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

embalming were something a tradesman like Bruce would never perform on his own mother, I wondered why we were performing it on anyone at all.

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

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 1899, a mere 4 percent of the US population was over sixty-five—forget making it to eighty-five.

The American undertaker had done something similar: by making themselves “medical” they became legitimate.

Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.

Spending over $100 billion a year on anti-aging products as 3.1 million children under five starve to death.

The ancient Ethiopians would place their dead in the lake where they fished, so the fish would have the opportunity to receive back the nutrients. The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created.

But that face, that human, was gone. Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is “red in tooth and claw,” demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.