The cemetery was Old Hollywood glamorous. It wasn’t Forest Lawn, but it was close. Turning off the road through the decorative gates was like entering Mount Olympus. A white-columned mansion sat high atop a hill, with a twelve-tiered water fountain cascading below it. It was a wonderland, where a single burial plot could run tens of thousands of dollars.
I was meeting with the general manager to interview for a job as a funeral director. After a few minutes he came sweeping into the lobby with a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. Directing me into an elevator, he said, “Here, cookies. Take one.” It felt rude to say no. Afraid to interview with chocolate on my teeth, I gracelessly held the sweet burden in my hand through the entire interview.
We got off the elevator and he led me into his office, which had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over his death utopia. He delivered a thirty-minute monologue on the pros and cons of his establishment. I would be hired to make funeral arrangements, but, he warned, “Don’t be surprised if the family treats you like a butler—that’s the kind of people they are. Here, well, you’re the help.”
I would handle the arrangements for everyone except the celebrities. He did all the celebrity calls. “Look,” he said by way of explanation, “last month when [redacted] died, his service time leaked to the media. Of course, all the paparazzi were swarming the gates. I need that kind of publicity like I need a fist in my ass, if you get me. I handle the celebrities now.”
This wasn’t my ideal employment situation, but at least the cemetery wasn’t run by one of the big funeral corporations. Even better, he swore up and down that I wouldn’t have to upsell anything to families: more-expensive caskets, extended services, fancy golden urns. No lines like “Are you sure Mom wouldn’t have wanted the rosewood casket? Didn’t she deserve a dignified send-off?” were required to earn my bonus. It seemed like a good enough place to recover for a while, licking my wounds from mortuary school.
After telling me I was hired, making me fill out my W-9, and showing me my new office, I didn’t hear from him for a month. I had erroneously thought that his “fist in my ass” speech meant I was part of the team. Apparently there are far more intimate rungs in the funeral service ladder, because I eventually got a curt e-mail from his secretary informing me they had decided to “hire internally” instead.
My second interview was at a crematory, a Westwind of magnificent proportions, a veritable disposal factory. It cremated thousands of bodies a year in a sizeable warehouse in Orange County. It was run by Cliff, a man who spoke in the same flat monotone as Mike, leading me to believe the speech pattern is a job requirement. He also took the place very seriously, having built the business to a size sufficient to support his real passion, competition Spanish Andalusian horses. I got the job.
My position would not be a crematory operator, but a body-transport driver. Most crematories receive bodies in deliveries of one to four at a time, depending on their source of origin. My body van, a tall diesel-fuel Dodge Sprinter with built-in shelves, held eleven dead bodies at once. Twelve in a pinch, with one corpse tilted at a slight angle.
With my eleven corpses in tow I drove hither and thither across Southern California—San Diego, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara—to retrieve the dead and bring them back to the crematory. Hauling, lifting, and driving filled my daily schedule.
In my new job I was no longer the belle of my own little ball as I had been at Westwind. I was a mere piece of a puzzle, a specialized laborer. My position was a product of Jessica Mitford’s influence, the result of her direct-cremation vision achieving ubiquity, on its way to supreme popularity. California was once again the leader in this new way of death, as it had been with Forest Lawn, as it had been with Mitford, as it had been with Bayside Cremation.
The crematory was manned by three young Latino men from East Los Angeles, working in shifts all hours of the day and night (and on weekends) to perform cremations in the colossal machines whose fires constantly burned. There was the good—the very sweet Manuel, who always helped me unload my bodies from the van at the end of the day; the bad—the tattooed Emiliano, who made sure to tell me he was looking to get a white girl pregnant; and the ugly—Ricky, who cornered and threatened me in one of the cooling fridges for stacking the bodies in a manner not to his liking.
There was a never-ending stream of decedents who required fetching. On Christmas Eve I got a call from the woman who ran the facility in San Diego: “Caitlin, there are too many bodies here, we need you tonight.” So in the middle of the night, while others snuggled in their beds, dreaming sugarplum dreams, my van zoomed from Los Angeles to San Diego and back like a depressing Santa Claus with even more depressing cargo. “The bodies were stacked in the reefer with care, with hope that the body van soon would be there . . .”
If there was one luxury I had as captain of the Good Ship Body Van, it was time to think. Driving more than 350 miles a day as a long-haul corpse trucker gives one ample time to ponder. Some days I listened to books on tape (Moby-Dick on eighteen unabridged CDs, thank you very much). Other days it was the Christian talk radio that starts to come in clearly as soon as you leave metropolitan Los Angeles. But mostly I thought about death.
Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives. This need for meaning is why some believe in an intricate system of potential afterlives, others believe sacrificing a certain animal on a certain day leads to healthy crops, and still others believe the world will end when a ship constructed with the untrimmed nails of the dead arrives carrying a corpse army to do battle with the gods at the end of days. (Norse mythology will always be the most metal, sorry.)
But there is something deeply unsettling—or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it—about what is happening to our death values. There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality. There have been times when humans were driven to break tradition by necessity—for example, deaths on a foreign battlefield. But for the most part, when a person dies, they are disposed of like their mother and father were, and like their mothers and fathers were. Hindus were cremated, elite Egyptians entombed with their organs in jars, Viking warriors buried in ships. And now, the cultural norm is that Americans are either embalmed and buried, or cremated. But culture no longer dictates that we must do those things, out of belief or obligation.
Historically, death rituals have, without question, been tied to religious beliefs. But our world is becoming increasingly secular. The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion”—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even those who identify as having strong religious beliefs often feel their once-strong death rituals have been commoditized and hold less meaning for them. At a time like this, there is no limit to our creativity in creating rituals relevant to our modern lives. The freedom is exciting, but it is also a burden. We cannot possibly live without a relationship to our mortality, and developing secular methods for addressing death will become more critical as each year passes.
I started to put essays and manifestos on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death,” looking for people who shared my desire for change. One such person was Jae Rhim Lee, an MIT-trained designer and artist who created a full-body suit for a human to wear for burial. The “Infinity Burial Suit,” which might be described as ninja couture, features a dendritic pattern of white thread spreading out across the black fabric. Lee crafted the thread from mushroom spores, which she specially engineered to consume parts of the human body using her own skin, hair, and nails. This may sound like a Soylent Green future, but Lee is actually training the mushrooms to remove toxins from our bodies as they decompose the human corpse.
After seeing a demonstration of her work at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, we met at a taco truck and talked for hours on a bus-stop bench on Olympic and La Brea. I was grateful to talk to someone interested in pushing the boundaries of body disposal; she was grateful that someone in the traditional funeral industry was willing to listen to her ideas. We both agreed that inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition was a noble purpose. She gave me a bucket of the flesh-eating mushroom prototype, which I attempted (and failed) to keep alive in my garage. Not feeding it enough flesh, I reckon.
For years, while working at Westwind and attending mortuary school, I had been afraid to discuss cultural death denial in public. The Internet is not always the kindest of forums, especially for young women. Tucked away in the comment section of my kitschy web series “Ask a Mortician,” there are enough misogynistic comments to last a lifetime. Yes, gentlemen, I’m aware I give your penis rigor mortis. It wasn’t just the anonymous basement dwellers who took issue with me. People in the funeral industry weren’t always thrilled that I was sharing what they perceived to be privileged “behind the black curtain” knowledge. “I’m sure she’s just having some fun. But since fun has no place in the funeral industry, I wouldn’t go to her for my loved one.” To this day the National Funeral Directors Association, the industry’s largest professional association, won’t comment on me.
But as I grew bolder, people came out of the woodwork. Crawled out of the coffin, if you will. People from all different disciplines—funeral directors, hospice workers, academics, filmmakers, artists—had wanted to discover how death works in our lives.
I wrote a lot of letters, sometimes out of the blue. One such recipient was Dr. John Troyer, a professor at the University of Bath’s Center for Death and Society. Dr. Troyer, whose PhD dissertation was titled “Technologies of the Human Corpse,” is studying crematoriums that capture the excess heat from the cremation process and put it to use elsewhere—heating other buildings, or even, as one crematory in Worcestershire did, a local swimming pool, saving taxpayers £14,500 a year. It is a way to make the cremation process, which uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body, more energy efficient. Luckily Dr. Troyer was willing to talk with me, even with my crude e-mail subject line, “Fan Gurl!”
It was a relief to find others like me; it removed the stigma and alienation. These were practitioners shifting our relationship with death, pulling the shroud off our deathways and getting to the hard work of facing the inevitable.
This work drove me internally. Externally, I was just the body-van driver. Three times a week I would drive my eleven corpses up the I-5 from San Diego and pass through the immigration checkpoint. My large, unmarked white van moved slowly toward the front of the inspection line, looking far more suspicious than the Priuses and Volvos in the other lanes. I would find myself hoping to be stopped, if only as a break from the monotony. In my mind, this is how the scene would go:
“You don’t got any inmigrantes back there, do ya, missy?”
“No inmigrantes, Officer. Just eleven people,” I’d reply, and, whipping off my sunglasses, “former US citizens.”
“Former?”
“Oh, they’re dead, Officer. Real dead.”
Unfortunately, every time the van rolled up and the officer saw a young white woman at the wheel, he or she would wave us right on through. I could have smuggled hundreds of Mexicans into the country in cardboard cremation containers. I could have been a drug mule. I could be a rich woman by now.
With as much time as I was spending on the road, my main fear was getting into an accident, crashing on the freeway. I imagined the back doors of my van flying open, all eleven passengers hurling out. The police show up amid chaos and confusion. Eleven fatalities—but why are these people so cold, with no signs of bodily trauma?
Once the smoke cleared and they discovered that all these fatalities were pre-dead, I’d become an Internet meme, my little head grimacing in a Photoshopped Wizard of Oz–style corpse tornado.
But every day I made it back to the crematory with my eleven bodies. When I pulled up behind the warehouse, Emiliano would be playing his accordion in the parking lot along with the Norteño music blasting from the stereo in his Cadillac. The soundtrack to my body unloading.
But the day I almost died, I wasn’t in the body van. I was driving my ancient Volkswagen through Salton Sea, California. Salton Sea is a man-made saltwater lake smack dab in the middle of the Southern California desert. One idea in the 1960s had been to redesign it as a resort destination, an alternative to Palm Springs. Now, instead of martinis, Hawaiian shirts, and water-skiing, abandoned mobile homes line a morass of brown water with an unbelievable stench. Massive fish die-offs have littered the shoreline with fish and pelican corpses. The satisfying crunch of the sand beneath your feet comes courtesy of thousands of dried bones. I had made the four-hour pilgrimage from Los Angeles to visit this monument to decay. Some consider it gauche to visit so-called ruin porn, but I like to witness firsthand the way nature will declare war against our hubris, building in places unintended for human habitation.
As I drove toward the northern shore of the thirty-five-mile-long Salton Sea, I chanced upon a dead coyote by the side of the road. This wasn’t one of the petite, doglike coyotes sometimes found in urban Los Angeles—it was a beast with a blackened tongue and distended stomach. I made a U-turn and returned to inspect him, undaunted by the suspicious locals in their trucks and ATVs.
Perhaps this coyote was an omen. The coyote and/or the fish graveyard at the Salton Sea. And/or the old women riding golf carts in pink Juicy Couture tracksuits. They all might have been omens.
Darkness had fallen before I departed for Los Angeles. The four westbound lanes of the I-10 freeway passed through Palm Springs, filled with Sunday revelers heading home. I was driving my Volkswagen in the far-left lane at a steady 75 miles per hour. The back left side of the car began to shake, and I felt the dull thud of a tire blowout. I put on my blinker to move into the median, miffed at my bad luck.
But it turned out a flat tire wasn’t the problem. The bearings had slipped loose and the entire wheel had begun spinning off the axle. Finally, bolts snapped and off it came, leaving a gaping hole where the wheel once was.
With only three wheels, the car spun wildly out of control. I spiraled across four lanes, raising a rooster tail of sparks as bare metal scraped against asphalt. Time seemed to slow as the Volkswagen performed its deadly dance across the highway. There was a complete, throbbing silence inside the car. The lights from oncoming traffic whirled in a blur around me, the vehicles missing me as if blocked by some miraculous buffer.
More than the loss of control, more than the crushing loneliness of contemporary life, this was my worst fear, what Buddhists and medieval Christians referred to as “the bad death”—a death for which there is no preparation. In the modern era it takes the form of bodies ripped apart in a searing crunch of metal. Never to tell their loved ones how passionately they are loved. Affairs out of order. Funeral desires unknown.
Yet, as I spun and my hands pulled the wheel in some attempt at control, my mind was miles away. At first, a voice said, Ah, here we go, and a gentle peace descended. The “Moonlight Sonata” played and slow motion began. I had no fear. I realized as the car spun that this would not have been a bad death. My four years working with bodies and the families attached to them had made this moment a transcendent experience. My body went limp, waiting to accept the violent impact. It never came.
I slammed into a dirt hill bordering the shoulder of the highway. Facing oncoming traffic head-on, upright, and alive, cars and semis whizzed by me at dizzying speed, any (or many) of which could have hit me during my swirling journey across the highway. But they hadn’t.
Once I had been terrified at the thought of my body being fragmented. No longer. My fear of fragmentation was born from fearing the loss of control. Here was the ultimate loss of control, flung across the freeway, but in the moment there was only calm.