A week before I started classes at Cypress College of Mortuary Science, I was poked, prodded, and shot up with tetanus and tuberculosis vaccines—all part of the orientation physical. I was sick, which the doctor at the clinic found wildly unimpressive. “Well, your nodes aren’t swollen,” he said. Well, thank you for your opinion, Doctor, I thought. You’re not the one taking your mortuary school ID photo looking like a bog monster.
All the disease testing and immunizations caught me off guard. Westwind Cremation had never seemed too concerned with the possibility of me giving syphilis to a corpse or vice versa. The only time Mike would tell me to put on any biohazard protection beyond a pair of rubber gloves was when he thought I might ruin a nice dress. A rare area of sensitivity for him, really.
The morning of my first day of school I left my apartment in Koreatown early and drove the forty-five minutes south to Orange County. I hadn’t budgeted for the gridlock traffic in the school parking lot, so of course I was five minutes late. I burst in just as the head of the program was explaining how tardiness of any kind would be counted as an absence.
“And where exactly are you supposed to be?” he asked as I bumbled in.
“Well, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be here,” I replied, slinking to a seat in the back.
There had been a mortuary school group orientation session a few weeks earlier, which I had missed in order to indulge my despair in the redwoods. This was the first time I was able to see the people I would be spending the next eighteen months with. Looking around the room I was surprised to discover that most of my fellow classmates were women, and women of color, no less. Hardly the bastion of creepy white men in suits I associated with the American funeral industry.
At the end of our first day we were corralled into a large room with the second- and third-semester students and given instructions to introduce ourselves and tell the group why we had come to the illustrious concrete halls of deth skool. I was hoping this sharing exercise would help ferret out my fellow death revolutionaries. Surely they would boldly refuse to give the same cheesy, party-line answer, “I just really want to help people.”
No such luck. Even the students with the crazy eyes, the ones you could just tell enjoyed the transgressive proximity to dead bodies, had to talk about their desire to help people. Finally the sharing circle arrived at me. I imagined myself yelling, “A new dawn is upon us, join me while you still can, fools!” Instead I said something about having worked at a crematory and, you know, seeing a “good future in the death industry.” Then it was over. Everyone grabbed their Nightmare Before Christmas messenger bags and left in a thoughtful mood.
There were roughly fifty of us starting the program. I quickly befriended Paola, a first-generation Colombian American. One woman I did not have the pleasure of befriending was Michelle McGee. Nicknamed “Bombshell,” her image was later plastered all over the media for her role in breaking up the marriage of America’s sweetheart Sandra Bullock and her tattooed husband Jesse James, a tabloid dream of a cheating scandal. Michelle dropped out two weeks into the program. It may have been the fact that her whole body was covered in tattoos, including her face (not the traditional look a family is expecting when choosing someone to look after their deceased mother). Michelle was the first to go, but others followed at an alarming rate.
One thing that was immediately apparent about the professors at Cypress College of Mortuary Science was that they believed in the work they were doing. Professor Diaz, a short blond woman, was the most aggressively cheerful person I had ever met in my life. Her enthusiasm for embalming, caskets, and all the available swag of the modern funeral industry bordered on the threatening. In her lectures she described embalming as an ancient art and said things like, “Do we have to embalm our bodies? No, but we do. It is who we are.”
In one class, Professor Diaz showed us lengthy slideshows of different caskets, gushing over her own purchase of a $25,000 Batesville Gold Protection casket with a forest-green interior, the same model the singer James Brown had been buried in. When she died, it would be slid into a pre-paid aboveground vault. Her soaring rhetoric seemed to refer to something far different from the caskets I had seen at Westwind, with crepe pillows and lumpy beds filled with shredded office paper like my cat used in her litter box.
At the end of the casket slideshow, Professor Diaz briefly showed us a picture of the dirtiest, most soot-stained cremation retort I had ever seen. Paola slid over to me and whispered, “Why does that cremation chamber look like it’s from the Holocaust or something?”
“I think it’s a veiled warning,” I whispered back.
“Yeah, like, ‘So, anyone here want to be cremated instead of buried? Well, come on down, this is where you’ll end up. Muahaha.’”
IN THE SECOND SEMESTER we began embalming lab, the class I feared the most. I had seen embalming in action many a time, but had little interest in performing it myself. Our embalming instructor wore a tie covered in the books of the Bible and would bless us all with the sign of the cross as he dismissed the class. He had faith that, as soon-to-be embalmers, we were doing God’s work.
It was evident I had no place in “traditional” funeral service. I hated embalming lab and the head-to-toe biohazard-resistant protective gear we were forced to wear. The personal protective equipment, or PPEs, were only available in a sickly shade of light blue, making the students look like a cross between the stars of a deadly-disease-outbreak film and overweight Smurfs. More than the outfits (admittedly a frivolous concern), I also hated that our lab bodies were the indigent and homeless dead of Los Angeles County.
