Four years after leaving my job at Westwind Cremation & Burial, I stood, once again, outside the front gate. I rang the bell, the prodigal daughter returned home to the corpse-burning hearth. After a few moments, Mike came out to let me in.
“Well, look at who it is,” he said with a smirk. “You keep coming back like a bad penny. Come inside with me, I’m fingerprinting a body.”
We passed through the lobby and back into the crematory, and I still felt some of the same reverence I’d had when I first walked into that cavernous room five years earlier. In the middle of the room was a cot holding the body of an elderly woman. She was surrounded by four sheets of white paper, filled along the edges with black thumbprints.
“OK, so you’re literally fingerprinting a body,” I said. “I was wondering if that was a metaphor or something. Is this for one of those Thumbie necklaces?” I asked, recalling the company that laser-etches fingerprints into memorial necklaces. It seemed even Westwind couldn’t escape the funeral industry’s siren song to personalization.
“Yeah, you got it,” Mike said as he lifted the woman’s hand and gently wiped the black ink off her thumb. He applied a fresh coat and pressed her thumb to paper for the umpteenth time. “This is the stuff I get obsessed with, man. None of these are right yet. I’m cremating the body today—I have to get a good print.”
Mike went to answer the phone, and I pulled out my notebook. I had come to research this book, to ask questions, to confirm stories. I had even made an official appointment, like a professional. Mike walked back into the room and asked, deadpan, “So are you around here for the afternoon? We need you to go on a removal out in Piedmont. I have a service today, I can’t do it, and Chris needs a second person.”
I had been back for all of five minutes and already I was being sent out on a removal. It was as if I had never left, death’s indomitable schedule sending me straight back to work.
“What the hell, yeah, I’ll go,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant at the prospect. To be honest, I was pretty excited to be back on the team.
“Good. Chris is on his way back from the coroner’s now. By the way, I didn’t tell him you were coming. It’s a surprise.”
When Chris walked through the door, a look of disbelief flickered over his face. The look passed quickly. “I knew you’d be back, Cat.”
Later, as we drove through the winding hills up to Piedmont, Chris asked where I was staying.
“Oakland, with friends,” I answered.
“That’s good, it means you don’t have to go to that devil city,” he replied, pointing vaguely in the direction of San Francisco.
“So I hear that you’re writing a ‘book,’” he continued, making air quotes with his fingers.
“Well, it’s a real book, Chris. Not a hypothetical one.”
“Why would you ever write about us? We’re dull. You should make it fictionalized characters. Like us, but better.”
“I would argue that you guys are pretty interesting.”
“It’s dull as tombs here. It’s a good thing you got out while you still could. Shame you didn’t leave the industry altogether.”
We pulled up to a large old house with a white picket fence covered in vines.
“Well, this is nice place. You got lucky, Cat. The body I picked up yesterday was a decomp. It purged all over me. Although that guy was in a pretty nice apartment too. You just never know what’s inside,” Chris mused, pulling the gurney out from the back of the van.
We returned to Westwind with the body of Ms. Sherman, a beautiful woman in her mid-eighties with thick white hair. Her body had been washed by her family and covered in fresh flowers. Before sliding her onto the cot I grabbed her hand, colder than a living human’s, warmer than a mere inanimate object. My reaction to seeing her laid out this way was a reminder of how much I had changed since I first started at Westwind; whereas before bodies had scared me, now there was nothing more elegant in my eyes than a corpse in its natural state, prepared with dignity by her own family.
After unloading Ms. Sherman, Chris went out again to retrieve the latest batch of babies. Mike was up front making funeral arrangements with a family. With no one to talk to, I decided to put Ms. Sherman away in the refrigeration unit. As I taped and labeled her cremation container, the cardboard edge gave me the same razor thin paper cut it had a million times in the past. “Oh, what the—really?” I said to no one in particular.
Westwind’s newest crematory operator, a young woman named Cheryl, came into the crematory, clearly confused by my presence there. After I explained who I was, she clumsily shook my hand and walked back out. Jerry, the man originally hired to replace me when I left Westwind, had died of fast-moving cancer a few months earlier. He was only forty-five.
As I was leaving for the day, Bruce stopped by to pick up a check for several embalmings he had done the week prior. “Caitlin! How you doing? I’ve seen those videos you do online. What’s your website?”
