{"id":996,"date":"2013-02-19T15:35:35","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T15:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/02\/19\/annotation-tuesday-ben-ehrenreich-on-the-grim-reaper-l-a-style\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T19:07:44","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:07:44","slug":"annotation-tuesday-ben-ehrenreich-on-the-grim-reaper-l-a-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/02\/19\/annotation-tuesday-ben-ehrenreich-on-the-grim-reaper-l-a-style\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation Tuesday! Ben Ehrenreich on the grim reaper, L.A. style"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n The subject of death has proven inexhaustible, from the Greeks to Hamlet to E.B. White’s pig. In “The End,”\u00a0Ben Ehrenreich<\/a><\/b>\u00a0examines The Inevitable from an unexpected postmortem angle, and with a clever bit of a wink. The story explores death within the context of a particular place \u2013\u00a0<\/i>Los Angeles, a city built upon an industry that twists and resists and parlays reality. The story may remind one of Morris Markey’s great New Yorker<\/em> piece<\/a> (Oct. 17, 1931), “Drift,” which opens this way:
Detective Sergeant O’Keefe was on the assignment at the Morgue, and he was checking over the morning’s instructions from Headquarters. He leaned over his desk in a pleasant room with a high ceiling, on the second floor of the old red building at Twenty-ninth Street and First Avenue, and thumbed the slips of paper. One of these slips, on pale-green paper, read “Release for Burial.” The detective carried it to the head of the Mortuary Department.<\/em>

“I’ve got a release on this one,” he said. “Number 48,227.”<\/em>

“O.K.,” said the superintendent. “We’ll send him up on this afternoon’s boat. But I thought that woman from Indianapolis was going to identify him.”<\/em>

“She kept coming back and looking,” said the detective. “Finally made up her mind it wasn’t her Willie. Willie had a scar on his arm where he fell out of a tree one time.”<\/em><\/blockquote>
\"Unknown-3\"<\/a>

Ehrenreich approached the story with an effective straight-chronology structure and\u00a0tracked the dead procedurally, as an explanatory narrative. The protagonist is death itself \u2013<\/i>\u00a0or, rather, you, Reader. (Sorry.) The idea worked\u00a0beautifully for its publishing home, Los Angeles<\/a><\/i> magazine, a longtime hunter-gatherer of distinguished long-form journalism. The magazine has published some of the country’s top nonfiction writers\u00a0and has a history of strong editing; Kit Rachlis<\/a><\/span> led the magazine to a fleet of National Magazine Awards and now\u00a0Mary Melton<\/a><\/span> is doing the same. (“The End” won for feature writing.)

In the annotation, you’ll find Ehrenreich’s comments in red<\/span>, Storyboard’s in blue<\/span>.\u00a0A few questions, to start:

Storyboard: How did this story come about and how long did you work on it?<\/strong>

Ehrenreich: The short answer is that I’ve always been somewhat\u00a0death obsessed. My original idea was to write a story about the distribution of death in L.A.: who dies and how. I had seen some intriguing statistics from the county: It’s almost a statistical anomaly if a white woman gets murdered in L.A., while death by homicide is a constant possibility for African-American men. Some of that information made it into the final piece, but as I began researching more, I became more interested in what happens after you die, and less interested in causes of death. I worked on the reporting on and off, while working on other projects, for about six months.<\/span><\/span>

Death in the abstract can be a tricky topic \u2013how could you be sure it wouldn\u2019t repulse people?<\/strong>

I couldn’t. But I did everything I could to draw the reader in. And I tried to be restrained with the icky stuff.<\/span>

You\u2019re a nonfiction writer and a novelist. You’ve written about the death of the book and the death of a young immigrant. Where do you find your ideas? What appeals to you?<\/strong>

I don’t think death is a favorite topic, but it is all over the place. It’s lurking somewhere in every story. (The skull grinning at the banquet<\/span><\/a>, to paraphrase William James.) If you don’t take pains to shut it out, it strolls right in. I always find myself saying that my next big story is going to be about puppies<\/span><\/a>, but it never works out that way. I wouldn’t say that I’m attracted to the darker stuff, but the stories that I find urgent don’t tend to be very jolly ones. If everything’s fine, why take the trouble to write about it?<\/span>

I have to ask if, as the son of\u00a0Barbara Ehrenreich<\/a>, you grew up with pencil and paper in hand, and whether you felt some a certain responsibility to writing and\/or activism. Do you feel compelled to write about social issues because of your mother\u2019s work? Is your sister also a writer?<\/strong>

