Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks. But Joe, Westwind’s owner, thought Bayside Cremation was the future of low-cost death care. It wouldn’t be the first time California had wit

They went from local coffin makers forced to supplement their income in other ways to highly trained medical professionals, embalming bodies for the “good of public health,” and creating artistic corpse displays for the family. It didn’t hurt that the postwar economic boom gave people the expendable income to keep up with the postmortem Joneses.

and choose an inexpensive cremation instead. It is safe to say that 1963 was cremation’s year. The American Way of Death came out in 1963, as did Pope Paul VI’s overturning of the Catholic Church’s ban on cremation. These two factors turned the death trends of the entire country toward cremation. When The American Way of Death came out, the vast ma

The old-timers in the death industry—mostly men—called this type of direct cremation “bake ’n’ shake” or “direct disposal.” Mitford’s last request was one final dig at this group who hated everything she stood for.

In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve our relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to fa

The victims on these shows are played by young models and actors who are making their rounds on the CSI and Law & Order corpse circuit while waiting to get called for a pilot. They are a far cry from the majority of bodies in a funeral home—old, knotted, and wracked with years of diseases like cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.

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

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.

in trade magazines like The Shroud, The Western Undertaker, and The Sunnyside.