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

THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality.

Eventually the morgue exhibitions became too popular with the citizens of Paris, and they were shut down to the public.

is a not-so-well-kept funeral industry secret that the processes used to make someone appear natural are often highly unnatural.

The person who performs the Ghusl is chosen by the dying man or woman themselves. Men are washed by men and women are washed by women. Selection is an honor and a sacred obligation to fulfill.

We needed the cremation chambers stone cold in the morning to accommodate our larger men and women. Without a cold chamber, the flesh would burn up too quickly, going up the smokestack in thick, dark puffs, potentially summoning the fire department. People with additional body fat (such as the zaftig Mrs. Greyhound) were cremated first, while small

Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world. On an average day in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges in India, anywhere from eighty to a hundred cremation ghats burn. After a very public cremation (sometimes performed by young children from India’s untouchable caste), the bones and ashes are released into the wate

Your body is donated to science in a very . . . general way. Where your parts go is not up to you.

Service Corporation International, the largest American funeral home and cemetery corporation, based in Houston, Texas, has even managed to trademark dignity. Go to any of their “Dignity Memorial®” facilities, and that pesky ® shows up every time, subtly letting you know they’ve cornered the market on postmortem poise.

talk about it.” We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all.