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

Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientists confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you’ve been programmed to fear deat

Vaults and caskets are not the law; they are the policy of individual cemeteries. Vaults prevent the settling of the dirt around the body, thus making landscaping more uniform and cost effective.

Without refrigeration, in the heat of the summer months, the noxious smell of human decomposition in these churches must have been unimaginable. Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini complained that “there are so many tombs in the church, and they are so often opened that this abominable smell is too often unmistakable. However much they fumigate

In the Siddhartha story, the crude physicality of the burning corpse is not a negative force but a positive one. It catalyzed his transformation. Encountering a corpse forced the man who would be Buddha to see life as a process of unpredictable and constant change. It was life without corpses, trapped behind the palace walls, that had prevented him

Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. Children of the Disney princess era grew up with a whitewashed version of reality filled with animal sidekicks and unrealistic expectations. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for th

In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but also a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.” Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.

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.

glasses, I went from thinking it was strange that we don’t see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world. Corpses keep the living tethered to reality.

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 crema