When I was younger, if anything, I tried not to be a writer. But we don’t get choices in these matters, and my mother certainly provides a model for me \u2013\u00a0<\/span>of integrity, commitment, courage, independence, sheer stubbornness. I don’t know that I feel compelled to write about social issues because of her work. It’s more that I grew up in a household in which politics was ever-present, lived, and very real. It was and is inseparable from other arenas of life. And yes, my sister, Rosa Brooks, is also a writer. She had a weekly [op-ed] column in the Los Angeles Times<\/i> for several years. (Ed. note:\u00a0<\/em>Rosa Brooks<\/b><\/a><\/span><\/span>\u00a0is, among other things, a human rights\/national security expert, a Georgetown law professor and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who founded a Pentagon office on humanitarian policy.)

Students always want to know about writers\u2019 overarching process, so how do you work? Where do you work? When? Are you a rituals person and if so how so?<\/strong>

No real rituals. I write in the morning because that’s when my head is clearest and I have the most energy. I rent a small office, and write there and at my desk at home.<\/span>

————————–

The End.
<\/a><\/b>By Ben Ehrenreich
Los Angeles magazine
11\/1\/10

You’ve made some bargains. <\/a> Right away, you address the reader. Why tell the story in second person?<\/span>I like the way the second person jars the reader, pushes them out and then pulls them back into the work. It breaks down the fourth wall, to borrow a metaphor from theater, forcing the reader to acknowledge their relationship to the text, explicitly involving them in its creation through the act of reading.<\/span><\/span> We all have. Maybe you allow yourself a single Tommy\u2019s burger every six months. Maybe you\u2019ve given up meat altogether, or red meat anyway, most of the time. Maybe you\u2019re serious about this and you\u2019ve given up all refined grains and any processed anything; the extra buck a pound to buy organic seems a reasonable sacrifice. You\u2019ve given up booze, cigarettes, pills, cocaine, sex with strangers. You tell yourself you don\u2019t miss them. You wear sunscreen and eat flaxseeds. You go to the gym on breezy Sundays when you\u2019d rather lie around. You go to yoga classes even though the chanting makes you want the world to end. You sold your motorcycle years ago. You cross at the light and look both ways.<\/span>

No matter how many sacrifices you make to Lady Death, no matter how rich the offerings you lay before her altar, she will know where to find you. When she comes, she will hold you tight, and she will never let you go. Don\u2019t be frightened. She takes us all.

Even here in Los Angeles, in the glow of so much newness, she takes 60,000 of us each year.1 That\u2019s 164 each day. Imagine them all lying side by side, napping forever without a snore. The sun goes down and rises again, and 164 more are sleeping beside them, resting cheeks on shoulders, ears on arms. <\/a> Very cinematic. That come from drinking the water in L.A.?<\/span>Our water is very pure. We steal it from faraway counties.<\/span><\/span> One day you will join their still parade. Chances are good\u2014about one in four in L.A. County\u2014that death will grab you by the heart. <\/a> \u201cDeath will grab you by the heart\u201d is good because it extends the personification of death and also gives us a slightly new way of thinking about heart attack. The Lady Death idea could have turned on you if you’d taken it too far, but didn\u2019t.<\/span>This was quite literal. I was at various points thinking about La Santa Muerte, the cult of Holy Death that has become increasingly popular in Mexico over the last few years, in which death is personified as a saint and worshiped in rituals that mix Catholic and indigenous sources. There are temples to Santa Muerte all over the immigrant neighborhoods of L.A. I explicitly mentioned her in earlier drafts \u2013\u00a0<\/span>that dropped out, but the personification remained.<\/span><\/span> Coronary disease is by far our <\/a> Narrative students and I are always talking about authorial presence and how much of oneself to include\/reveal. Why the \u201cus\u201d and \u201cour\u201d and \u201cwe\u201d for this story? To maintain the idea of universality\/inevitability? Or because it\u2019s gentler, given the topic?<\/span>It seemed crucial to this story to involve the reader, to bring it home that this story was about them, that they had something at stake in it.<\/span><\/span> leading cause of mortality, as it is in the rest of the country. L.A.\u2019s specific inequities, though, travel as deeply through death as they do through life. In this and other ways, death maps life. If you\u2019re an African American or a Latino male and you die before 75, you\u2019re more likely to die of homicide than any other cause. The same goes if you\u2019re of any race or either gender and you live in South L.A. If you\u2019re white or live west of La Cienega and it\u2019s not your ticker that gets you, it will most likely be an overdose, or a car crash, or lung cancer,2 or your own hand\u2014murder is not even in the running. <\/a> Walk us through the reporting, if you would. How did you begin? How did you proceed? What public records and other sources did you use?<\/span>I used some public records \u2013\u00a0the facts above are from a report commissioned by the county. I dug around, called a dozen or so offices until I found the researcher who had written the report (which at the time was unpublished). I started with the county coroner, who was less than media-friendly. So mainly I called funeral homes, interviewed at least a half-dozen\u00a0funeral directors until I found a few who were open enough to put me in touch with the people they worked with in other sectors of the industry (the embalmer, the transporter, etc.). Most people don’t call back, so you have to be a (polite, persistent) pest.<\/span><\/span>

