CBS NEWS, SAN FRANCISCO—A man possibly in his 20s appears to have voluntarily stood on Bay Area Rapid Transit tracks before he was fatally struck by a train at a San Francisco station around noon Saturday, BART officials said.
Witnesses claimed the man “stood in front of the train waiting for it to hit him,” BART spokesman Linton Johnson said. “He did not make any attempt to get out of the way.”
The man was struck and dragged under the BART train at the San Francisco Civic Center Station, halting all trains at that station for nearly three hours and causing system wide delays, according to Johnson.
Jacob was twenty-two when he climbed down onto the BART tracks and waited for the train to end his life. Twenty-two was only one year younger than I was. He didn’t look like someone who had been dragged under a train. He looked like someone who had been in a two a.m. bar fight—light facial bruising, a few cuts.
“The guy we had in here last month, the one pushed under the MUNI train, that guy was chopped in half,” Mike said, unimpressed.
Jacob’s only major damage was the absence of his left eyeball, which presumably went missing on the tracks. But if you turned his face to the right side, he looked almost normal, as if he could open his remaining eye and hold a conversation.
The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has. Life can become unbearable in all respects, and “this world can take everything from us . . . but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Cioran, a man “obsessed with the worst,” died an insomniac and recluse in Paris.
Cioran may have been predisposed to Negative Nancy-ism, but madness and despair can touch us no matter our philosophies. Nietzsche, who famously said in Twilight of the Idols, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” suffered a mental breakdown at age forty-four. Eventually he fell into the full-time care of his sister, whose own husband had committed suicide in Paraguay.
Cruel and selfish as many view suicide to be, I suppose I felt supportive of Jacob’s decision. If every day of his life was dull misery, I could not demand he stay alive and endure more dull misery. I couldn’t know if it had been mental illness or a sense of endless despondency that had driven Jacob to suicide. It wasn’t my place to speculate on his motives. But I could pass judgment on his methods. There, I was firmly not on his side.
There was something in the way Jacob had killed himself that unsettled me. The public spectacle of staring down a crowded train. In college, I managed a coffee shop on the University of Chicago campus. Only two months before I started at Westwind, my former assistant manager hanged himself in his bedroom after a fight with his girlfriend. His roommate had to come home to find his body. The fact that he left those two women with the lifelong burden of his suicide made me ill, even more so than his death. If you are going to take yourself out of commission, it seems only fair you do so in a way that does the least harm to others, slipping out the back door of the party of life, ensuring the other guests don’t have to agonize about your choice.
Most of the damage Jacob caused by stepping in front of a BART train that day was financial: thousands of people late for work, flights from San Francisco and Oakland Airports missed, important appointments broken.
But for the train conductor, the person who had to look into Jacob’s eyes as he barreled toward him, helpless to stop the train in time, the damage was not financial. The average train conductor will involuntarily kill three people in his career. Having no choice but to kill someone (or several someones) has to be the quickest way to lose affection for an otherwise stable, even desirable, job.
Nor was the damage financial for the people waiting on the platform. They had to stand there screaming for him to get out of the way: didn’t he see there was a train coming? Then came the moment when they realized he knew perfectly well the train was coming, and they would be forced to witness what came next. Forced to live with the image, the sounds, their own confused screams for the rest of their lives.
Mike pointed out that a few of those people would envy the opportunity I had to cremate Jacob. “Maybe they’d smack him around a little first,” he said. “Some light revenge.”
As it was, they would never see his body. Jacob would maintain his power over them, haunting their dreams.
I thought of the years I had spent reliving the little girl hitting the ground at the mall, and I felt a searing sympathy for those people. I wanted to throw open the crematory doors to the train conductor and the other commuters. I wanted them with me that day, gathered around Jacob’s body so I could announce, “Look, here he is; he wanted to die. He is dead, but you’re not. You are not dead.”
It was illegal, this open-house-at-the-mortuary fantasy of mine. The California Code of Regulations clearly states that “the care and preparation for burial or other disposition of all human remains shall be strictly private.”
In the late 1800s, the citizens of Paris would come to the morgue by the thousands each day to view the bodies of the unidentified dead. Spectators lined up for hours to get in as vendors sold them fruit, pastries, and toys. When they reached the front of the line, they would be ushered into an exhibit room, where the corpses were laid out on slabs behind a large glass window. Vanessa Schwartz, scholar of fin-de-siècle Paris, called the Paris morgue “a spectacle of the real.”
