Costel Paslaru’s Reviews > Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory > Status Update

Human skin is confined to a dull color palette of cream, beige, taupe, and brown when people are alive, but all bets are off once someone is dead. Decomposition allows skin to flower into vivid pastels and neons. This woman happened to be orange.

I wanted to teach people to take care of their own dead like our ancestors used to. Washing the corpse themselves. Taking firm control of their fear.

While it’s true that bodies create offensive sights and smells, a dead human body poses very little threat to a living one, the bacteria involved in decomposition are not the same bacteria that cause disease.

If they asked whether their body would rot before cremation, I’d say, “See, the bacteria start eating you from the inside out as soon as you die, but body refrigeration really puts a stop to that.” The strange thing was, the more honest I was, the more satisfied and grateful people were.

Decomposition was just another reality of death, a necessary visual (and aromatic) reminder that our bodies are fallible, mere blips on the radar of the vast universe.

Royce was vivid green, like the color of a 1950s Cadillac. He was a “floater,” the unfortunate funeral industry term for bodies found dead in the water, in Royce’s case, the San Francisco Bay.

“All this stuff,” he pulled his gloved hands apart to reveal the yellowed deposits, “this is why you can’t be fat!”

I must have looked insulted at this accusation, because he quickly added, “Naw, I don’t mean you specifically can’t be fat, girl, you got a good figure. But I know you must have fat friends. Tell your fat friends.”

Mike was always politically correct in his terminology. He once referred to the victims of Oakland’s gang violence as “young urban men of colour.”

In addition to my nine to five at the funeral home, I moonlit as a English and history tutor for wealthy high-schoolers in Marin County (recently described by the New York Times as being "the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth").

Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return." As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone.