"As soon as your brother passes," Cathy said, "you call me up, and I’ll take good care of him." I’d noticed that the hospice people also talked in a matter-of-fact way about his death. “When he passes, you’ll have to do x and y,” they’d say, as if he were going on a two-week vacation. It was strangely comforting, as if this were the natural next step and not something to be dreaded.

 

On February 11, 2020, I became my brother Bill’s guardian. He didn’t know that, in a matter of minutes, a court formally took away his civil rights, and his younger sister, namely me, was now responsible for his every need. I had already been ordered to place him in a locked facility, and I’d found a clean, spacious, dorm-like residence for Alzheimer’s patients—in a farming community in the middle of nowhere. I was supposed to return to the court on April 9 with a statement of Bill’s assets and a proposed budget, but  the Plague shut everything down. However, his assets wouldn’t last two years, so I was faced with the need to sell our rental home to buy him some time, and eventually transfer him to a Medicaid facility. The social worker who was helping me said that if she had a choice between a Medicaid facility and death, she would choose death.

As I went over and over his bank statements during the lockdown, waking up at 3 a.m. worrying about him, I kept wishing there was some way I could keep him at his current home for the rest of his life. Well, the Monkey’s Paw must have heard my wish because on May 29, after a five-week struggle with what must have been COVID, Bill died.

However, I don’t want to write a sad story of saying good-bye to him, because his send-off was actually quite . . . I’m still not sure how to characterize it, so I will just write.

When Bill was transferred to hospice care at his residence, the nurse told me that it would be easier if I made the arrangements in advance. “Better call Cathy,” she advised. Actually, Cathy probably ran the only funeral home in this tiny town. When I called her up, a loud, cheery voice shouted, “Hel-l-l-o-o! I’m driving, but I’ll put you on speaker. The bodies can’t hear me. Ha!” I explained that my brother, who was near death, had expressed his desire to be cremated but that I didn’t want a funeral, given the COVID situation, and she said, “Then you’ll want our basic cremation package. It includes pickup and delivery, all the prep and paperwork, four death certificates . . . and you get to choose from five colors of your basic urn. I prefer stainless steel myself! Ha! Of course, if you want to watch, that’ll be extra. Ha ha ha!”

We talked for a while until she had to go, because she did indeed have several bodies in the back of her truck. “Gotta get ’em inside. So as soon as your brother passes, you call me up, and I’ll take good care of him. You just go to my website, fill out the forms, and you’ll be all set.” I’d noticed that the hospice people also talked in a matter-of-fact way about his death. “When he passes, you’ll have to do x and y,” they’d say, as if he were going on a two-week vacation. It was strangely comforting, as if this were the natural next step, and not something to be dreaded.

When I got home, I filled out the forms, which was extremely creepy, because I had to fill in “Name of deceased” for someone who was still alive. When I got to the price list, I mentioned offhandedly to my kids that for $300, one could “witness” the cremation, and to my horror, my son James said, “Yeah, let’s do it!” And my daughter Julia chimed in, “Yeah! Let’s watch!” At first I said no way, but they were like two little kids who wanted money for the ice cream man, so after pestering me for a while, I figured, well, we’d avoided the expense of an actual funeral, so I paid the $300. Bill died on a Friday, and when I called Cathy, she said, “So you’re going to witness, are you? Then you better come by Sunday morning, when he still looks good.”

The funeral home itself was in a small one-story strip mall, surrounded by fields. The front door led into a standard kitchen area, with round tables and junk food snacks, and in the back room, there were rows of chairs, a podium, and a place for a coffin.

“Well, hello, there,” Cathy greeted us, and she was just as I’d expected—tall, buxom, with short, unstylish hair, and casual Western clothing. “Here, let’s go see Bill,” she said, and she led us into a quiet room where he was laid out wearing his favorite Hawaiian shirt and draw-string pants (which we’d tied tight when he lived with us, so he couldn’t pee all over the house). What was startling was how good he looked. His face was clean-shaven, unlined, handsome, and even young-looking. Cathy came over and remarked, “I had a hard time with that jaw of his. I had to work on it for three hours.”

“It was out of place, wasn’t it,” I said.

“Sure was.”

That was the saddest moment of the day, because he’d had such terrible TMJ due to his misaligned jaw that he’d had constant headaches for the previous five years, and no one in the medical, dental, or orthodontic field was able to put that jaw back in place. “I should have called you five years ago,” I said glumly.

“Well, I have to go greet some people in the other room, but what was Bill’s favorite music?” James piped up, “He was a mobile DJ, and one of his most requested songs was ‘Hoochie Coochie Coo,’ by Taj Mahal.” Cathy found the song on Spotify, and she left us in that solemn room with: “They’re swirling in the kitchen / I know she’ll get a licking / For doing the hoochie coochie coo. . .” Playing in a continuous loop.

After at least 30 minutes of that music, Cathy returned.  “So,” she said, “as part of witnessing, you get to turn on the oven, and you get to put him inside. Let me show you.” We went into the large storeroom at the very back, which had ordinary fluorescent lights, lots of windows, and a loading dock, not some dark, secret, somber place. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves against one wall, piled high with urns, and a scratched, beat-up coffin over at the side—the rental—for funerals that would be followed by cremation. In the middle of the room,  there were two long ovens. “I just finished up with a lady in that one, but since you paid, you get the one with the window.”

“Now,” she said to James, “ as soon as we get him into the oven, you flip this switch to turn it on. It’ll take about an hour to get up to 1800 degrees, but when the temperature is hot enough, you can release the flame. And watch.”

Bill was still in the quiet room, lying on a long piece of cardboard with a large plastic sheet tucked around him on a standard gurney.