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you will go. <\/a>The repetition is kind of Dickensian. This, of course, being classic Dickens repetition: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s\u00a0name was good upon ‘Change,\u00a0for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don\u2019t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country\u2019s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” Why use repetition here and in the sentences that follow?<\/span>I mainly understand prose through rhythm. It has rhythms whether we’re aware of them or not. Better to be aware and in control. Repetition is one way of establishing a beat.<\/span><\/span> You will not be you anymore. Not exactly. You will be a corpse, a cadaver, a decedent, a \u201cloved one.\u201d You will be remains. The death industry employs more euphemisms than politicians do.3 Someone will find what\u2019s left of you. A child, spouse, or parent. A nurse or passerby. Whoever it is will call for help. At home, at work, or in the street, he or she will dial 911. In a hospital, hospice, or nursing home, someone will call your doctor, who will check one last time for vital signs, declare you dead, and fill out the proper forms. A nurse will remove your clothes and close your eyes. (Not just for modesty\u2019s sake: Rigor mortis hits the eyelids fast.) He or she will tie a tag bearing your name, which you can no longer speak, <\/a> This detail \u2013\u00a0\u201cwhich you can no longer speak\u201d \u2013\u00a0is the hardest to bear, for some reason. Did that one just jump into your boat or did it come in revisions?<\/span>I think that was there from the first draft.<\/span><\/span> onto one of your toes, cover you with a plastic shroud, and wheel you to an elevator and thence to the morgue. In most hospitals it is in the basement. You will be rolled from the gurney into a refrigerated drawer. The door will close behind you. It will be dark and cold, but you won\u2019t care.

Power Words<\/strong>

So here you are, dead and alone. <\/a> More repetition. Did it depress you, reporting\/writing this piece?<\/span>No, not at all, actually. It was much cheerier than most of the stories I work on. There’s no human cruelty here, no horrific injustices. All of that is upsetting, depressing. Death is just death. No getting around it.<\/span><\/span> Chances are you didn\u2019t want this, but your wishes were ignored. <\/a> You now build some distance and take to another plane \u2013\u00a0it\u2019s the same point of view yet it\u2019s shifted.<\/span><\/span> Whatever happens to the part of you that you recognize as somehow quintessentially you (call it soul, self, spirit, spark), the other part isn\u2019t finished yet\u2014the fleshly part, the limbs and guts that ached and pleased you in so many ways, the meaty bits that you vainly or grudgingly dragged around for all those years. That piece is still of interest to the bureaucrats. It is still a potential source of profit. In your absence its journey is just beginning. <\/a> Ah,\u00a0now this seems to be the point of the story or at least a parallel narrative.<\/span>Yep. Here we go.<\/span><\/span>

The path forks before it. Which way it goes will be determined by the cause of your demise. All the state wants is a death certificate: Think of it as a letter from your doctor excusing you from paying income tax forever. The county, though, wants to know why you died and if there might be a reason to push the cops and the courts and the jails into motion. The coroner holds the key to all that machinery. The key itself is what you once called you. If you have not been under the care of a physician for six months, if you die during surgery or as a result of injuries sustained in an accident or an assault (self-inflicted or otherwise), or if there\u2019s any suspicion that your death might be something other than \u201cnatural,\u201d your next stop will be the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner\u2014which is, assistant chief coroner Ed Winter\u20094 tells me more than once, the busiest such department in the country.

