Wisdom from Unlikely Places
TL:DR - Go read this book.
Bonus Video:
If you’re not someone who usually checks out the ‘Staff Favorites’ at your local library, do yourself a favor and see what’s lurking on that shelf. My most recent winning find was Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.
I’ve a morbid curiosity and a strong history with death, what’s not to like? I thought (correctly).
Recognizing the mystery and expense surrounding death and the funeral industry, Doughty’s mission is funeral industry reform. She formed The Order of the Good Death and is working to de-mystify death and support burial alternatives to cremation and embalming.
Doughty’s book is phenomenal, and she’s got a couple more I now need to go track down. She is honest and humorous, with lines like:
“What was a nice girl like me doing in a body disposal warehouse like this?” (p5)
And
“The first time I peeked on a cremating body felt outrageously transgressive… no matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.” (p17)
And
“I punched his name into the label maker, which hummed and spit out the identity that would be stuck on the front of his eternal holding chamber…I placed him on a shelf above the cremation desk, where he joined the line of brown plastic soldiers, dutifully waiting for someone to come claim them. Satisfied at having done my job and taken man from corpse to ash, I left the crematory at 5PM, covered in my fine layer of people dust.” (p24)
I mean, I’m in.
Death has not been a stranger in my life, to be sure. The first death I remember was my father’s father. Sitting in the car in front of our house, my mom handed me a golden keychain music box and told me that it was from him, and that he had died. It was a strange concept to contemplate at five-ish. I didn’t see him very often though, and, although I remember being sad, it eventually was a shoulder shrug sort of thing. Eh. Ok.
My grandmother passed when I was 13, right before I got confirmed and ‘graduated’ 8th grade. She’d been in the hospital in Florida with emphysema. My mom flew me down from Maryland, and I saw her briefly before she died, hooked up to so many tubes and machines doing her breathing for her. My grandmother was a fierce woman and it scared me more to see her in the hospital than she ever scared me when she was alive. There’s no protocol for how to talk to someone who’s comatose. Why am I here, what am I meant to do? Say goodbye. After a few days I was sent back home. This time, my mom handed me a silver Seiko watch my grandmother had picked out for me as a gift for my graduation and confirmation. It was a time of emotional whiplash, going from celebrations of my progression to high school to a funeral. My mom joked my grandma was on ice, and she’d be fine until we would get around to her funeral and burial. Death is inconvenient.
My grandfather died the next year, I believe. I’ve lost track over the years. Death knocked right at my door this time around. My grandfather had struggled with throat cancer for years, and it was back for good. He was in and out of the hospital, and eventually came home with hospice care, a hospital bed and IV pole set up on the ground floor of our house. We all watched his color change from pinkish to grey. His larynx was removed, and he had to write to communicate, take his nutritive slurry directly into his stomach. Eventually his writing stilled and he stopped eating. When they wheeled him out of the house, I was confused why they left his face uncovered; I was told it was so as not to scare the neighbors. This also confused me, because it was a corpse dead from cancer, not the plague.
Then, three-ish years later it was my mother’s spouse’s time. Also cancer. After her episodes in the hospital, she too came home with hospice. Hospital bed, IV pole and medicine cabinet set up in their bedroom. Death ventures further in over the years. The morphine terrified me when she asked me to administer it, but, a medical professional, she calmly walked me through the process in spite of the pain she needed it to quell. I got called out of class a few weeks later, and knew what had happened before I was told. Going in the house, I heard alien wailing from my mother’s room. It took me a minute to realize it was, in fact, my mother, changed by a new kind of grief. For a few years on special occasions my mom handed me cards, from her spouse, loving forethought reaching across the grave.
Doughty shares both her personal and professional experiences with death, from seeing a young girl tumble over a railing from the second story at the mall to her grandmother’s death.
It’s a strange thing, how business and grief mix. There are logistics to take care of when someone dies. It’s unfair.
She shares that as late as the beginning of the 1900s, most folks died at home. It was only in the 1930s that this changed via the hospital, which “[…]removed from view all the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds of death…The hospital was a place where the dying would undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living.” (p49)
True.
Also, apparently embalming in the USA was a product of the Civil War, and the smells surrounding the deaths of so many soldiers in the summer, in the south. Who knew? A cost-effective way to get bodies back to families, using chemicals like arsenic, zinc chloride, etc. Sawdust filled the chest and abdomen in lieu of organs. Tidy, efficient. Not so stinky.
Cremation then became the norm after Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death. I’ve not read this book (I want to), but according to Doughty, Mitford was more concerned with the economic cost of death and funerals. Apparently, “Mitford hated the fact that funeral directors were business people.” (p113)
Mitford accomplished her goal, in that cremation is less expensive than embalming and caskets and vaults (container to go around the casket) for burial. Evidently cremation rates have been going up and up and up since The American Way of Death was published in 1963. They’re expected to reach 80% by 2035 according to US Funerals Online with all states expected to exceed 50% cremation by 2033. A direct cremation can be less than $1,000, while a ‘traditional’ funeral can be upwards of $10,000 or more, depending.
What I enjoyed most about Smoke Gets in Your Eyes was the premise that we need to have a closer relationship with death, as humans. This sums it up quite nicely, I think:
“A corpse doesn’t need you to remember it… it doesn’t need anything anymore…it is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom.” (p174)
The funerals we had for our family members always had a viewing. And we watched them get buried. Meaning there was a body in a box and we looked at it, spent time in the room with it. It was super weird and trippy, given the makeup and all of the stuff they do to the face to make it look ‘natural’. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine not having had that time when it sunk in that this person was g-o-n-e. Particularly after returning to life as ‘usual’, expecting those day to day idiosyncrasies we come to rely on in our family members, and not having them. Oh right, they were in the box that got buried.
In her book A Well Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, Tia Levings describes in crushing detail the loss of her baby daughter, Clara. How her midwife told her that she needed to be alone with Clara, after she had died. Levings shares “I had to hold her until my dad came. Until Allan came too. I had to show them.” (p113)* She describes rocking her dead, talking to her, feeling the weight of the truth of this crushing death. And how she wanted to pick up the body at the viewing, “But you don’t hold the body at a viewing, because embalming water flows.” (p115)
I’ve not held my own dead, but I agree with Doughty that we do need corpses. We need to be able to witness the fullness of each cycle of life as humans, which includes death. It’s important that we are able to internalize that death comes for each of us, and we needn’t be panicked about the prospect. More, that we should take the days with our loved ones as the transient flashes they are.
Year after year, I’m astounded how more and more houses seem to decorate for “Spooky Season”. How many folks talk about their love of it, how much of a craze it is.
I wonder if this is part of why.** This stark removal of death from our zeitgeist of normal happenings. We lean into Halloween or All Saints Day or Day of the Dead or other similar holidays according to our culture because this is the only chance we have to re-acquaint ourselves with death. To try and make amends with the ends of our lives.
So we make do with plastic skeletons, cutesy ghosts, and gory horror.
Alas.
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*Allan is Clara’s dad, Levings’ ex-husband
**Consumerism, of course plays a role
Note: nothing in this article or episode is a substitute for medical or mental health advice; do not delay necessary medical care; please work with a qualified and licensed health care provider in your area.
