WITH A BURIAL, what you see is what you get. Body in box, box in hole, earth on top. Jews understand the worth of a real burial—not just a few symbolic clods and walk away, but mourners pass the shovel from hand to hand, fill the hole right to the top, cry out loud while the job is done slowly and with physical effort; and who can fail then to feel the grave as a bed, a fine and private place, into which the dead one has been tenderly laid, then covered as a child is tucked in under blankets, and left to sleep?
With a cremation you get a curtain drawn between the weeping and the fate of the body. People must have wanted this at some stage, or it wouldn’t be the industry it is. But isn’t there a curiosity we feel is morbid, a longing to know what happens to the coffin after it clunks down and out of sight? What weird ideas do we brood on? I told a friend of mine—in her forties, intelligent, worldly, witty, who’s held my hand at more than one funeral—that I’d spent a day at Melbourne’s Springvale crematorium.
‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ she said with a shiver. ‘They cut the body up into pieces, don’t they.’
‘Oh no!’ I said, astonished. I told her what I’d seen. She listened. When I’d finished she gave a sigh.
‘What you said makes me feel better,’ she said.
The funny thing is that anyone could go out there and find out what they want to know.
‘You can look at anything you like here,’ says the manager.
‘Otherwise you get the hidden mysteries.’
‘The what?’
‘The mysteries. The unknown.’
He shows me the layout of the place—the huge garden, the four chapels, the furnace room—then goes back to his office and leaves me to my own devices. This surprises me: I’d expected to be kept under surveillance and given a laundered view of events. I feel like a kid suddenly given more freedom that it knows what to do with. I know what I really want to see, but I am embarrassed by my curiosity which I still cannot help feeling is morbid, so I go for a long walk round the garden, through the enormous cemetery.
It is a cool, sparkling morning. A couple of the gardeners, full-blown eccentrics with unidentifiable European accents, corner me and bash my ear. One of them tells me a long and comical story with actions.
‘One day I was raking,’ he says. ‘Like this. And I saw on the ground, just near the tap, a black handbag. It had an address, a hundred and seventy-five dollars and a pension cheque. I took it to the boss. Other blokes they say, Eddy, why didn’t you take the money and dig the bag into the garden? No one will know. I say, No, honesty is the best thing in this world. There is no honesty in this world.
‘Some time later she comes out, a lady, she says to me, Are you Eddy? I say, Lady, I am Eddy but I don’t know you. She says, You found my handbag. She gives me an envelope. I start to walk away, I say, Lady, I don’t need anything. I don’t need your envelope. But she runs after me—and she’s not young—fifty-eight or sixty—and she sticks the envelope in my back pocket, here, this one—I didn’t even feel it go in, I was walking away. But later I find it in my pocket, and there’s five dollars in it.’
His colleague, a freckled man in a towelling hat, wheeling a barrow and whistling with expert trills, shows me a little area where the gravestones are decorated with artistic and fanciful sculptures. He is content to draw my attention to them but Eddy hurries up to interpret them for me.
‘Some people spend seventeen thousand dollars on a memorial. See? This is all bronze. They come out and put a kind of wox—a yelly—on it. See this? This is the Mona Lisa. See the little dove on her hand? And what do you reckon this means? A river? Course it’s not a river! It means—the ocean! Crossing the ocean.
‘And these? Yes! It’s a choir of angels! You look at it from over there. Makes a nice effect, don’t you think? One day someone came out and put a lighted cigarette in their mouths. It dropped—see these marks? Tsk tsk. Oh, she was wild.’
This is highly entertaining but not what I have come for. I find myself drawn back towards the chapels and to the furnaces: where the action is. The first funerals have begun and I stand at the back of one of the chapels listening to the limp-backed tributes that are being paid by a minister to a man he never met. We have to get paid functionaries to do even our speaking for us. What a pathetic, stiff, frightened lot we are.
