Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory Read Free

She was brokenhearted over the married man she had fallen for on a recent backpacking trip to Guatemala (a blow to both her ego and her lesbianism).
    “How was your first day?” she asked through her tears.
    I told her about Mike’s silent judgment, about the introduction to corpse shaving, but decided not to tell her about Byron’s skull. That was my secret, along with the strange, perverse power I had felt in that moment as skull crusher of the infinite universe.
    As the sound of ranchera music from Esta Noche blasted me to sleep, I thought of the skull lodged in my own head. How it would one day emerge after everything that could be recognized as Caitlin—eyes, lips, hair, flesh—was no more. My skull might be crushed too, fragmented by the gloved hand of some hapless twentysomething like me.

PUPPY SURPRISE
    M y second day at Westwind I met Padma. It wasn’t that Padma was gross. “Gross” is such a simple word, with simple connotations. Padma was more like a creature from a horror film, cast in the lead role of “Resurrected Voodoo Witch.” The mere act of looking at her body lying in the cardboard cremation container caused internal fits of “Oh my God. Holy —what is— what am I doing here? What is this shit? Why?”
    Racially, Padma was Sri Lankan and North African. Her dark complexion, in combination with advanced decomposition, had turned her skin pitch-black. Her hair hung in long, matted clumps, splayed out in all directions. Thick, spidery white mold shot out of her nose, covering half her face, stretching over her eyes and yawning mouth. The left side of her chest was caved in, giving the impression that someone had removed her heart in some elaborate ritual.
    Padma was in her early thirties when she was felled by a rare genetic disease. Her body was kept for months at the Stanford University Hospital so doctors could run tests to understand the condition that killed her. By the time she arrived at Westwind, her body had taken a turn for the surreal.
    Grotesque as Padma appeared in my amateur’s eyes, I couldn’t shrink away from her body like a wobbly fawn. Mike the crematory manager had made it clear that I was not being paid to be freaked out by dead bodies. I was desperate to prove that I could share his clinical detachment.
    Spiderweb face mold, is it? Oh yes, seen it a million times before, surprised this is such a mild case, really , I would say, with the authority of a true death professional.
    Until you’ve seen a dead body like Padma’s, death can seem almost glamorous. Imagine a Victorian consumption victim, expiring with a single trickle of blood sliding from the corner of her rosy mouth. When Edgar Allan Poe’s love, Annabel Lee, is taken by the chill of death and entombed, the lovelorn Poe cannot stay away. He goes to “lie down by the side, of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.”
    The exquisite, alabaster corpse of Annabel Lee. No mention of the ravages of decomposition that would have made lying down next to her a rancid embrace for the brokenhearted Poe.
    It wasn’t just Padma. The day-to-day realities working at Westwind were more savage than I had anticipated. My days began at eight thirty a.m. when I turned on Westwind’s two “retorts”—industry jargon for cremation machines. I carried a retort-turnin’-on cheat sheet with me for the first month, clumsily cranking the 1970s science-fiction dials to light up the bright-red, blue, and green buttons that set temperatures and ignited burners and controlled airflow. The moments before the retorts roared to life were some of the quietest and most peaceful of the day. No noise, no heat, no pressure, just a girl and a selection of the newly deceased.
    Once the retorts came to life, the peace vanished. The room turned into an inner ring of hell, filled with hot, dense air and the rumbling of the devil’s breath. What looked like puffy silver