It investigates 18,000 deaths a year, dispatching 36 investigators5 to the far edges of its jurisdiction\u2014from Lancaster to Long Beach and West Covina to Catalina Island, from oil tankers and cruise ships anchored off the coast to jets on the runway at LAX. <\/a> This story is such an interesting way of looking at L.A. life and culture. (Yes, I meant to say \u201clife.\u201d) It\u2019s an unexpected perspective. How did you come to the idea?<\/span>We live in a highly death-denying culture, and more so in L.A. than probably anywhere else in the country. This made actually talking about death seem particularly intriguing here.<\/span><\/span> One of those investigators will come to you. He or she (let\u2019s go with she, because more often these days the investigators are women) will search your pockets for ID. If you are at home, she will nose around for medical records. She will interview relatives, witnesses to your final moments, and the police at the scene. She will photograph and examine you. You\u2019ve seen this part on TV. When she has finished, she and a driver will load you into the rear of a white county van and take you on one last drive down one last freeway, through one last Sig-Alert, off that final off-ramp onto Mission Road. At the corner of Marengo <\/a> Nice specificity juxtaposed with \u2026 they will pull into a driveway at the side of an elegant old brick building. <\/a>\u2026 a half-detail \u2013\u00a0<\/span>\u201can elegant old brick building\u201d as opposed to its name or purpose. This gives me, the reader, a bit of relief and also latitude to do my own imagining.<\/span>Good!<\/span><\/span> They will open the back of the van, roll you out, and take you inside, where you will wait quietly in the coroner\u2019s fridge until one of 25 overburdened pathologists is ready to examine you.

Winter, a 61-year-old goateed ex-cop with a cranky sort of charm, squints and counts the day\u2019s cases on his computer monitor. It\u2019s 9:30 in the morning. \u201cSince eight o\u2019clock, I\u2019ve gotten one, two, three, four, five more,\u201d he says. \u201cGot an undetermined, a child. Got an accident, 63-year-old male. Another accident: unknown male Caucasian, 30 to 40, found unresponsive by passerby at a construction site. And an unknown male found floating in the ocean dressed in T-shirt and jeans, Pacific Coast Highway.\u201d He stops reading and looks up. \u201cWe\u2019re frigging always busy.\u201d <\/a> This is, technically, our first scene, and introduces us to a distinctive character. I like that you handed him the mike; quoting him gives us our first voice other than your own. What were the challenges of populating a story about dead people?<\/span>The challenge was of the abundance-of-riches variety: The\u00a0living characters were all sufficiently interesting that it was more of a question of what to leave out.<\/span><\/span>

It\u2019s not just the dead. The telephone rings, and it\u2019s a reporter. He has questions about Brittany Murphy\u2019s husband.6 Winter puts the call on speakerphone <\/a> Love that you didn\u2019t use the call or further allude to it; was it uninteresting?<\/span>What mattered most here was that he has to deal with so much celebrity death, his attitude towards it, so the fact of the call and his reaction to it were more interesting to me than anything the reporter said.<\/span><\/span> and rolls his eyes. When Winter and I first met a few weeks earlier, he pushed a sheet of paper across his desk. It was an inventory of celebrity deaths the coroner\u2019s office had investigated during the previous year. Michael Jackson\u2019s name was listed twice.

In the lobby Winter introduces me to Lieutenant David Smith, a genial, dapper man of 46 with a white handlebar mustache, who supervises the department\u2019s identification and notification division. Right now Smith\u2019s mind is on other things. \u201cPart of the issue I\u2019m dealing with here,\u201d he tells me in the elevator, <\/a> Nice, using the elevator \u2013\u00a0continues the motion.<\/span>Ideally, a single vehicle will get you around a story. That rarely happens, but in the end, it’s the motion that matters.<\/span><\/span> \u201cis extremely overweight bodies that have to be cremated.\u201d By state law, if nobody picks you up after 30 days, you will be incinerated.7 In bureaucratese this is called \u201ccounty disposition,\u201d or \u201ccounty dispo\u201d for short. Smith located a private crematorium willing to kindle his uncollected dead, but it wouldn\u2019t take bodies over 350 pounds. He found a mortuary in Orange County that wanted seven bucks for every pound over 350, but even it topped off at 400 pounds. \u201cI had one the other day who was 710 pounds,\u201d Smith says. The problem seems to have been solved: Odd Fellows Cemetery in Boyle Heights specializes in the incineration of the truly obese and charges a flat rate of one dollar a pound. <\/a> Just, wow. Never knew this issue\/cottage industry existed, or that L.A. even had enough morbidly obese people to make disposal a problem. What were the biggest surprises when reporting this story?<\/span>Yeah, we’re a pretty skinny bunch compared to most Americans, but not all of us, apparently. The biggest surprises tended to be things like this, the discovery of worlds you wouldn’t have imagined exist. Like, say, the challenges of applying makeup to a child’s corpse. (Kids don’t wear makeup, so it’s that much harder to avoid making them look ghoulish…)<\/span><\/span>