“The Order of the Good Death.”
“Yeah, yeah, and the videos, the Question for a Mortician ones? Yeah, they’re good, they’re good.”
“Thanks, Bruce, I’m glad you like them.”
“You know what you need to do? I have a plan for you. You need to do a show at night, like with monster movies and such. A show like Answer a Mortician . . . is that what it’s called? Anyway, it would be like that. Paired with like, creature features. There was one on cable access in the ’70s. I tried to get my buddy at KTVU to bring it back. Everybody watches these monster movies on a Saturday. Like Svengoolie or who’s that woman—Vampira. Cult classic stuff.”
“I think I’d make a pretty poor Vampira substitute.”
“No! Don’t worry about it, you’ve already got the right hair for it,” he assured me. “I’m gonna talk to my buddy.”
ON MY WAY OUT of San Francisco I drove by Rondel Place. My former apartment had been stripped of its dull pink paint and refashioned as an elegant Victorian, right down to the gilded trimmings. I had a feeling my old room no longer rented for $500 a month. A handcrafted bicycle-messenger-bag shop had opened up across the street, and high-tech cameras at the end of the alley threatened to expose potential miscreants. The sidewalks on the surrounding streets had been repaved with glitter. Glitter. It was a shocking change from the Rondel I knew, but as the joke goes: “Q: What’s the definition of a gentrifier? A: Someone who arrived five minutes after you did.”
Halfway to Los Angeles, I stopped for the night at a small boarding house in the seaside town of Cambria. This was one of my favorite places in California, but I was filled with anxiety that I couldn’t place.
In 1961, a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology laid out the seven reasons humans fear dying:
1. My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends.
2. All my plans and projects would come to an end.
3. The process of dying might be painful.
4. I could no longer have any experiences.
5. I would no longer be able to care for my dependents.
6. I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death.
7. I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.
The anxiety I felt was no longer caused by the fear of an afterlife, of pain, of a void of nothingness, or even a fear of my own decomposing corpse. All my plans and projects would come to an end. The last thing preventing me from accepting death was, ironically, my desire to help people accept death.
I dined at Cambria’s one Thai restaurant and walked back to the boarding house. The streets were quiet and empty. Through the thick fog, I could barely make out a sign above the road: cemetery, 1 mile. I strode up the hill, walking straight down the center of the road with big, bold steps—bigger and bolder than my cardiovascular health should have allowed for. The full moon peeked out from the clouds, lighting up the pine trees and causing the fog to glow an eerie white.
The road came to an abrupt end at the Cambria Cemetery, est. 1870. Stepping over the small metal chain, a rather ineffectual deterrent against trespassers, I walked down through the rows of graves. To my left the leaves crunched, breaking the silence. Standing on the path in front of me was an enormous buck, its antlers framed in the mist. We stood looking at each other for several moments.
The comedian Louis C.K. talks about how “mysterious and beautiful” deer seem until you live in the country and deer are shitting in your yard and causing highway accidents. But this night, framed majestically in the fog, you had better believe that damn deer appeared like a spiritual messenger.
The buck slipped past the headstones and back into the trees. I was exhausted. No matter how bold my steps had been in the climb up to the cemetery, it was adrenaline that could not be sustained. I almost fell to the ground, mercifully covered in soft pine needles, and leaned against a tree between Howard J. Flannery (1903–1963) and a grave marked only with a small metal sign reading A SOARING SPIRIT, A PEACEFUL HEART.
I sat next to Howard J. Flannery for so long that the fog lifted. The full moon stood out crisp and white and thousands of stars appeared against the black sky.
It was complete, silver silence. Not a cricket, not a breath of wind, just the moon and the old headstones. I thought of the things that culture teaches us to fear about a being in a cemetery at night. A floating specter appearing, its demon red eyes aglow. A zombie pushing its bloated, decaying hand out of a nearby grave. Organ music swelling, owls hooting, gates creaking. They seemed like cheap gimmicks; any one of them would have shattered the stillness and perfection of death. Maybe we create the gimmicks precisely for that reason, because the stillness itself is too difficult to contemplate.
At the moment I was alive with blood coursing through my veins, floating above the putrefaction below, many potential tomorrows on my mind. Yes, my projects could lie fragmented and unfinished after my death. Unable to choose how I would die physically, I could only choose how I would die mentally. Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.