrying all my worldly possessions. Together with my cat and my python, our motley crew made the six-hour journey south from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Luke had asked me to stay at his place while I searched for an apartment. It was painful to even be in his presence, so overwhelming was my desire to divulge the way I felt about him. Afraid that these feelings would upset the delicate balance of our relationship, I declined his offer and quickly settled in Koreatown. Several people had warned me that Koreatown was a “bad neighborhood,” but after living on Rondel Place, it seemed like heaven. I could walk down the street without once encountering a naked man defecating behind my car or a woman in a full intergalactic space-clown costume smoking a crack pipe. There may have been some light drug deals and gang violence on Catalina Street, but in comparison to Rondel Place it was a verdant oasis.

In Los Angeles, I plunged headlong into research on death and culture—not only how it affected our behavior but
why
. Death practice was a calling, and I followed it with an earnestness that my cynical nature would have never allowed before. Having a purpose was nothing short of exhilarating.

But for every bit of exhilaration, my emotions would also swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. I believed so intensely in the importance of death ritual that I worried it might come across as morbid or pathological. Worse still was the fear of isolation—I was a leader in the cult of the corpse, but so far there was no one else at the temple. A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard.

But I did have Luke. He represented the comfortable place where I could escape the bonds of death and crawl into the blissful distraction of love. Or so I thought.

I finally lived in the same city as Luke, but I still couldn’t speak the words to him directly—they were too loaded. When I could stand it no longer, I wrote him a letter telling him how much I needed him, how his support was the only thing keeping me together in a world where it was all too easy to hand yourself over to despair. The letter was equal parts sappy and nihilistic. Fitting, I thought, as Luke and I were both equal parts sappy and nihilistic. I left it for him in his mailbox in the middle of the night. I felt sure that he was expecting this, and that his response would be as ardent as my declaration.

And then—silence.

After several days, I received a single-line e-mail from Luke:

Don’t ask me for this. I can’t see you again.

Somewhere in the world, Luke was technically alive. But the relationship I knew, the friendship I cherished, crumbled to dust before my eyes. It was a type of death, and the pain was acute. It didn’t take long for my mind to start up the old standby, my running inner monologue. Some sections were similar to the voice of my childhood:
People out there are starving, dying for real. This one guy doesn’t want you, well boo-de-hoo, dumb bitch.
And new material was added to the script:
You thought you could escape, didn’t you? Well, you can’t. You belong to death now, and no one can love someone like that. Everything smells of corpses here.

M
Y
JOB
AT
W
ESTWIND
lasted until the end of November, and mortuary school didn’t begin until January; in between, I felt aimless. I drove up to the far north of California to hike through the giant redwood trees, intending to get my mind off of what had happened with Luke. I wrote my friends (and my mother) a lighthearted e-mail detailing what I wanted done with my body (and my cat) were I to perish on the winding mountain roads.

I checked into the Redwood Hostel, an old house along the jagged Northern California coast. The next day I set off to find the Cathedral Trees Trail, where I had hiked several years before, but for some reason I couldn’t find it. I drove up and down the highway, unable to locate the entrance. Suddenly my frustration gave way to rage, and I slammed my foot all the way down on the accelerator and drove full-speed toward the edge of a cliff, swinging the wheel at the very last moment to avoid driving off. Pulling off to the shoulder to catch my breath, I marveled at my own fury. I wasn’t prone to outbursts of violence. I had certainly never tried to drive off a cliff before.

After collecting myself, I stopped to ask directions from a park ranger, who led me to the turnoff for the Cathedral Trees Trail. There was no one on the trail with me as I descended into the canopy of towering, sacred trees, some more than a thousand years old. I could sense their ancient wisdom as I made my way down the hill. It was when I reached the bottom that I realized I had gone there to die. I hadn’t consciously planned to do so, but I had written my last e-mails, stated what I wanted done with my body, and carried with me in my backpack the agent of my demise. Twenty minutes earlier I sped straight toward the cliff’s edge because I was furious at myself for being so pathetically lost, ruining the sanctity of my final day.

I felt fucking cheated. Culture exists to provide answers to the big human questions: love and death. When I was still a young girl, my culture made me two promises. The first promise was that society knows what’s best for us, and what’s best for us is that death be kept hidden. That promise was shattered at Westwind, which I had discovered was playing its part in a vast mortality cover-up. Now that I had seen our society’s structural denial of death, it was hard for me to stop thinking about. I wanted to quiet my brain, to stop its incessant ruminations on the whys and hows of mortality. I felt like Muchukunda, the mythical Hindu king who, when asked by a god what reward he desired for his years of fighting (literal) demons, wished for nothing more than never-ending sleep. Death, for me, was like a never-ending sleep. And I longed for it.

The second promise was delivered by popular culture, which laid out the narrative that a girl is owed the prize of true love. I didn’t believe myself to be a slave to popular-culture narratives (spoiler: I was). Instead I believed what I shared with Luke was a rational, passionate connection with another human being. But somehow I was wrong about everything. Both of the promises my culture made to me were broken, my webs of significance snapped. None of my privileged assumptions about the world could be counted on anymore.

For what seemed like hours, no one came by. This was a well-trod hiking trail, but today there was absolutely not a soul. So there I sat, debating whether or not to walk into the forest. If I did, I would follow the example of painter Paul Gauguin, who tried to commit suicide by swallowing arsenic deep in the mountains of Tahiti. He had just finished one of his greatest paintings,
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Gauguin hoped that no humans would find his body so that ants would eat his corpse. In his zeal, he swallowed
too much
arsenic. His body rejected the poison, and he vomited it back up. He woke up, wandered out of the mountains, and lived for six more years.

Like Gauguin, I wanted the animals to devour my body. There is, after all, a thin line between a corpse and a carcass. I was just as much an animal as the other creatures in the redwood forest. A deer needs no embalming, sealed caskets, or headstones. He is free to lie where he dies. My whole life I had eaten other animals, and now I would offer myself to them. Nature would at last have its chance with me.

Botflies can smell a carcass from ten miles away. Chances are they would arrive first to the feast. They would lay their eggs on the outside of my corpse, eggs that would need only a single day to hatch into maggots. The new maggots would tunnel into my body, impervious to the onset of my putrefaction. A marvel of engineering, their mouths allow them to breathe and eat at the same time.

If you are interested in the other, more honorable, guests at the feast, may I submit the bald eagle, symbol of America? They are natural scavengers and do not pass up the opportunity to take advantage of dead meat. Their sharp beaks would rip away strips of my flesh and carry them into the sky.