The county of Los Angeles has, depending on the year, upward of 80,000 homeless men and women living within its borders. More citizens live on the streets in L.A. than in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. A mere ten minutes away from the latest big-budget film premiere is a section of downtown known as Skid Row, a popup-tent city of homeless men and women, many of them mentally disturbed and dependent on drugs. In L.A., the gap between the haves and the have-nots is more like a chasm.
When a celebrity dies in Los Angeles, the news is greeted with tremendous fuss. Michael Jackson’s body warranted a private helicopter escort to the L.A. County Coroner’s and hundreds of thousands of mourners observed his funeral in person and on the Internet. His body, like those of the medieval saints, was a relic, an object of public adoration.
Not so the bodies of the homeless. They are a rotting burden that must be disposed of on the government’s dime. I know these bodies well. They were embalming practice.
Every week a volunteer from Cypress College went to retrieve bodies from the L.A. County Morgue. We fetched our victims from a special fridge (really a vault) full of the unclaimed. The morgue attendant opened the refrigeration unit to reveal hundreds of identical white body bags, stacked five shelves high. They are what mortician Thomas Lynch calls “larger than life-size sperm” for the way hospitals and coroners’ offices tie the bags tight around the deceased’s feet. It is an entire city of dead bodies, a frozen sperm necropolis.
This fridge is where the dead wait. Weeks pass into months as the county tries to find someone to claim the body. When the trail ends, a county-provided cremation will take place. Starting early in the morning, while some young starlet stumbles drunkenly out of a Hollywood club, bodies are already burning. Having been reduced to ash, they are placed in a container, labeled, and put on a shelf. That shelf is a burgeoning necropolis of its own, and the remains will wait there even longer. They’ll wait until the bureaucratic channels have run dry, and the government is finally satisfied that nobody is coming to retrieve the anonymous tin of ashes.
In bad economies, major cities see a drastic increase in unclaimed bodies, not all of them homeless, or even without a family. A son may have loved his mother, but if his house is in foreclosure and his car repossessed, his mother’s body might shift from relic to burden very quickly.
Evergreen Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Los Angeles, established in 1877. Buried on its grounds are former Los Angeles mayors and congressmen and even film stars. Once a year, in a small section where the grass is brown and the markers almost unnoticeable, L.A. County workers dig a large hole. Into the hole they will dump, one after another, almost two thousand sets of unclaimed cremated remains, a thick, gray cloud of dust rising above the backhoe. They replace a thin layer of topsoil and mark the area with a plaque stating the year they were put in the ground.
Some bodies are “lucky” enough to visit Cypress College before this anonymous ceremony, where they are laid out on embalming tables and surrounded on all sides by the student Smurf brigade in our protective outfits. We spent the first semester of embalming lab learning where the arteries and veins were, often through trial and error. Someone would slice open the upper thigh in the incorrect place, only to say, “D’oh! The femoral artery is actually down here.” If at first you don’t succeed, slice, slice again.
Outside the embalming laboratory was a stack of trade magazines from the Dodge Company (no relation to the automobiles), which sells embalming and restorative chemicals. Their trade magazine is full of tips ’n’ tricks to use with their products.
“Fills! Plumps! Firms!”
“Dryene! Stay Cream! Looks like a dream!”
There were products for sealing skin, hydrating skin, dehydrating skin, firming skin, and bleaching skin. Products to prevent the body from leaking, smelling, and turning strange shades of orange (mental note). Products for curling hair and blushing cheeks and moisturizing lips.
My personal favorite was Tim Collison’s article “Cosmetic Considerations for the Infant Death,” a fancy way of saying “Makeup for Dead Babies.” The three pictures accompanying the article were of a darling living baby, Mr. Collison himself, and a well-lit shot of Dodge’s patented Airbrush Cosmetics Deluxe Kit, presumably perfect for use with infants.
If you are like me, your first response might be, “Gosh, I don’t think dead babies really need makeup.” Mr. Collison disagrees with you. He wants to ensure that funeral professionals place “the tiny body in the casket to look as natural as possible.”
Mortuary schools no longer teach students that they are embalming to make the dead bodies look “lifelike.” “Lifelike” makes people think the dead might actually come back to life. The word of choice in the industry is now “natural.” Embalmers “restore the body to a natural appearance.”
According to Mr. Collison, the first step to applying “natural” baby makeup is to preserve the heck out of the baby in question: “The use of a cosmetic arterial chemical with a humectant base such as Plasdopake or Chromatech, along with sufficient amounts of accessory chemicals, will supply the needed preservation.”
Plasdopake or Chromatech might provide an excellent base for cosmetics, but the downy hair on a newborn’s face can be such an impediment. Best to go ahead and shave the baby. Be careful, though, “the shaving of an infant requires extra care.”
Finally, be aware that a baby’s facial pores are much smaller than their adult counterparts. You might think you can use the same old oil- or paraffin-based cream cosmetics you use on adults, but nay. They would make the baby look waxy and not “produce a natural appearance.” There’s that natural again.
Often our assigned research papers required us to consult and interview “funeral industry professionals.” Mike and Bruce served as my funeral professionals. Phone calls with them made me think that perhaps I had left Westwind too soon. After a year there I was still learning so much; it was imprudent for me to waltz out.