Eventually the morgue exhibitions became too popular with the citizens of Paris, and they were shut down to the public. Morgues remain behind closed doors today, perhaps because those in charge of regulating death believe the hoi polloi would be too interested, and that such an interest is inherently wrong. Close the morgues if you will, but another attraction will always arise to fill a void. The runaway popularity of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’s traveling exhibit of plastinated human bodies, shows us that the human urge to file past corpses on display is indeed as strong as ever. In spite of the ongoing controversy that von Hagens obtained some of his bodies from Chinese political prisoners, Body Worlds is the most popular touring attraction in the world (having drawn 38 million people by the start of 2014).
JACOB LIVED IN WASHINGTON State, and visited San Francisco for reasons unknown. His parents arranged his cremation over the phone, faxing Westwind the required forms and reading us their credit card number to cover the balance. As usual, it was just Jacob and me as I loaded him into the cremation machine, his one eye gazing up at me.
Because of his violent death, Jacob was taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office before being brought to Westwind. The Medical Examiner’s Office is the modernized version of the Coroner’s Office, and is run by medical doctors trained to investigate suspicious or violent deaths. Whenever Westwind Cremation went to pick up a body, the examiner’s staff would give us whatever personal items arrived with the deceased. This usually meant clothes, jewelry, wallets, and so on.
Jacob came with a backpack. His parents didn’t want it mailed back to Washington, so the only place for it to go was into the flames alongside Jacob.
I set the backpack on a table and pulled open the zipper. Jackpot, I thought, one serving of understanding of the mind of a depressed madman, coming right up. But each item I pulled out was more obscenely normal than the next. Change of clothes, toiletries, a kombucha bottle. Then: a stack of notecards. At last! The scribblings of a suicidal lunatic? No. Chinese language flashcards.
I was disappointed. I had expected answers in that backpack, insight into the human condition.
“Hey, Caitlin, put this wallet back in there before you cremate it,” Mike called from his office.
“Wait, there’s a wallet?” I replied.
“I’m looking at his ID right now. There’s his college ID, his driver’s license, his Greyhound bus ticket to San Francisco. Oh, and a map of the BART train system; that’s depressing. He wrote something on the BART map. Word of the day: ‘anthropophagy.’ What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. I’m going to Google it right now. Spell it,” I said.
“A-N-T-H-R-O-P-O-P-H-A-G-Y.”
“Shit. It means cannibalism. It’s a synonym for cannibalism,” I said.
Mike laughed at the gallows humor of the definition. “No way. Do you think this means he had an insatiable desire for human flesh? This bus ticket says he got in to San Francisco the day before he died. Why not commit suicide back in Washington?”
“Right,” I added, “why would you come all the way to San Francisco to stand in front of a BART train?”
“Maybe he wasn’t trying to die. Just be an ass and dodge the train or something. Like that kid in Stand by Me.”
“Corey Feldman?” I asked.
“No, the other one.”
“River Phoenix?”
“No, not that one either,” Mike said. “Whatever, if that’s what he was trying, shit, he didn’t do a very good job.”
As I slid Jacob into the flames, the only things I knew about him were that he was a twenty-two-year-old from Washington who studied Chinese and was perhaps, at least on the day he died, interested in cannibalism. A few weeks earlier I had invested my first paycheck in the box set of the HBO television series Six Feet Under, the beloved show about a family-run mortuary. In one episode, Nate the funeral director visits a lonely, dying young man to arrange his cremation. The man is angry and bitter about his impending death and the lack of support from his family. He asks Nate who will push the button on the cremation machine when he dies.
“Whomever you specify,” Nate replies. “Buddhists have a family member, and then some people choose no one, in which case the person at the crematory does it.”
“I’ll take that guy.”
That was me. The person at the crematory. I was “that guy” for Jacob. In spite of what he had done, I didn’t want him to be alone.
THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.
Say you are a gazelle, grazing an African plain. The soundtrack from The Lion King plays in the background. A hungry lion stalks you from a distance. He sprints in to attack, but today you manage to outrun him. By instinct, a fight-or-flight reaction, you feel momentary anxiety. Experience and genetics have taught you to run and evade danger, and it does take some time for your heart to stop racing. But soon enough you can return to happy grazing as if nothing had happened. Chomp-chomp, blissful chomps, until the lion comes back for round two.
The human heart rate may decelerate after the lion chase has ended, but we never stop knowing that the game is lost. We know death awaits us, and it affects everything we do, including the impulse to take elaborate care of our dead.
