There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. “I’ll love you forever, darling,” and “Will it be a diamond this year?” are two fine examples. But young lovers take note: above all else, the phrase every girl truly wants to hear is “Hi, this is Amy from Science Support; I’m dropping off some heads.”
Westwind had ongoing cremation contracts with two anatomical-donation facilities, of which Science Support was one. Several dozen lucky Californians who donated their bodies to be poked and prodded for the good of scientific inquiry ended their journey in my fiery care.
After the phone call from Amy, a truck crept through the gate at Westwind and pulled up next to the rear entrance where Chris unloaded his daily round of bodies. The back door creaked open. Two young men poked their heads in and looked around suspiciously. “Uh . . . yes, afternoon ma’am, we’re Science Support here with, your uh . . . heads.”
No matter how many times the transport truck came to visit Westwind, the Science Support drivers always looked supremely uncomfortable. They couldn’t drop their cargo and get out of the crematory fast enough. It made me proud to know that the drivers of Ye Olde Travelling Body Parts Truck were intimidated by my workplace.
Science Support is essentially a body broker, accepting whole dead bodies for donation and then dividing them up and selling the parts, as a junkyard does for old cars. Science Support isn’t the only name in the body-broker game. Several large companies trade in this macabre (but quite legal) field.
There are many positives to donating your body to science. In the modern death landscape, body donation is the only surefire way to make sure your death is free. After your death, Science Support will pick up your corpse, transport you to their facility, use you to cure cancer (note: results may vary), and then pay for your cremation at Westwind.
Indeed, your body might be used on the front lines of medical research. My own grandfather died after a long, debilitating bout with Alzheimer’s, including one memorable Christmas Eve where he managed to steal the car keys in the middle of the night and disappear for seven hours into downtown Honolulu. Ho-ho-horrible Christmas morning to you too, family. If the donated heads of Alzheimer’s patients, with brains containing the plaques and tangles that turned my grandfather into a stranger, could make a difference to other families, off with their heads, I say.
Unfortunately, not every dead body goes to what might be considered “noble ends.” There is a slim possibility that your donated head will be the head, the head that holds the key to the mysteries of the twenty-first century’s great disease epidemics. But it is equally possible your body will end up being used to train a new crop of Beverly Hills plastic surgeons in the art of the facelift. Or dumped out of a plane to test parachute technology. Your body is donated to science in a very . . . general way. Where your parts go is not up to you.
The use of corpses for the advancement of science has come a long way in the past four hundred years. In the sixteenth century, medicine was practiced with a feeble grasp of how the human body actually functioned. Medical texts misunderstood everything from how blood flowed through the body to the locations of vital organs to what caused sickness to develop in the first place (accepted answer: imbalances in the body’s four “humors”—phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile). Renaissance artist Andreas Vesalius, upset that medical students were learning human anatomy by dissecting dogs, secretly plucked corpses of criminals from the gallows. It wasn’t until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that surgical training schools consistently provided human anatomical dissections for teaching and research. The demand for corpses was so high that professors took to robbing fresh graves for bodies. Or, in the case of William Burke and William Hare in nineteenth-century Scotland, murdering living people (sixteen of them) and selling their bodies to be dissected by a public anatomical lecturer.
The two men from Science Support rolled a large box off the back of their truck. In the box were two human heads, surrounded by ice packs filled with small gelled beads that resembled Dippin’ Dots ice cream. As soon as I signed for the shipment, the gentlemen slammed shut the back of their truck and screeched out of the parking lot. This exchange was typical. The Science Support fellows regularly brought deliveries of torsos, heads, and other assorted viscera. We also got a single leg once, but that wasn’t from Science Support.
“Hey, Caitlin, you see that leg in the reefer?” Mike asked. After six months as his colleague I could discern the subtle distinction between all-business Mike, genuinely asking if I had seen the aforementioned leg, and wry, sarcastic Mike, about to crack the most minuscule of smiles.
“Well, no Mike, I haven’t seen this leg you speak of. Is it a Science Support leg?”
“No, man, the lady’s alive,” he said. “She had it amputated yesterday. Diabetes, I guess. She called to see if we could cremate just her leg. That was the weirdest phone call. Chris picked it up at the hospital this morning.”
“She’s cremating just her leg? So you’re telling me this is a . . . premation?” I replied. My joke was rewarded with a hint of a laugh.
“Pre-cremation—premation—that’s good. Like the guy we got from San Jose last week. The one who set himself on fire with his cigarette. Premation.” He shook his head and turned back to the computer.
