My first job after I suffered a great injury was at a crematory. Behind a small castle In Colma, nestled between fallen trees and unkept plots, in a corrugated temporary structure sat four furnaces, a grinder, and a wall of refrigerators. Steel doors ground open against concrete floors chipping them away. Loose stones stuck to the steel-toe boots that hung loosely tied around my ankles. Near the garage doors, the bodies were dropped off in the night. Each to be cataloged, their identities proven, their possessions closed in that cardboard box with them. Old men and women, young men and women, children, all wrapped in plastic, mouths agape, staring at eternity. When I first began working there I would jump every time I opened the lid to their containers. Their white eyes fixed on me. Their wounds still seeping, or rotted entirely, never in between.
I was paid 28 dollars an hour to cremate the bodies and crush their bones into dust, then give it back to their weeping kin. From this process, I saw that on that slab we are all the same. Something to be exploited, something to be used then thrown away. Yet I can tell a rich man from a poor man by their teeth, by their hips, by their very life spread out before me. I could only see the body as a commodity; my work was to burn it as a commodity, too.
Twelve. Twelve people a day was the minimum quota to maintain our position in the eyes of our employer, a district manager, general manager, chief operating officer, or some other title. They did not know the names of the people I touched, the souls I sent below, the vessels in which I bid farewell. Each morning I checked in the load that sat out in the putrid air. Knowing more of them made them real to me, never wanting to see them as only an object, something to be changed and sold. Even if that is what they were for the industry of the dead. I pull out the first four from the refrigerator and inspect them, their names, their manner of death, their wounds, and their life. The retort would open, spitting flame onto brittle, broken, concrete slabs. They went in. The door closed. They burned.
The process is slow, especially when I need to intervene with a metal stick to make sure all the parts of the body are burned completely. I will not make twelve at this pace, so I must turn them more. I must prod them more. I must tear them apart. That rod comes down on the body until it breaks under the flame. Until its black blood seeps. Until nothing remains but hot bones. With a wire brush, I push the pulverized body out the back into a steel container. My arms turn red. I have been burned more times than I can count here, dipping in and out of that warmth. The largest go in at the beginning, the smallest last. I am always behind.
The second round is prepared and entered into the oven. Four done. Four in. Four left. The burning of the bodies moves quicker as the day drags. They are lighter and more emaciated. The destitute and homeless cremations are paid for by the state. People forgotten. Deaths ignored. In the cold, they lived and in that flame, they are finally free. I do not pray, I have no belief in an after. This is it. And you will suffer no more. I break. I burn. I grind. And I pack. Eight done. The round is fast, but not fast enough. Even with all my attempts to humanize these things the work rips at that faux reality. We are a product. Nothing more than our worth to another.
The last four are the children, the babies, and the fetuses. The quickest to burn, the hardest to understand. Loved beyond all things even when they no longer remain. I am the last to look at their faces. I apologize that it is only me, not God.
I am still there with them. Two hours of overtime. My boss sends an email about the discrepancy.
I am still there with them even after my overtime.
//
- Image credits
Cover: Courtesy of Michael Brand.