I go outside and loiter between the chapels in the sun. I am longing to go back to the furnace room but I’m scared. Scared of what? Not of what I’ll see, but of what people will think. What people? I don’t know. Anyone who sees me. They’ll think I’ve got a sick mind. They’ll think…
I am saved from this nonsense by a man from the furnace room, to whom the manager introduced me an hour ago before the fires had been lit. He’s wearing his uniform of maroon blazer and grey trousers, but on his feet are Frye boots and his hands are tattooed. He sees me dawdling with intent, strides up to me and gets straight to the point. ‘Do you want to come and have another look?’
He takes me through a little door marked ‘Private’.
Oddly, this is the most shocking moment of the day, this one quick step from the outside world of colour—sun and leaves—into the monochrome of the furnace room. I panic, my legs go weak, I think, It’s the gas chambers, it’s the underworld, I can’t write this, only a photographer could show this place as it is, it’s made of dust, there’s no blood, everything’s a shade of pale grey, the huge ovens are grey, the walls and floor are grey, the workers are grey, the air is grey. I’m not going to faint but I’m going to lose control of my bowels.
This does not happen. The shock lasts two seconds and passes, and I see I am in a long cement-coloured area that must link the business ends of the four chapels which are built in pairs, back to back. Men are walking about. There is a low roaring sound.
My guide gives me a sharp look. ‘You don’t mind seeing the actual…umm…’ ‘No! That’s what I’m here for.’
He nods, and leads me to the end furnace. I think they call them cremators in the official brochures, but a furnace is what it is, huge, wide and tall, like a giant pizza oven.
My guide opens a door, like the door of an old fuel stove, only bigger, and I bend over to look in. First, with relief, I see colour, the only colour in the place—orange flames—and then the small end of a coffin. The heat is so tremendous that everything wavers: the coffin is covered with a network of fine cracks, its surface reminds me of an old porcelain jug in an op shop, with a glaze that’s covered in lines while the china’s still in one piece underneath.
I’ve never been so curious in my life. I want to stare and stare. As I look, squinting against the heat (they burn at between eight hundred and a thousand degrees Celsius) the end of the coffin goes pouf! and disintegrates. I can see two burning lumps. I gape. What I am looking at is a man’s feet. In the heat of their consumption they turn slightly, almost gracefully, as if he were moving to a more comfortable position in bed.
I don’t see them as pink human feet, you understand, with skin and heels and toes, but as two shimmering dark-centred objects of flame, which the context instructs me can only be feet. This is not the slightest bit horrible or disgusting. I am not aware of any smell.
Perhaps this wonder I am feeling is a very exaggerated version of that dreamy hypnosis that comes over us when we stare into a fire of wood, or coal. Why are we so drawn to fire? It’s the spectacle of matter being transformed. And that’s what I’m seeing here.
My guide glances at me. I’m struck dumb. All I can think to say is ‘Wow’. He nods again. The rest of the coffin loses form and collapses. What I can see now is a sort of humped, curved lump: it is his torso, the line of his spine, the bulky part of his body. ‘The feet take only a few minutes,’ says my guide. ‘The head goes last. The oil burner’s aimed at the head and the torso. They’re the hardest parts of the body to burn.’
He closes the door and leads me to the next furnace. Here a body has been consumed and a man is about to rake out the top section of the burning chamber to allow what they call the CRs, the cremated remains, to fall through a grille into a lower part, for collection. I can see a long bone, a femur, pale and dry-looking. ‘The thigh-bone’s connected to the kneebone,’ I foolishly think, but nothing’s connected to anything any more, all the links have been burned away and the furnace floor is covered with ordinary-looking ash in which the few bones, fragile and ready to be crushed, lie about as naturally as if they had been bleached not by fire but by a pure desert sun.
The man is raking and raking and the crumbly ash tumbles down into the under chamber.
Like a lot of people, I used to think that when the coffin disappeared behind the curtain in the chapel it was devoured instantly by flames, as if the chapel were built astride a hell where fire forever raged.
Of course, it’s not like that at all. My guide takes me up some steps to a concrete area like a garage, open at one end to the garden. Here we stand and wait. A red light on the wall goes off. This means that a service is over and a coffin is on its way out of the chapel. It heaves into view, thickly encrusted with flowers. A young man in jeans and runners tips the bouquets off into a wheelbarrow and briskly takes hold of the coffin. He straps it to a metal arrangement of rails, a kind of overhead conveyor belt. We go down the stairs again and I see the coffin go sliding smoothly above our heads on its elevated track. Down and round it goes to the furnace room, where it is unstrapped and put to wait its turn outside one of the furnace doors.