Score one for appropriately timed morbid humor. I had spent months trying to impress Mike with my death-positive gumption, but he was only now beginning to trust me with a joke.
The heads in this Science Support box belonged, respectively, to a gentleman of eighty and a lady of seventy-eight. Each head came with long identification sheets. The sheets didn’t give us their names or where they were from, but did provide a whole list of superfluous fun facts like “Head No. 1 is allergic to shellfish, tomatoes, morphine, and strawberries,” and “Head No. 2 has brain cancer and is prone to hay fever.”
There is little chance my two heads could have known each other in real life, but I wanted to imagine they were two lovers separated by war. The Crusades, perhaps. The Crusades seemed like a romantic, violence-soaked backdrop for this sort of thing. Maybe they were victims of a single guillotine blade during the French Revolution. Or perhaps the early American frontier—had they been scalped? I pulled back the gel ice packs to peek in. No, no, these heads had their scalps intact. Regardless, here they were, together, on their way to the eternal pyre.
Hesitant, I peeked into the box of heads. I toyed with the idea of not unwrapping them. They could go straight in the cremation machine, right? Mike popped up behind my shoulder, always watching. “You gotta take those gel packs out; those aren’t good for the retort.”
“Won’t I have to take the heads out to do that?” I asked.
“Yeah, well, let’s see what kind of woman you are,” he replied, arms crossed.
Chris looked up from his task, putting together a cardboard corpse container with a tape gun. All eyes on me. Boxes of heads really brought people together at Westwind.
I gingerly pulled out the man’s head (No. 1, allergic to shellfish, tomatoes, morphine, and strawberries). It was squishy, heavier than I expected it to be. Roughly the weight of a bowling ball but far more unruly, thanks to his brain distributing mass unevenly. A person really needed two hands to hold it.
“Alas, poor Yorick!” I proclaimed to my head.
“Aye-aye, Queequeg,” Chris countered. Our literary references for decapitated heads were at the ready, a kind of funeral-industry improv game.
Mike finished us off with a rambling story about Joel-Peter Witkin, the avant-garde artist who procured heads from Mexican morgues and photographed them in elaborate arrangements alongside hermaphrodites and dwarves in mythical costume. Witkin said his desire to create this dark imagery came from witnessing a horrific car accident as a young boy, where a small girl was decapitated, her lifeless head rolling to a stop at his feet. Mike always had to win the prize for esoterica.
I admired people, like Head No. 1 and Head No. 2, who had given up on a traditional funeral and the idea of post-death “dignity” for the good of research. It was très moderne.
Did that mean I was considering such an end for myself? Au contraire. I had a violent reaction to the thought of being fragmented in this way. It seemed like a serious loss of control to have my head lying in a box somewhere, the unbridled anonymity, only a number and my shellfish allergy to define me. My mother had always told me that it didn’t matter what we did with her dead body: “Just put me in a Hefty bag out on the curb for the trash guys for all I care.” No, Mother. Donating your body to science was certainly noble, but I revolted at the thought of anonymous portions, sections, and parts scattered about town.
Self-control has always been important to me. My grandfather, the man who went on the Alzheimer’s-induced joyride on Christmas morning, had been a full colonel in the United States Army. He commanded the tank destroyers in the Korean War, learned Farsi and hobnobbed with the Shah of Iran, and spent his later years running Hawaii’s army base. He was a strict man with definite ideas about how men, women, and children (read: me) should behave. All those ideas went to pot at the end of his life, when Alzheimer’s made him confused, sad, and socially inappropriate.
The worst part of his disease was the way it eroded his self-control, and since Alzheimer’s is in part genetic, it offered daily reminders of how it might someday erode mine as well. Then again, death brings an inevitable loss of control. It seemed unfair that I could spend a lifetime making sure I was dressed well and saying all the right things only to end up dead and powerless at the end. Naked on a cold white table, boobs flopped to the side, blood seeping out the side of my mouth, some random funeral home worker hosing me down.
I, of all people, had no rational reason to be against scientific donation, against the fragmentation of the body. Part of the fear is cultural. The dismemberment of the body prior to a Tibetan Sky Burial is difficult to accept even though, rationally, cremation is just another kind of fragmentation. The cousin of a friend was killed in Afghanistan. There was a brief period of time after the death that his mother received distressing reports that the roadside bomb that killed him had sent his limbs in all directions. She was relieved to discover his body was intact, even though his body was flown home to be placed directly into the cremation chamber, transformed by fire into thousands upon thousands of anonymous chunks of inorganic bone.