Most of all I missed their straight talk. When I asked Bruce about whether a corpse is going to “go bad” if not embalmed right away, he laughed derisively, even though he was a longtime embalmer and educator himself. “The whole ‘body going bad’ thing has really gotten blown out of proportion. Granted, if you’re in a hundred and ten degrees with no air conditioning, like, the middle of the Amazon rain forest, you gonna want to take care of that. Otherwise, that body isn’t going to go rotten in the next hour. It’s crazy how funeral homes really think that.”
Mortuary school made me tense to the point of physical illness. The longer you spend doing something you don’t believe in, the more the systems of your body rebel. The months drifted by and I was plagued by sore throats, muscle spasms, canker sores in my mouth. As Dr. Frankenstein ruminated while working to create his monster, “My heart often sickened at the work of my hands.” It was a stressful environment and a financially foolish decision on my part. But I would have forked over my life savings to anyone who could have let me skip embalming lab and not fail the class.
Granted, I was far from the only student made tense by mortuary school. There was a woman in the program who would stand outside the building chain-smoking, her hands trembling. She often broke down crying during exams and twice, notably, during labs: once while viciously jamming a metal suction tube into a dead man’s foot and once while applying practice curls to a plastic head. I had named my plastic head Maude. My classmate was not on a first-name basis with hers.
More and more I began to cherish the idea of the home funeral. I had never forgotten about my original dream of owning a funeral home. The dream of La Belle Mort had morphed into the dream of Undertaking L.A. At Undertaking L.A., families could reclaim the process of dying, washing, dressing, and attending to the body as humans had done for thousands of years. Family members would remain with the body, free to mourn and care for their loved one in a supportive, realistic environment. Such an idea was taboo at mortuary school, where wisdom held that embalming kept a corpse “sanitary.” No wonder Bruce said funeral directors were telling families that dead bodies were a threat to public health: they were learning that dead bodies were a threat to public health.
I INCHED TOWARD GRADUATION and passed the exams to become a licensed funeral director in the state of California. My reveries of galloping into the sunset to start Undertaking L.A. were dampened by financial realities. I had put myself in debt to go to Deth Skool and thus lacked the capital, and perhaps the experience, to open my own funeral home. I had to get another job in the death industry.
One option was moving to Japan, where they were desperate to hire trained embalmers from the United States and Canada. Embalming is a recent development in Japan, where they call it “death medicine.” One Canadian embalmer who moved to Japan to work described placing bandages on the embalmed corpse to make it look like a medical procedure. Appealing as it would have been to live overseas, I wasn’t about to act as the colonialist bearer of ill-advised deathways.
Professor Diaz told me that it would be hard to get hired at a crematory in Southern California. For that type of physical work, “they can just get an immigrant to do it.” Though insensitive, she was being honest; this was what crematory owners had told her.
On the opposite end of the death spectrum was someplace like Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Jessica Mitford’s archnemesis, the “Disneyland of Death.” Forest Lawn had expanded to multiple locations across Southern California. Everyone knew Forest Lawn. Their billboards soar high over Los Angeles, picturing a forty-foot-tall elderly couple dressed in white linen. Their heads thrown back in laughter, the couple holds hands and walks along the beach at sunset. They’re reveling in their golden years, beaming at each other, just here to gently remind you (in tiny print at the bottom of the billboard) that there is a memorial park available should you wish to prepay for your funeral.
A group of Forest Lawn representatives filled the lobby of Cypress College. It was billed as a job fair, although the “fair” element fell somewhat flat, as only Forest Lawn was represented. One of the representatives gave a talk to our graduating class.
“Our founder, Hubert Eaton was a revolutionary!” she gushed. “Surely you’ve learned about the wonderful things he has done for the death industry. And it’s a wonderful place to work. Such good benefits—people retire from our company.”
At Cypress, the all-female representative army looked just like Evelyn Waugh had described, “that new race of exquisite, amiable, efficient young ladies” whom he had met everywhere in the United States. They wore matching gray suits and blank stares reminiscent of the Manson family. The Eaton family, if you will, here to gain recruits for the beautiful death brigade.
I filled out their massive employment application and forced myself to turn it in. I had to wait my turn while they interviewed several male students in the mortuary program, for whom they make no effort to hide their preference.
“Well, I am looking for a job as an arrangement counselor. I do have experience in that area,” I began.
“Now, we call those ‘memorial counselors,’ and we don’t have anything like that available,” the representative cooed. “You don’t want to be an embalmer?”
“Um, no.”
“Well, perhaps you would be interested in our student program, where we allow selected students to work part-time at services, giving directions to the families, et cetera. Oh! But look, it says here you are graduating this year, you wouldn’t want that.”
“Oh, well, sure I would. I really want to work for your company!” I said with as much vigor as possible, forcing the bile down the back of my throat. I felt gross the rest of the day.
Over the next month I applied everywhere, knowing where I actually wanted to be was back in the trenches, with dead bodies, with real grief and real death. I heard back from two places: a very fancy mortuary/cemetery combination, and a crematory. I decided to show up at both interviews looking well put together and let fate decide.