Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory(8)

AFTER LUNCH, AN HOUR or so after sliding Mr. Martinez into the retort, it was time to move him. His corpse had entered the machine feet-first, allowing the main cremation flame to shoot down from the ceiling of the chamber and hit him in the upper chest. The chest, the thickest part of the human body, takes the longest to burn. Now that his chest had had its turn with the flame, his body had to be moved forward in the chamber so that his lower half could do the same. For this I donned my industrial gloves and goggles and fetched my trusty metal pole with a flat solid rake at the end. I raised the door of the retort about eight inches, inserted the pole into the flames and carefully hooked Mr. Martinez by the ribs. The ribs were easy to miss at first, but once you got the hang of it you could usually hook the sturdiest rib on the first try. Once he was successfully hooked, I yanked him toward me in one quick movement. This pull caused a bright burst of new flames as the lower body was at last addressed with fire.

When Mr. Martinez had been reduced to red glowing embers—red is important, as black means “uncooked”—I turned the machine off, waited until the temperature crept down to 500 degrees, and swept out the chamber. The rake at the end of the metal pole removes the larger chunks of bones, but a good cremationist uses a fine-toothed metal broom for hard-to-reach ashes. If you’re in the right frame of mind, the bone sweeping can reach a rhythmic Zen, much like the Buddhist monks who rake sand gardens. Sweep and glide, sweep and glide.

After sweeping all of Mr. Martinez’s bones into the metal bin, I carried them over to the other side of the crematory and poured them along a long, flat tray. The tray, similar to the kind used on archeological digs, was used to search for various metal items that people had embedded in their bodies during their lifetimes. The metal I was looking for could be anything from knee and hip implants to metal dentures.

The metal had to be removed because the final step in the cremation process was placing the bones into the waiting Cremulator. “The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot.

I swept the bone fragments from the tray into the Cremulator and set the dial to twenty seconds. With a loud whir, the bone fragments were crushed into the uniform powdery puree that the industry calls cremated remains. In California, it is assumed (and is, in fact, the law) that Mr. Martinez’s family would receive fluffy white ashes in their urn, not chunks of bone. Bones would be a harsh reminder that Mr. Martinez’s urn contained not just an abstract concept but an actual former human.

Not every culture prefers to avoid the bones. In the first century CE, the Romans built tall cremation pyres from pine logs. The uncoffined corpse was laid atop the pyre and set ablaze. After the cremation ended, the mourners collected the bones, hand-washed them in milk, and placed them in urns.

Lest you think bone washing hails only from the ancient bacchanalian past, bones also play a role in the death rituals of contemporary Japan. During kotsuage (“the gathering of the bones”) the mourners gather around the cremation machine when the bones are pulled out of the chamber. The bones are laid on a table and the family members come forward with long chopsticks to pick them up and transfer them into the urn. The family first plucks the bones of the feet, working their way up toward the head, so that the deceased person can walk into eternity upright.

At Westwind there was no family: only Mr. Martinez and me. In a famous treatise called “The Pornography of Death,” the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote, “In many cases, it would appear, cremation is chosen because it is felt to get rid of the dead more completely and finally than does burial.” I was not Mr. Martinez’s family; I did not know him, and yet there I was, the bearer of all ritual and all actions surrounding his death. I was his one-woman kotsuage. In times past and in cultures all over the world, the ritual following a death has been a delicate dance performed by the proper practitioners at the proper time. For me to be in charge of this man’s final moments, with no training other than a few weeks operating a cremation machine, did not seem right.

After whirling Mr. Martinez to ash in the Cremulator, I poured him into a plastic bag and sealed it with a bread-bag twist tie. The plastic bag containing Mr. Martinez went into a brown plastic urn. We sold more expensive urns than this one in the arrangement room out front, gilded and decorated with mother-of-pearl doves on the side, but Mr. Martinez’s family, like most families, chose not to buy one.

I punched his name into the label maker, which hummed and spit out the identity that would be stuck on the front of his eternal holding chamber. In my last act for Mr. Martinez, I placed him on a shelf above the cremation desk, where he joined the line of brown plastic soldiers, dutifully waiting for someone to come to claim them. Satisfied at having done my job and taken a man from corpse to ash, I left the crematory at five p.m., covered in my fine layer of people dust.