Some 95,000 years ago, a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh Cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. Some of the surviving skeletal remains found at Qafzeh show stains of red ochre, a naturally tinted clay. Archeologists believe the ochre’s presence means that we performed rituals with our dead very early in our species’ history. One of the recovered skeletons, a thirteen-year-old child, was buried with its legs bent to the side and a pair of deer antlers in its arms. We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.
When families came to Westwind to arrange for cremations and burials, they sat in our front arrangement room and nervously drank water out of paper cups, unhappy about the death that brought them there and often even more unhappy about having to pay for it. Sometimes they’d request a viewing in our chapel in order to see the dead body for a final time. Occasionally the chapel was filled with a hundred people weeping over the strains of gospel music; other days it was just a single mourner, sitting quietly for half an hour before seeing themselves out.
Families would go through the chapel or arrangement room, even the front office, but the crematory itself was my space. Most days I was alone “in the back,” as Mike called it.
On our price list we offered something called a “Witness Cremation,” but no one took us up on this offer the first few weeks I was at Westwind. Then, one day, there was the Huang family. When I showed up to work at eight thirty there were already a dozen older Asian women, in the supply closet of all places, setting up a makeshift altar.
“Mike?” I called out, walking toward his office.
“What’s up?” he called back with his usual deadpan indifference.
“Hey, why are there people in the supply closet?” I asked.
“Oh, right, they’re here for the witness this afternoon. There’s not going to be enough room in the chapel for all their stuff, so I gave them the supply closet for the altar,” he said.
“I—I didn’t know there was going to be a witness,” I fumbled, terrified at the invasion of my space and routine.
“I thought Chris told you, man. Don’t worry about it, I got this one,” he said.
Mike had no qualms about the day’s events. Maybe he could perform a witness cremation with one hand tied behind his back, but the whole premise seemed incalculably dangerous to me. A witness cremation followed a sequence: the family was given time in the chapel with the deceased, the body was wheeled into the crematory, and the cremation process was begun with the whole family standing right there. With the whole family standing right there. About as much room for error as in the transport of nuclear weapons.
When Western cremation evolved from open pyres to enclosed industrial machines, the first of these new machines were built with peepholes in the side so the family could peek in and watch the process like a naughty show. Some funeral homes even required that family members be there to witness the body being loaded into the machine. But as time went on the peepholes were covered and sealed, the families kept out of the crematory altogether.
Over the last few decades the funeral industry has evolved a number of methods to distance the family from any aspect of death that might potentially offend them, and not just in the crematory.
When my friend Mara’s grandmother suffered a fatal stroke, Mara was on the next flight to Florida to hold vigil at the deathbed. Over the next week, Mara watched her grandmother struggle to breathe, unable to swallow or move or make a sound. When death mercifully took the old woman, Mara expected she would be there through the whole funeral as well. She wasn’t. I received this message from her: “Caitlin, we just stood there next to the open grave. Her casket was there and the dirt was covered up with Astroturf. I kept thinking they were going to lower the casket into the grave. They never did. We had to walk away while the casket was still sitting there, unburied.”
Only after Mara’s family had left the cemetery would Grandmother’s casket be lowered into the ground and the yellow construction backhoes brought in to dump the dirt back on top.
These modern denial strategies help focus mourners on positive “celebrations of life”—life being far more marketable than death. One of the largest funeral-home corporations keeps small toaster ovens near their arrangement rooms so fresh-baked cookie smells will comfort and distract families throughout the day—fingers crossed that the chocolate chips mask the olfactory undertones of chemicals and decomposition.
I passed back through Westwind’s supply closet, nodding at the women who were making remarkable progress on the altar. They worked to arrange multiple bowls of fruit and circular flower wreaths at the base of a large framed picture of the deceased Mr. Huang, the patriarch of the family. The picture was in the style of a shopping-mall portrait, the head and shoulders of an older Chinese man in a sharp suit and abnormally rosy cheeks. Airbrushed clouds floated in the background.
On Mike’s instructions, Chris and I brought Mr. Huang’s wooden casket into the chapel. When we opened the lid, Mr. Huang was waiting for us in his best suit. He had the stiff, waxy appearance of an embalmed corpse, no longer the stern dreamer in his cloud portrait.
Throughout the morning, more and more of Mr. Huang’s family arrived, bearing more fruits and gifts for the supply-closet altar. “You,” an older woman barked at me with disapproval, “why you wear red?”
The color red, associated with happiness, is poor form at a Chinese funeral. The cherry-red dress I wore all but screamed, “Ha, grievers! I laugh in the face of cultural sensitivity!”
I wanted to protest that I didn’t know the Huang family would be there that day, especially for something as terrifying as a witness cremation. Instead I mumbled an apology and shuffled away with her bowl of oranges.
Mike had already gone into the back to preheat one of the retorts. When the time came for Mr. Huang’s cremation, he had me follow him into the chapel. We threaded our way through throngs of Mr. Huang’s relatives, clucking with displeasure at my red dress. The casket was rolled out of the chapel and into the crematory. The family streamed in behind us, thirty people at least, invading what until now had been my sacred space.
As we filed into the crematory, everyone (elderly women included) fell to their knees on the ground, wailing. The howls of the mourners mixed in with the roar of the cremation machine. The effect was eerie. I stood in the back, my eyes wide, feeling like an anthropologist privy to some unknown rite.
It is a Chinese practice to hire professional mourners for a ceremony to help facilitate grief, to whip the crowd into a frenzy. It was difficult to tell if some of the people on the crematory floor were such professional mourners, hired by the family to promote sorrow through their excess emotion. Were professional mourners even available in Oakland? Their grief appeared genuine. But then again, I had never been in a situation like this before, where such a large group of people allowed themselves to be emotionally vulnerable. No stiff upper lips here.
Suddenly, a man I had somehow missed began weaving his way through the crowd with a video camera, filming the mourners. He would stop in front of a wailer and wave his hands upward, indicating what he wanted from them was more, more wailing! The mourner would let out a louder, more anguished cry and beat the ground. It seemed that no one wanted to get caught on camera looking calm or stoic.
The Huang family was engaged in ritual in the classic sense, mixing belief with tactile, physical action. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, two researchers of the human brain from the University of Pennsylvania, explained that for a ritual to work, the participants must engage “all parts of the brain and body, it must merge behavior with ideas.” Through their wailing, their kneeling, their grief, Mr. Huang’s family were connecting to something greater than themselves.
Mr. Huang’s casket slid into the cremation chamber and Mike gestured at Mr. Huang’s son to push the button to start the flames. It was a symbolic gesture, but one of incredible power.
Mike said to me later, “You gotta let ’em push the button, man. They love the button.”
Mr. Huang got something crucial that Jacob did not: someone he loved, not the random crematory operator in her culturally insensitive dress, to push the button that would take him out of this world.
As the door closed, locking Mr. Huang into the fiery chamber, Chris swooped in to set a large burning candle in front of the machine. Mike and Chris had done this part as a team before. The Huangs had wailed in grief before. I was the only one who was out of place.
Mr. Huang forced me to think about what I would do if my own father died. Frankly, I hadn’t a clue. There was a good chance that not everyone taking part in this witness cremation felt quite the intensity of grief they were displaying. For some it may have been more performance than genuine sorrow. But that didn’t matter; the Huang family had ritual. They knew what to do and I envied them for it. They knew how to cry louder, mourn harder, and show up with bowls of fruit. At the time of death, they were a community, rallied around ideas and customs.
My father taught history at a public high school for more than forty years. Even though the school where he taught was on the other side of the island, he would wake up at five thirty every morning to drive me an hour to my private school in Honolulu, and then another hour to his own school. All so I wouldn’t have to take the city bus. He had carried me for thousands of miles—how could I just hand him off to another person when he died?
As I gained more experience in the crematory I no longer dreamt of the gracious cover-ups of La Belle Mort Funeral Home. I began to realize that our relationship with death was fundamentally flawed. After only a few months at Westwind I felt naïve for having ever imagined putting the “fun” back in funerals. Holding “celebration of life” ceremonies with no dead body present or even realistic talk of death, just Dad’s favorite old rock-n’-roll songs playing while everyone drank punch, seemed akin to putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one. As a culture it was time to go after the bullet.
No, when my father died he would go to a crematory. Not a warehouse like Westwind, but a beautiful crematory with huge windows that let in gobs of natural light. But it would not be beautiful because death was hidden or denied; it would be beautiful because death would be embraced. It would be a place of experience, with rooms for families to come and wash their dead. Where they could feel safe and comfortable being with a body until its final moment, inserted into the flames.
In 1913, George Bernard Shaw described witnessing the cremation of his mother. Her body was placed in a violet coffin and loaded feet-first into the flames. “And behold!” he wrote. “The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like Pentecostal tongues, and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.”
I pictured my father, the door of the cremation chamber rising and the reverberation filling the room. If I was still alive when he died, I would be there to watch him become “that beautiful fire.” I didn’t want anyone else to do it. The more I learned about death and the death industry, the more the thought of anyone else taking care of my own family’s corpses terrified me.