Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Doughty describes the funerary practices of the Wari’ people in Brazil, who used to perform mortuary cannibalism. The Brazilian government banned the practice and condemned it as barbaric, but Doughty argues that this is a matter of perspective, and that to the Wari’, leaving bodies in the ground is barbaric. Mortuary cannibalism, for the Wari’, was a compassionate act. Immediate relatives did not engage in the practice; instead, other community members did so as a way to fully destroy the body. That process brought the bereaved a sense of peace. 

Doughty meets Bruce, Westwind’s embalmer. She considers the history of embalming. Although the ancient Egyptians practiced embalming, modern embalming is completely different and was popularized during the American Civil War, when families wanted to transport their dead loved ones home from the battlefield. Transporting corpses on trains was an incredibly smelly business, and there was no way to prevent the decomposition of bodies on their way home. Enterprising people began embalming bodies on the battlefield for a fee so that they could be sent home to their families relatively intact. Now, the practice is practically the default in the American funeral industry, even though no law requires it. Bruce and Doughty talk about how they would never be able to embalm their own family members, as the process is quite unsettling to watch. Since embalming is not rooted in religious belief or longstanding cultural tradition, Doughty wonders why it happens at all.

Doughty summarizes her undergraduate thesis on late medieval witch trials. Medieval Europeans believed that witches killed babies, drank their blood, and ground up their bones to make spells that would make their broomsticks fly. 

One day, Doughty must collect the corpses of babies from the hospital. Upon arriving at the hospital, security chastises her for not bringing the cardboard box Chris usually uses to transport the fetuses. The security guard gets her to sign a form for the babies but will not let her borrow her pen until Doughty removes the gloves on her hands. She sees Doughty as “dirty and deviant” for her job transporting the dead fetuses (81). Doughty, doing her best to be appropriately apologetic and professional, sees the woman’s unfriendliness as another manifestation of death denial.

When cremating the babies and fetuses, Doughty makes herself look at the bodies, because it seems wrong to her to “pretend they were medical waste” (82). Sometimes, the babies have serious birth defects. Mike, who is a father, finds it extremely difficult to cremate babies and children, but Doughty tries to maintain a sense of detachment. The only time Doughty ever cries is when she must shave the head of an 11-month-old infant girl so that her parents can keep a lock of her hair. She does not fully understand why this baby is the one that she cries for: It may be because the baby has blue eyes like Doughty’s or because she is a very beautiful child. After the cremation, Doughty must grind the remaining bone fragments by hand because they are too small for the Cremulator. She reflects that she is like the witches in her thesis, grinding babies’ bones.

Some families do not want to be involved in the funeral process at all. One of the services offered by Westwind is the option to order a cremation online. Nothing about the process is different from a regular cremation, except that all human interaction on the part of the family of the deceased is removed completely. Though Doughty understands that some families choose this option because it is the cheapest, it troubles her, as it troubles Chris and Bruce. They receive an online order for the cremation of a nine-year-old girl and are all horrified: “Ashley, who had just finished the third grade, died at a hospital, where her parents left her body, went home, typed their credit card into a website, and waited two weeks for her to appear in a box by mail” (90). 

Doughty describes Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California, which was turned into a “memorial park” in 1917 by Hubert Eaton, who wanted to get rid of traditional cemeteries and “erase all signs of mourning” (91). Forest Lawn influenced the death industry in America, and in the 1950s, cremation rates were at an all-time low. Most people preferred to be embalmed and buried in elaborate, lavish funerals. During this time, Jessica Mitford, a writer and journalist, began her crusade “against the funeral status quo” (92). She spoke out against costly funerals and advocated for cheaper cremations in her book The American Way of Death (1963). 

The more experience Doughty gets at Westwind, the more she finds that while she agrees that large, expensive funerals are not the way to go, she does not fully agree with Mitford’s ideas, either. While Mitford states that she is not willing to find the American public guilty for how the funeral industry has evolved, Doughty is. She argues that denying death and refusing to engage with and prepare for it is a big part of why the funeral industry is the way it is. While Mitford was trying to improve the cost of dying when she suggested that everyone get direct cremations with no ritual or family involved, Doughty tries to encourage a “realistic interaction with death” (98).

Doughty speaks with a woman whose mother has died. The woman wants to see her mother but does not want to pay the $175 fee for a final viewing. Doughty explains to the reader that this fee is there because the body needs to be prepared for viewing by funerary workers like herself. This is because the average person in America has never seen a real dead body and is unprepared for what dead bodies actually look like. She describes the process of readying a body for viewing: inserting eye caps so that the eyes appear round instead of sunken; cleaning the body of purge, which is “a frothy, reddish-brown liquid expunged from the lungs and stomach” (102); inserting a mouth mold and then wiring the mouth shut; and wrapping body parts in plastic wrap so that clothes fit better. Then, the body is dressed and laid out for viewing. Doughty reflects that funeral homes sell families dignity in the death of their loved ones, but this dignity is only an illusion that can be quite undignified.

The next day, Doughty arrives at work to find that the floors of the cremation retorts have been replaced. When she begins her first cremation of the day, she is horrified to find liquified fat dripping out of the retort. Chris and Doughty attempt to contain the liquefied fat, and in the process, Doughty is doused in it, ruining her dress. The new floors have no uneven areas where the fat can pool as it burns; this is one of the perils of crematory work. Although Doughty readily admits that death is never clean, she still thinks there is value in knowing it for what it really is.