“Here,” she said, “you all can wheel him now.” So we carefully guided him on his very last journey. Cathy positioned a metal plank with rollers next to the oven door, the kind you see in airports for rolling luggage down to the baggage handlers, and we  carefully transferred him from the gurney onto the rollers. Once he was in place, Cathy lifted the plastic sheet over the entire body, including his final urine bag and catheter. She explained that they usually burn the urine bag along with the body so they don’t have to deal with it as medical waste.

“And see this?” She held up a coin. “This is his number. I programmed it into the oven, and I’ll put this coin in with him. It won’t burn, and it’ll make sure you take home the right body. Ha!”

She opened the maw of the oven, long enough for the tallest NBA player, and slowly we rolled Bill in. “I’m about to buy another oven…for pets,” Cathy remarked. “Although I have to do some moving around. I want to get the one big enough for horses.”

After Bill was in his final resting place, the door was closed, and the switch was flipped, we had an hour to wait. But Cathy said, “Say, do you want to see what happens? Here I just finished up with this lady.”

She opened the other oven, the one without the window, and inside, there were small piles of sand and bone fragments arranged in the basic shape of a human, kind of like what you’d find at an archaeological dig.

“Now, this is only the first step,” Cathy explained. “As you can see, there are a lot of chunks. To get a smooth uniform texture, you need to put all this through the grinder.” Then she pulled out what looked like an ordinary janitor’s broom and started sweeping the organized piles into a deep pocket at the front end of the oven. “I need to get it all,” she called out, sweeping vigorously as clouds of dust billowed in the air and got on her clothes and in her hair. Even though she had swept up the visible ash, she actually crawled partway into the oven with a smaller whisk broom to get the last remaining bits. When all the ashes were in the pocket and the clouds had settled, she picked up what turned out to be a plastic bag lining the pocket and carried the sack of chunks over to the grinder. It occurred to me that every one of these steps had to be invented, and all these machines and  products had to be made by someone.

“Here’s the important part,” she said. “I have to take out any metal like a knee replacement. Or”—she pulled a screw out of the ash—”something like this! I have a bunch of these in my leg from a snowmobile accident. Ha!” Then she tossed the screw into an ordinary wastebasket. “See here,” she said, then showed us her collection of knees, hips, shoulders, and screws. I marveled that the placement of one of those ordinary-looking things might have cost its owner $40,000 to install.

“It’s crucial to keep your blades sharp,” she warned as she showed us the grinder. “If they ever give you a body that’s got chunks, then you know they didn’t sharpen their blades.”

She poured the lady into the top of the grinder, kind of the way you pour coffee beans into a store grinder, turned on the machine, and smiled at the sound of the whirring. “Hear how smooth? I keep those blades sharp.” After about ten minutes, the whirring stopped, she put the plastic bag next to a chute, and again like ground coffee, she opened up the chute and ground human poured into the plastic bag. Before she closed it up, she pulled out a handful and said, “Mm. See that?” Then she let the uniform grains fall slowly through her fingers back into the bag. “No chunks. That’s how your brother will be, too.”

She closed the bag with a fancy twist-tie, then found the urn the family had ordered and put the remains inside. “Busy week,” Cathy commented, nodding toward a hallway. We turned our heads and saw three other bodies lined up on gurneys, covered in sheets. Perhaps those families hadn’t paid the $300 to get a nicely groomed body and a window seat.

As we still waited, she said that it was a treat for her to talk to people like this. “After all, most of the time, the only people I get to talk to are them. Ha!” She motioned with her head over to the line-up. “I talk to them a lot. They’re my customers, you know. I talked to your brother as I was fixing his jaw, and I told him, ‘I want you to look your best. They’re coming to see you on Sunday.’ I actually got up early this morning and worked on his jaw some more, so I could get his jaw just right.”

After an hour had passed, the oven timer binged, and Cathy finally turned “Hoochie Coochie Coo” off. James flipped the next switch to release the flame into the interior of the oven, and with a whoosh, the immolation began. My kids wanted the first look, commenting that his legs had buckled up and were now on fire. The plastic, the cardboard, his clothes, his urine bag, and finally (I guess) his skin burst into flame as the kids narrated without any distress, taking turns peering into the small window. After all, they watch Marvel and other action movies, and those things are loaded with violence. This probably also had the same level of unreality for them. While they were describing what was burning next, I recalled the documentary I’d seen about the Russian Czar and his family and how the soldiers had unsuccessfully tried to burn the bodies in a simple camp fire. All they did was basically roast the meat, and there was enough remaining DNA to eventually identify all of them, including Anastasia.

“Here’s some chairs,” Cathy said, and brought three from the other room. Together we took turns, watching my brother burn, organ by organ. Well, the kids almost of the watching while I took an occasional peek. After a while, Julia and I went over and looked at the urns, picking out the one we liked the most. That one turned out to cost an extra $200, so we settled for the standard stainless, which looked like a huge version of a Starbucks’ coffee mug, complete with an air-tight lid.

Julia and I went home after another hour, but James stayed for the full immolation. He said he had memorized Hindu and Hare Krishna chants to recite over the body to help the soul find its way to heaven. It took about four hours, and Cathy allowed him to get take-out Chinese food, in honor of his uncle, who loved Szechuan pepper beef. James, as I’ve mentioned in other essays, has high-functioning autism, and although he was a late talker, now he never stops. I figured that those two would either hit it off or drive each other crazy. Apparently, they hit it off, and they talked about what burns first, what burns last, and after it was over, Bill was put in the grinder. When James came home, I took a breath and pried off the snug-fitting lid. There my brother was in his plastic bag, all smooth and uniform, his unburned coin included.

He was still warm.