Like it or not, some of those bones will be irretrievable from the cracks between the floor and the wall of the cremation machine. The official State of California cremation authorization acknowledges this phenomenon with the following language:
The chamber is composed of ceramic or other material which disintegrates slightly during each cremation and the product of that disintegration is commingled with the cremated remains. . . . Some residue remains in the cracks and uneven places of the chamber.
In layman’s terms: When you’re pulled out of the machine post-cremation, some of the machine comes with you—and some of your bones stay behind. “Commingling,” it’s called.
No matter how many times I dragged the mini retort broom across the breaks in the ceramic surface, fragments of each body were lost. Not that I didn’t try. I attempted to gather each sliver. The hot air would scorch my face as I stuck my body a little too far into the machine, dislodging trapped bones with the mini broom until the straw bristles melted into a stump.
Once, while sweeping out the cremation machine, a hot bone fragment launched itself out at me. I accidentally stepped on it and burned a hole deep into the rubber sole of my boot. “Goddammit!” I yelled, and with an involuntary jerk of the knee I kicked the bone in a high arc across the crematory. It landed somewhere behind a row of gurneys. After five minutes crawling on my hands and knees I found the ember and matched the piece to the bone-shaped hole in my boot. You will be fragmented.
Of course, there are different perspectives on fragmentation. A month later, Mike gave me two (unpaid, mind you) vacation days to attend the wedding of my cousin in Nashville. In typical pre-wedding fashion, a ladies’ spa day was scheduled for the afternoon before the ceremony. I was whisked into the massage room, a windowless den of incense and meditation Muzak. The blond masseuse, soft-spoken and very Southern, began her heavenly dance across my back, making chitchat as she massaged.
“So what do you do, sweetheart?” she drawled over the chanting from the speakers.
Do I tell this woman what I do, I wondered. Do I tell her that her magical fingers are kneading muscle knots caused by the hauling of corpses and scraping of bones from giant ovens?
I decided to tell her.
To her credit she didn’t skip a beat. “Well. . . . I can tell you that I’ve got lots of family in West Virginia and they consider all that cremation-stuff to be devil’s work.”
“Well, what do you think about cremation?” I asked my masseuse.
She deliberated for a second, her hands resting on my back. “You know, I’m born again.”
Fortunately I was face-down on the massage table, so she couldn’t see my eyes flickering back and forth. I was unsure if I was supposed to ask a follow-up question.
There was a long pause before she continued. “I do believe Jesus will come at the rapture to take the blessed up to heaven. But here’s the thing. I know we will need our bodies, but what if I should be swimmin’ in the ocean and get myself torn apart by a shark? My body is bobbing around the water and in the shark’s stomach, but are you telling me our Savior can’t make me whole again? If his power can heal a shark attack, he can heal a cremation.”
“Heal a cremation,” I repeated. I had never thought of this. “Well, hypothetically if God can reconfigure decomposed bodies that have passed through the digestive tracts of maggots, I guess He could probably heal a cremation.”
She seemed satisfied with my reply and we spent the rest of the session in silence, pondering the degree to which we would ultimately be fragmented. Her body would await the rapture. My body, I feared, would enjoy no such transcendence.
It wasn’t only the inevitability of fragmentation that got to me, it was the way death was inescapable, sweeping over everything in its path. As Publilius Syrus wrote in the first century CE, “As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.”
In the late Middle Ages, the “danse macabre,” or dance of the dead, was a popular subject in art. Paintings depicted decomposing corpses with huge grins who arrive to collect the unsuspecting living. The gleeful corpses, made anonymous by putrefaction, wave their hands and stomp their feet as they pull both popes and paupers, kings and blacksmiths into their whirling dance. The images reminded viewers that death was certain: No one escapes. Anonymity awaits.
The Golden Gate Bridge stretches north from the tip of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Sound to Marin County. The burnished red-orange architectural masterpiece is the most photographed bridge in the world. You can drive across it at any hour, on any day of the year, and there will be happy couples embracing and taking pictures. The bridge also holds the somewhat infamous distinction of being one of the most popular suicide destinations in the world, squaring off against places like the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China and the Aokigahara Forest in Japan in a competition none of the tourist bureaus particularly want to win.
