“We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.” – Nikos Kazantzakis
Most people don’t like to talk about death. How it ends. What happens afterwards? Usually it’s reserved for quiet times of reflection amongst confidantes, but the subject frustrates. It’s a bull fight where the bull always wins. Always.
All that can be done is to share the details.
When Chris Chilton’s dog was nearing death, he had done his research and believed that he could handle administering the procedure with compassion. First deliver a large quantity of oral sedative, like trazodone. When the pet falls asleep, one then delivers an intravenous administration of pentobarbital, the drug which stops the beating heart.
“Dying at home where she was comfortable would be ideal, but she was having these breathing problems where all the sudden it was like she was suffocating. I was afraid if I went off to Mexico, she might die suffocating while I was gone.”
He mentions Mexico because, in that country, pentobarbital is sold over the counter at pet stores with no questions asked. That plan faded, so he turned his thoughts to farms.
“On farms, dealing death is fairly common,” Chilton said. “I knew a woman who raised livestock. Horses. She told me, for putting down suffering livestock, a bullet to the brain works as well as anything. Death is quick, so I was told. Also, I thought, what could be better? A walk out under the sunlight and blue sky. Sit down on the grass. Let her look at the world, birds and squirrels in the trees, tongue lolling, as happy as a dog can be. Then pull the trigger. What you do to aim, the woman told me, is you draw an imaginary X and aim for the center. What I didn’t realize is you have to draw the X between their eyes and so you’re looking at them while you pull the trigger.”
Chilton couldn’t do it. He called around until he found a vet who would come to his home. She administered valium-ketamine anesthetic and chased it with the pentobarbital. His dog died in bed. He and his wife invited friends over. They cried and they pet the fur of the dead Dutch Shepherd. The spark had gone and they drank wine late into the night. Then they set the dog on a table and surrounded her with flowers. With people of course, dying is more complicated.
Lana Kova, typist, hopes that the afterlife is like a party held on a beach near a cliff above water.
“You lay around in eternity. Everybody’s there. Your dogs. Your family. Your friends. The weather is perfect. The sand is warm. You grill food. You drink without hangovers. Maybe you fall asleep in the sunlight listening to the crashing of waves. Everything is perfect. But eventually, you know, eternity gets boring. So there’s a game everyone can play. You climb the cliff over the water and you jump in.”
Back into the crashing, tumbling surf of living, to wear the flesh costume and give it another whirl.
“When you climb back out of the water, everyone’s still on the beach waiting to hear what happened.”
But Kova’s beach is conjecture. For anyone on this side of life, death remains mysterious.
People will still go on dying. And having seen the rictus, made eye contact with the empty eye-sockets looking back, coping mechanisms may vary. All that remains is for the living to deal with the corpses.
Burials for the unknown or the unloved in Ulster County, as a final kind of kindness, are paid for by the taxpayer. In case that relatives might at some point come forward to claim the body, the county does not cremate. They only bury.
Encountering an unclaimed decedent lacking all material resources, the medical examiner contacts the Department of Social Services, who in turn contact the funeral homes. Through a sort of Potter’s field arrangement, the funeral directors know where to bury the bodies.
What happens next?
For those who were in contact with family and friends, the grief is just beginning. Poetry and tears. Caress crucifixes or worry beads. Wave candles. Murmur prayers. Curse oblivion or drink to intoxication. Dance to exhaustion. Tell stories and engage in maudlin recollection. Hold vigil with stale or lukewarm coffee in a Styrofoam cup. With a cold eye and steady hand, believe in nothing at all. Whatever the shape of the ritual, at some point there awaits a numb trip down the spiritual escalator. The ceremony of letting go waits at the bottom. Then begins the weary climb back up into the sunshine, to engage once again in whatever behavior brings the money in – to pay the harpies with.
Auto body repair specialist, Fred Dollie, recalls the recent death of his oldest friend.
“He was living down in New York City. Met him when I was seven years old. He was eight. We were a couple of cards. I’m so deaf I had to wear a hearing aid. He was medically blind. All we needed was a mute. Fast forward forty years. So now he was in a bad way. Stage four liver disease. Had the opportunity to take a liver transplant. Which he did not do. There’s always a chance a liver won’t take and he had decided not to die full of tubes in some hospital. Ed wanted to die at home in his apartment, or at least out in the world. Besides, a lot of the damage to his liver he did to himself. And he knew he’d do more. He recognized there were others out there, less damaged, who deserved a chance. That’s a realistic decision. He was a real sonofabitch, you know? I had him pegged for another decade or two left, at least. But I was wrong. I’ll miss him.”
