Free Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty Page A

wash their dead. Where they could feel safe and comfortable being with a body until its final moment, inserted into the flames.
    In 1913, George Bernard Shaw described witnessing the cremation of his mother. Her body was placed in a violet coffin and loaded feet-first into the flames. “And behold!” he wrote. “The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like Pentecostal tongues, and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.”
    I pictured my father, the door of the cremation chamber rising and the reverberation filling the room. If I was still alive when he died, I would be there to watch him become “that beautiful fire.” I didn’t want anyone else to do it. The more I learned about death and the death industry, the more the thought of anyone else taking care of my own family’s corpses terrified me.

PINK COCKTAIL
    O nce upon a forgotten time, the Wari’ people lived in the jungles of western Brazil with virtually no contact with Western civilization. Then, in the early 1960s, the Brazilian government arrived in Wari’ territory alongside evangelical Christian missionaries, both groups trying to establish relations. The outsiders brought with them a host of diseases (malaria, influenza, measles) that the Wari’ immune system had no precedent for fighting. In the span of a few years, three out of every five Wari’ were dead. Those who survived became dependent on the Brazilian government, who supplied them with Western medicine to fight the new Western diseases.
    In order to receive medicine, food, and government aid, the Wari’ were forced to give up an important aspect of their lives—their cannibalism.
    The Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in his conveniently titled On Cannibals that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” We certainly would call cannibalism barbaric, and it is not our practice, thank you very much. Consuming human flesh is for sociopaths and savages; it conjures up images of headhunters and Hannibal Lecter.
    We can be confident that cannibalism is for the deranged and heartless because we are caught in what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance.” From the time we are born, we are indoctrinated by our specific culture as to the ways death is “done” and what constitutes “proper” and “respectable.”
    Our biases in this matter are inescapable. As much as we fancy ourselves open-minded, we are still imprisoned by our cultural beliefs. It is like trying to walk through a forest after the spiders have been up all night spinning webs between the trees. You may be able to see your destination in the distance, but if you attempt to walk toward that destination, the spiderwebs will catch you, sticking to your face and lodging themselves awkwardly in your mouth. These are the webs of significance that make it so hard for Westerners to understand the cannibalism of the Wari’.
    The Wari’ were mortuary cannibals, meaning their form of cannibalism was a ritual performed at the time of death. From the moment a member of the Wari’ took their last breath, their corpse was never left alone. The family rocked and cradled the body to the sound of a steady, high-pitched chant. This chanting and wailing announced the death to the rest of the community, and soon everyone joined in the hypnotic sound. Relatives from other villages rushed to get to the corpse’s side to participate in the ritual for the dead.
    To prepare for the consumption of the flesh, relatives walked through the village and pulled a wooden beam from every house, leaving the roofs sagging. Anthropologist Beth Conklin described this sagging as a visual reminder that death had violated the community. The wood gathered from the homes was bundled together, decorated with feathers, and used as kindling for a roasting rack.
    At last the family