The burning goes on all day. Each one takes about two hours. One at a time they are consigned, burnt, raked and collected. It is possible that by the time you have driven home across town after the funeral, the coffin is already in the fire.
This is not, after all, the underworld. In one sense it is simply a place where people work. In the storage room behind the furnace section the radio is going softly on 3KZ. Someone has pinned to the bulletin board a caricature of a workmate, complete with rude message. The men in charge are obsessed with labelling, checking and checking again.
The walls are covered with shelves and on them are ranged scores of black plastic containers, each one about the size of a shoe box. These contain CRs waiting to be collected by their relatives.
‘Some people never collect,’ says my guide. ‘We scatter them by default. Oh, after three to six months.’
A young man is working at a bench with a big electric magnet shaped like a goose’s beak, or the mouth of a small dog. He plunges it into the container of CRs, works it round and round, and draws it out bristling with nails, screws and staples. ‘If we didn’t use the magnet,’ he says, ‘the metal’d break the blades of the grinder when we put the CRs through.’
My guide hands me a shallow metal container, like a tray with sides. ‘That’s what’s left of a person,’ he says. ‘Not much there, is there.’
No, there is not. About the equivalent of one and a half stale hi-top loaves if you crumbled them up. It’s a mixture of ash, bone and a honeycomb-like substance which I suppose is also bone, or its insides. It is a pale, greyish-fawnish-whitish colour. It looks dry, delicate, purified. ‘It’s completely sterile,’ says my guide. I put out one finger and lightly touch the honeycomb. It’s sharp. Good luck, spirit of these ashes, wherever you’re travelling.
One of the men gets a box like an old-fashioned biscuit tin down of a shelf and shows it to me. It is full of metal things, all the same dull burnt brown colour, and with the same crumbled surface, like a jam tin after a bonfire. I don’t know what they are, in their jumbled pile. My guide picks them up one by one and names them. ‘A horse shoe. A watch. A woman’s neck-chain. A war medal. The metal parts of a pocket knife. Toe caps off an old man’s boots. A bottle opener. A pacemaker out of somebody’s heart. A hip joint.’ These objects have come though the fire. He lays each one down with care.
On a special shelf by themselves are treasures which have survived the cremation of children: a metal piggy bank with the coins still in it; a little porcelain dish with a decorative knot of china flowers on its fitted lid, the kind of thing a young girl might have on her dressing table.
‘We get babies here too,’ says my guide. He reaches up to a high shelf and brings down one of the plastic containers, but a very small one. He opens it and draws out a sealed plastic bag, which he shakes so that its contents slide down to one end. He holds it out to me in his palm.
‘See? Hardly even a handful. The babies are stillbirths, mostly. We call ’em billies. I don’t know why. That’s what they called ’em when I first came to work here, and that’s what I call ’em too.’ We stand in silence looking at the tiny quantity of ash in the plastic bag. He handles it gently, and nothing he says about it is sentimental.
On our way to the door he says, ‘I reckon they ought to bring the gardeners in here, after they’ve been working here a while, and show ’em exactly what goes on. Because often you get people who come out here a few months later, when they’ve got over it a bit, and they ask the gardener to tell ’em what goes on and the gardener doesn’t know.’
I didn’t start shaking and crying till two days later.
And on my way home I had, for the first time in my life, a conviction—I mean not a thought but knowledge—that life can’t possibly end at death. I had the punctuation wrong. I thought it was a full stop, but it’s only a comma, or a dash—or better still, a colon: I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or punishment or reward, or the survival of the ego; but what about energy, spirit, soul, imagination, love? The force for which we have no word? How preposterous, to think that it could die!
Dry bones! Dry bones! I find my loving heart,
Illumination brought to such a pitch
I see the rubblestones begin to stretch
As if reality had split apart
And the whole motion of the soul lay bare:
I find that love, and I am everywhere.
‘The Renewal’, Theodore Roethke
1986