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

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

Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we

The idea of cradling the dead this way, according to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “is called being tegel—able to do something odious, abominable, and horrible without flinching, to stick it out despite an inward fear and revulsion.” The mourners perform this ritual to become iklas, detached from the pain. Embracing and washing the corpse allows

We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system.

As a rule, bedridden patients have to be moved every few hours, flipped like pancakes to ensure that the weight of their own bodies doesn’t press their bones into the tissue and skin, cutting off blood circulation. Without blood flow, tissue begins decay. The ulcers occur when a patient is left lying in bed for an extended period, as often happens

“My mother died when I was really young, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. After my mom died, Grandma gave me one of these leaves and told me that if I planted it in the ground a tree would grow from it. It sounded ridiculous, but I planted the leaf in a Maxwell House coffee container and gave it three cups of water every morning. And h