Sublime

we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.

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

I became “functionally morbid,” consumed with death, disease, and darkness yet capable of passing as a quasi-normal schoolgirl.

desquamation,

The victims on these shows are played by young models and actors who are making their rounds on the CSI and Law & Order corpse circuit while waiting to get called for a pilot. They are a far cry from the majority of bodies in a funeral home—old, knotted, and wracked with years of diseases like cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.

The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks. But Joe, Westwind’s owner, thought Bayside Cremation was the future of low-cost death care. It wouldn’t be the first time California had wit

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.