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

Death as the great equalizer needs no better example than the two men brought in to Westwind: a twenty-one-year-old homeless man and a forty-five-year-old aerospace engineering executive. Where the bodies of Golden Gate jumpers

The California Code of Regulations clearly states that “the care and preparation for burial or other disposition of all human remains shall be strictly private.”

Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

The hospital was a place where the dying could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living. In my high school, my classmates

But what we needed wasn’t more additions to the endless list of merchandise options. Not when we were missing rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions. Rituals that couldn’t be replaced with purchasing power.

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

Then came the American Civil War, the deadliest war in United States history. The Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, holds the dubious honor of having been the Civil War’s (and American history’s) single bloodiest day, during which 23,000 men died on the battlefield,

Paul Gauguin, who tried to commit suicide by swallowing arsenic deep in the mountains of Tahiti. He had just finished one of his greatest paintings, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin hoped that no humans would find his body so that ants would eat his corpse. In his zeal, he swallowed too much arsenic. His body rejected

I had written my thesis on medieval witches accused of roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. A year later I found myself literally roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. The tragedy of the women who were accused of witchcraft was that they never actually ground the bones of babies to help them fly to a midnight devil’s Sabbath. B