Like losing your long-term parking ticket at JFK international and trying to talk the parking attendant into opening the boom gate, attempting to retrieve the belongings of a loved one who passes on in New York City is a nightmare of miscommunication and tangled bureaucracy – especially if the deceased must be returned to another state. Regardless of what the coroner says, regardless of whether the police suspect foul play, the apartment is sealed off until the body has been moved out across state lines and planted firmly in the ground. Only then will the accompanying paperwork be provided to authorities to open the apartment door in order to allow for the collection of the effects and belongings, the symbols and objects of a life stopped in mid-course.
What moved the process along, Dollie said, was his mother decided to have him cremated in the city, “Before taking him back by train with her to the Rhode Island coast.”
Cremation does simplify the process. Relevant authorities are only half-heartedly concerned about the transport of ashes. Marcus W., employed at a crematory in Kingston which he asked not be identified, is sympathetic to those facing the bureaucrat’s machinery from a weakened position of emotional strength.
“The fees are crazy,” he said. “Plus you have to fly the body, or, if you’re driving the body it’s obviously not as expensive, but you still have to have the proper permits. You can’t just be carting around human remains.”
When Marcus first took the job in the crematory, he said he expected it to feel spooky or haunted. He expected to feel some sort of presence. In the end, he says the workplace feels very clinical.
“It’s incredibly clean at all times, obviously,” says Marcus. “It has to be. It’s just very stark white. Very businesslike. It’s the same feeling as just walking through a hospital. But there is still an inherent level of sadness at hospitals. It just feels very businesslike in the crematory. There’s a very palpable reverence for human life, though, among everyone that works there. Nobody takes the job lightly.”
Marcus admits the first day of work was odd, “definitely nothing like I’ve ever experienced before.”
“So I guess the process is, the police, the autopsy, then everything has come back and they decided that everything was a natural death. Then the body comes to you, at which point the loved ones decide whether it’s going to be cremated instead of buried.”
Referring to the endless supply of dead persons arriving at the crematory boxed in cardboard, Marcus says he’s always been good at detaching himself from difficult emotional experiences.
“I guess there have been employees before me that have really had a hard time being around so much death, day-in and day-out. The thing is, that side of things isn’t as difficult to me because that person is gone. It’s just a meat sack after a certain point. But you can kind of get stuck in your own mortality, like a cycle of just thinking about it over and over.”
“If you can remove yourself,” Marcus says, “from thinking this is a human or this was a human body, it’s really fascinating. At such a high temperature, everything basically gets fully reduced.”
Marcus says that the oven into which a deceased person is incinerated, called a retort, is somewhere around five feet tall and five feet wide going back 25 feet and lined with ceramic bricks. The body, still boxed in cardboard, is raised on a push cart, set on the rollers there and pushed inside with a good shove. The retort is set at around 1600°F.
“It’s not the ashes of your skin or your hair or your tissue. All the fat evaporates away. All the moisture until you are just left with the most basic of your bones. They kind of break down and become a powdery substance. Everyone calls it ashes, but they’re not, technically. It’s just diminished bone fragments after a certain point. And you could have a 400-pound man, but depending on his bone density and his overall health, he might end up with only a pound of remains. Whereas you could have a perfectly healthy, 30-year-old woman, you know 120 lbs, and she might have heavier remains because her bones were more dense.”
Depending on the density and the fat content, the process takes from between two to four hours. If someone has a very high fat content, it’ll be smoky.
“In terms of how the smoke is processed, so that it’s not just billowing black smoke out into the air outside,” Marcus says, “it’s almost like a catalytic converter. Then there’s the cooling process, and after, the process where everything kind of goes into like a big sifter where everything is removed that needs to be removed.”
Pacemakers. Gold teeth. Metal fillings. Implants. Usually, says Marcus, it’s aluminum that has a higher melting point.
“There’s a big metal thing that pulls it all toward you that kind of looks like a snow shovel – but flat – that pushes it all, and then we use what is essentially a push broom to collect any last little bit of dust so nobody’s left behind. We check to make sure there’s no extra stuff and then we put it into a plastic bag that’s zip-tied and then it goes into like a plain black plastic bag that’s not see-through and, boom, you’re ready to go.”
But like grave-digging, the crematory is back-of-house work. For the front-of-house- where the funeral directors mingle with priests and families, the first thing one notices about this service industry of the funerary arts is that the key the language is spoken in is calculated to soothe and obscure. It’s an older mode, built on metaphor and import and it has everything to do with avoiding direct eye-contact with the frayed emotions of those dealing with the loss of a loved one.
Mortal remains. Final disposition. Bereaved. Condolences. All codewords for speaking at a remove, the abstractions are simultaneously useful for sterilizing a conversation in anticipation of business to be transacted.
During this “difficult time”, when people are “grieving”, everything has a price. Each step in the process, from transportation of the remains, the embalming, for renting the showroom to renting the showroom casket for the decedent to be viewed in, for viewing & visitation, for the ceremony, for the dressing and casketing. Taken together the niceties which precede delivery to the final destination – by hearse, by horse-drawn carriage, by motorcycle sidecar – can run the bereaved upwards of $7,500.