A man or woman jumping off the side of the Golden Gate can expect to hit the water at 75 miles per hour, and count on dying with 98 percent certainty. The trauma alone kills most jumpers—their ribs shatter and puncture fragile internal organs. If you do manage to survive the fall, you will drown or develop hypothermia unless someone spots you. Bodies are often found after they have been attacked by sharks or infested with crabs. Some bodies are never found at all. Despite the high death rate (or tragically, because of it), people come from all over the world to jump off the Golden Gate. Tourists walking along the bridge to catch the sunset over the Bay encounter signs reading:
CRISIS COUNSELING
THERE IS HOPE
MAKE THE CALL
THE CONSEQUENCES OF
JUMPING FROM THIS
BRIDGE ARE FATAL
AND TRAGIC
The Golden Gate Bridge creates a new corpse in this way about every two weeks. One day, after I had been working at Westwind for about seven months without a single jumper, we got two. Death as the great equalizer needs no better example than the two men brought in to Westwind: a twenty-one-year-old homeless man and a forty-five-year-old aerospace engineering executive.
Where the bodies of Golden Gate jumpers wind up after their plummet into the bay depends on what direction the currents carry them. If the waters brought the body south, San Francisco County took possession and sent it off to the overcrowded Medical Examiner’s Office in the city. If the currents bore it north, the body belonged to wealthy Marin County, which had a separate Coroner’s Office. The aerospace engineer, an actual rocket scientist, could easily have afforded a mansion in Marin County, but he bobbed south. The homeless gentleman, who never had a job, according to his sister, floated north into the wealthy Marin suburbs. The current under the bridge didn’t recognize their relative status; it didn’t care what helplessness led them to the bridge. The Bay’s current fulfilled feminist Camille Paglia’s lament: “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.”
ONE AFTERNOON, CHRIS AND I left the crematory in his white van and drove into Berkeley to pick up Therese Vaughn. Therese died in her own bed at age 102. Therese was born when World War I—World War I!—was still years in the future. After returning to Westwind and placing Therese’s body in the cooler, I cremated a newborn baby who had lived a mere three hours and six minutes. After cremation, Therese’s ashes and the ashes of the baby were identical in appearance, if not in quantity.
Bodies cremated in full, heads donated to science, babies, and some woman’s amputated leg all come out looking the same in the end. Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone.
There is a great deal made in the modern funeral industry about “personalization.” This marketing narrative targets the pocketbooks of baby boomers and ensures that, for the right price, every death can come with extras—Baltimore Ravens caskets, golf-club-shaped urns, corpse-shrouding blankets with duck-hunting scenes. Mortuary Management (the main death-industry trade rag) proclaimed the arrival of Thomas Kinkade airbrushed burial vaults with rainbow-hued pastoral scenes as if they were the second coming of Christ. These products provide the extra touches that say, “I’m not my neighbor, I’m not the same as the next dead guy, I’m me, I’m unique, I’m remembered!” For me, the schmaltzy tchotchkes provided by the funeral home ignite a horror that would shame the swirling corpses of the danse macabre.
I understood the impulse for personalization. In fact, I had indulged that impulse when I came to Westwind with the naïve idea of someday opening La Belle Mort, a funeral home for the one-of-a-kind, personalized death. But what we needed wasn’t more additions to the endless list of merchandise options. Not when we were missing rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions. Rituals that couldn’t be replaced with purchasing power.
Over the months I worked at Westwind, sacks of cremated remains had been piling up on the metal shelf above the tools. They were babies, adults, anatomical parts from Science Support, and the “extra” bits from the machines—a leftover mixture of just about everyone who passed through our doors. One afternoon, when there were enough sacks to make a trip worthwhile, we prepared the little gray warriors for their non-witnessed sea scattering. The bags of bones, decedents with names like Yuri Hirakawa and Glendora Jones and Timothy Rabinowitz, were stacked into crates, their little twist ties standing at stoic attention. Family members, next of kin, and Science Support paid our mortuary to take the ashes of their loved ones out onto San Francisco Bay and toss them to the winds.
The preparation took me a while. In California there are laws and procedures for scattering remains at sea. One has to check and then double-check each decedent, each Authorization for Disposition, each Westwind contract, comparing the little numbers on one form to the little numbers on another. At the end I had three full crates containing the indistinguishable remains of thirty-eight former adults, twelve former infants, and nine former anatomical specimens. I was the leader of my own danse macabre.
The crates were ready to be taken out on Westwind’s ash-scattering boat the next morning. I dropped the hint to Mike that I should be the one to go. I wanted to be the one who took these people all the way through, picking them up from where they fell to placing them into the fire to releasing them into the sea. Alas, Mike got that job. He had been looking forward to the early morning seaside adventure. Someone had to stay at Westwind, answer the phones, and burn the bodies. That someone was the crematory operator, the low woman on death’s totem pole: me.