Mike returned, pushing a squeaky-wheeled gurney bearing my first corpse.
“There’s no time to learn the cremation machines today, so you can do me a favour. Give this guy a shave,” he requested, nonchalant. Apparently the dead man’s family wanted to see him one more time before he was cremated.
Motioning for me to follow, Mike wheeled the gurney into a sterile white room just off the crematorium, explaining that this was where the bodies were “prepared.” He walked over to a large metal cabinet and pulled out a pink plastic disposable razor. Handing it to me, Mike turned and left, disappearing for the third time. “Good luck,” he called over his shoulder.
As I said, I hadn’t expected the corpse shaving, but there I was.
Mike, though absent from the preparation room, was watching me closely. This was a test, my introduction to his harsh training philosophy: sink or swim. I was the new girl who had been hired to burn (and occasionally shave) corpses, and I would either (a) be able to handle it or (b) not be able to handle it. There was to be no hand-holding, no learning curve, no trial period.
Mike returned a few minutes later, stopping to glance over my shoulder. “Look, here . . . no, in the direction his hair was growing. Short strokes. Right.”
When I wiped the last bits of shaving cream from Byron’s face, he looked like a newborn babe, not a nick or razor burn in sight.
Later that morning, Byron’s wife and daughter came to see him. Byron was wheeled into Westwind’s viewing room and draped in white sheets. A floor lamp fitted with a rose-coloured lightbulb cast a calm glow over his exposed face—far more pleasant than the harsh fluorescent bulbs in the preparation room.
After my shave, Mike had worked some kind of funerary magic to close Byron’s eyes and gaping mouth. Now, under the rose lighting, the gentleman seemed almost serene. I kept expecting to hear cries from the viewing room of “Dear God, who shaved him like this!” but to my relief, none came.
I learned from his wife that Byron had been an accountant for forty years. A fastidious man, he probably would have appreciated the close shave. Towards the end of his battle with lung cancer he couldn’t get out of bed to use the bathroom, let alone wield a razor.
When his family left, it was time to cremate him. Mike rolled Byron into the mouth of one of the behemoth cremation machines and turned the dials on the front panel with an impressive dexterity. Two hours later, the metal door rose again and revealed Byron’s bones, reduced to glowing red embers.
Mike brought me a metal pole with a flat rake on the end. He demonstrated the long strokes required to pull the bones from the machine. As what remained of Byron fell into the waiting container, the phone rang. It boomed loudly through the speakers in the ceiling, installed specifically to be heard over the thunder of the machines.
Mike tossed me his goggles and said, “You finish raking him out. I gotta grab the phone.”
As I scraped Byron’s body out of the cremation machine, I saw that his skull was still fully intact. Looking over my shoulder to see if anyone, living or dead, was watching, I carefully inched it towards me. When it was near enough to the front of the chamber, I reached down and picked it up. The skull was still warm, and I could feel its smooth, dusty texture through my industrial-grade gloves.
Byron’s lifeless eye sockets stared up at me as I tried to remember what his face had looked like as he slid into the flames just two hours before. It was a face I should have known well after our barber-client relationship. But that face, that human, was gone. Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is “red in tooth and claw,” demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.
Bones, reduced to just their inorganic elements by cremation, become very brittle. As I turned the skull to the side for a better look, the entire thing crumbled in my hand, the shards tumbling into the container through my fingers. The man who was Byron—father, husband, and accountant—was now entirely in the past tense.
I got home that evening to find my roommate, Zoe, on the couch, sobbing. She was brokenhearted over the married man she had fallen for on a recent backpacking trip to Guatemala (a blow to both her ego and her lesbianism).
“How was your first day?” she asked through her tears.
I told her about Mike’s silent judgement, about the introduction to corpse shaving, but decided not to tell her about Byron’s skull. That was my secret, along with the strange, perverse power I had felt in that moment as skull crusher of the infinite universe.
As the sound of ranchera music from Esta Noche blasted me to sleep, I thought of the skull lodged in my own head. How it would one day emerge after everything that could be recognised as Caitlin—eyes, lips, hair, flesh—was no more. My skull might be crushed too, fragmented by the gloved hand of some hapless twentysomething like me.
PUPPY SURPRISE
My second day at Westwind I met Padma. It wasn’t that Padma was gross. “Gross” is such a simple word, with simple connotations. Padma was more like a creature from a horror film, cast in the lead role of “Resurrected Voodoo Witch.” The mere act of looking at her body lying in the cardboard cremation container caused internal fits of “Oh my God. Holy—what is—what am I doing here? What is this shit? Why?”
Racially, Padma was Sri Lankan and North African. Her dark complexion, in combination with advanced decomposition, had turned her skin pitch-black. Her hair hung in long, matted clumps, splayed out in all directions. Thick, spidery white mould shot out of her nose, covering half her face, stretching over her eyes and yawning mouth. The left side of her chest was caved in, giving the impression that someone had removed her heart in some elaborate ritual.
Padma was in her early thirties when she was felled by a rare genetic disease. Her body was kept for months at the Stanford University Hospital so doctors could run tests to understand the condition that killed her. By the time she arrived at Westwind, her body had taken a turn for the surreal.
Grotesque as Padma appeared in my amateur’s eyes, I couldn’t shrink away from her body like a wobbly fawn. Mike the crematorium manager had made it clear that I was not being paid to be freaked out by dead bodies. I was desperate to prove that I could share his clinical detachment.
Spiderweb face mould, is it? Oh yes, seen it a million times before, surprised this is such a mild case, really, I would say, with the authority of a true death professional.
Until you’ve seen a dead body like Padma’s, death can seem almost glamorous. Imagine a Victorian consumption victim, expiring with a single trickle of blood sliding from the corner of her rosy mouth. When Edgar Allan Poe’s love, Annabel Lee, is taken by the chill of death and entombed, the lovelorn Poe cannot stay away. He goes to “lie down by the side, of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.”
The exquisite, alabaster corpse of Annabel Lee. No mention of the ravages of decomposition that would have made lying down next to her a rancid embrace for the brokenhearted Poe.
It wasn’t just Padma. The day-to-day realities of working at Westwind were more savage than I had anticipated. My days began at eight thirty a.m. when I turned on Westwind’s two “retorts”—industry jargon for cremation machines. I carried a retort-turnin’-on cheat sheet with me for the first month, clumsily cranking the 1970s science-fiction dials to light up the bright-red, blue, and green buttons that set temperatures and ignited burners and controlled airflow. The moments before the retorts roared to life were some of the quietest and most peaceful of the day. No noise, no heat, no pressure, just a girl and a selection of the newly deceased.
Once the retorts came