This is before the cost for cremation or burial is figured in. A top-of-the-line-model in deluxe burial accommodations offered over on Albany Ave. at the Keyser Carr Simpson Hammerl funeral home is the H11 Brushed Natural Spice casket for $10,395. And to ensure a worm-free afterlife for the decedent, a bronze vault is also available for $6,995. Essentially an impermeable grave-hole liner, a vault is like a casket for your casket. Different from a coffin, which is tapered and features a removable lid, a casket is rectangular with its lid on hinges.
And then, there is graveyard real-estate to consider. It never ends. They really do ding you coming and ding you going.
Bernie Gray, funeral director at Leahy funeral Home on Smith Ave in Midtown Kingston, says he’s gotten rid of some of the filters.
“I use the word dead. I use the word died. I don’t use pass away much anymore,” he says, “but I’ve been doing this a long time. Maybe if a child has died. I don’t like the word, you know, we lost him. What do you mean you lost him? I know exactly where he is. I kind of correct people with that. Sugar coating doesn’t do anybody any good.”
Gray has been in the business 42 years. He recalls that as an adolescent helping out around a neighbor’s funeral home, the neighbor who thought he had a knack for the business encouraged him, “because of my personality and helping him with little chores around his funeral home.”
After high school he went into mortuary science school. Decades later, his son, Will, followed after him. A family business.
“I’m a mortician. And my son is a mortician. But we don’t use that term anymore. We’re licensed to embalm and we’re also licensed to make funeral arrangements and supervise the disposition of bodies.”
Required for presenting the body for the viewing, Will now does the majority of the cosmetic work and the embalming, but in a pinch, they do have a staff of specialists, licensed beauticians, who can be called in.
“Depending upon the hairstyle,” says Gray. “I’ve got a rotating staff of women who, somehow or some way they were asked to do someone’s hair and they obliged and they said, ‘hey, I’d like to do some more.’ Two of them are also cosmetologists and they also do nails.”
Besides the desairology, over time the blur between the responsibilities of religious leaders versus funeral home directors has only increased. Traditionally, the funeral director is both master of ceremonies and dancehall landlord, hiring talent, communicating with specialists, coordinating the happening, whereas religious leader has become merely a featured speaker – though they are both colleagues and familiars in the business of death.
Gray recalls that in the 1960s, “families went to the Italian funeral home. Families went to the Irish funeral home. Families went to the Black funeral home. Families went to the German funeral home. You had that in Kingston. You had churches that those ethnicities would go and worship. Not so much now. The funeral homes are very well versed in all the rituals, more so now because of the influx of Hindus, Muslims, Asians and Hispanic people.”
“I feel terrible for people who do not have a connection to some kind of a faith-based belief,” Gray says, “that experience a tragic sudden death because their coping mechanisms are just gone.”
Having to improvise meaning and ritual in the wake of the tragic and devastating blow. A burden.
The fashion of the passage is everything. One can observe the wake – keep watch over the dead body through the night. One can gather the congregation and get a single file look at the body. Or one can put on a second line where the marching band plays dirges through the streets which lead up to the graveyard service. And when the words which need to be spoken have been spoken, the funeral procession is turned loose, the band drops the dirge and picks up the beat to provide for dancing and laughter. One can do it all, umbrellas in hand, celebration and a commemoration rolled together.
When push comes to shove, Bernie Gray says he will prefer to be buried.
“When I was young and I didn’t have children, I said to my wife, cremate me. But I have a family now. And I have grandchildren. Even though I am a big proponent of telling people, ‘I’m not there, my body’s there’, I feel as though I want to be buried in case they have the need to visit.”
But if burial seems too morbid, too final, too cold or too damp an act of transcendence for the dearly departed, then an urn will be the appropriate model of eternal transport. Where a stylish steel thermos with screwed-in lid might be had for less than $200, funerary receptacles, made of the same stainless-steel, mysteriously command thousands of dollars more. All this to say, dying in the United States, like living in the United States, isn’t cheap. So honor the journey. Deepest sympathy for your loss. A funeral is just a wedding in reverse.
When his time comes, Marcus says he would prefer cremation to burial. And then, because what everyone burns down to is just carbon, he wants his ashes to be transformed into a diamond. He says he knows of a company who does it and that depending on the amount of carbon in the ashes, diamonds made from human remains can range in size from .03 carats to 3 carats.
“If you’re a younger person, with healthy bones and a lot of remains, you’d probably make a larger diamond,” Marcus smiles. “I want it to be mounted on a ring, because I just feel like that kind of adds to the good spookiness. Like a haunted piece of jewelry.”
Dollie suggests he should be buried with a guitar, a bottle of wine and a shovel.
“In case I get blue or I get thirsty. Or I need to dig my way out.”
Join the family! 