Again, death maps life. County budgets are tight, and more families can\u2019t afford funerals. L.A. County will charge your next of kin $352 to pick up your ashes (cremains, if you prefer), which is about what Forest Lawn wants just to chauffeur you from your deathbed to its oven door. <\/a> Arresting phrase, \u201cchauffer you from your deathbed to its oven door,\u201d for its syncopation\/juxtaposition of ideas. \u201cChauffeur\u201d charges the sentence whereas \u201cdrive\u201d or \u201ctake\u201d would\u2019ve wasted an opportunity for a memorable image.<\/span>Verbs matter! Nouns too, but sentences hang on the verbs.<\/span><\/span> So more families than ever have to settle for the grim anonymity of \u201ccounty dispo.\u201d

Smith\u2019s main responsibility is to identify you and notify your family that you have died. If the investigator sent out to the scene was unable to make a positive ID, you are for the moment a John or Jane Doe. These categories, Smith says, are further subdivided into \u201csoft Does\u201d and \u201chard Does.\u201d You are a soft Doe if you were found locked in your own apartment, for instance, and the investigator is pretty sure you are you\u2014but you are too decomposed for anyone to be certain. Your fingers are too far gone to yield prints, but Smith\u2019s people8 should be able to confirm your identity through dental records or X rays. You are a hard Doe if you were discovered in an alley or in the trunk of a car and you didn\u2019t have your wallet and there was no one around who knew that you were you. Then the only real options are fingerprint databases and DNA, and the latter is likely to be on record only if you\u2019ve been convicted of a felony.

Once they\u2019ve pinned a name on you, Smith and two other investigators will start looking for your family. If they turn up an address, they\u2019ll send a letter out. If they find a phone number, they\u2019ll call. \u201cWe notified somebody through MySpace one time,\u201d Smith says. The phone calls can be tricky. Some people laugh on hearing the news. Some are apathetic. Some start screaming. \u201cIf the phone just drops, we call 911,\u201d Smith says. \u201cWe don\u2019t want another case.\u201d Sometimes the next of kin are in denial. \u201cYou have to use the power words: \u2018They\u2019re dead.\u2019\u2009\u201d <\/a> What elicited this interesting litany of responses? Did you ask how people react upon being contacted?<\/span>Yes. I wanted to know what it’s like to spend your days delivering the worst news people will ever get.<\/span><\/span>

Your family might demand to come in and see you one last time. This generally means they can\u2019t afford a funeral and want a chance to say good-bye. County rules forbid them from viewing you in the flesh, so the best Smith can do is show them a photo. \u201cI\u2019m good with Photoshop,\u201d he says, \u201cso if the face looks really bad, I\u2019ll try to remove as much blood as possible, take the bullet out of the head. Decomposed bodies I can\u2019t do much with.\u201d

If your family members really miss you, Smith says, they will talk to your photo as if you could hear them. Sometimes they will pet it, as if you could still feel their fingers on your face. <\/a> You\u2019ve brought the POV back down to the personal, moved from general to specific, which returns us to the overall idea that death is singular. The detail about relatives who talk to photos is haunting \u2013\u00a0<\/span>did that, and the petting detail, come organically or did you have to push for it? I admire that you took the petting detail one step further, back to the personal, with \u201cas if you could still feel their fingers on your face.\u201d<\/span>I don’t remember having to push for it. If they were willing to speak to me at all, most of the people in these industries talked and talked and talked. They rarely get to talk about their work \u2013\u00a0most people are too creeped out to listen \u2013\u00a0<\/span>so they were eager for the chance to unload, to tell all the stories that they keep bottled up.<\/span><\/span>

All the King\u2019s Horses<\/strong>

If you become a coroner\u2019s case, you have a decent shot at being eviscerated within a few days of your death: Pathologists employed by the coroner perform about 7,800 autopsies a year, though many of those are partial autopsies, in which the examiner inspects only the specific organs that catch his or her interest. In the 1960s, autopsies were performed on more than half the patients who exited the hospital through the morgue. That number has since fallen to less than 10 percent. Insurance companies loathe spending money on the living and are even stingier with the dead. This has opened up a market niche large enough for Vidal Herrera to park his Hummer in. <\/a> Fantastic. So much cleverer than the usual expository \u201cHe drives a Hummer\u201d or \u201cHe pulls up in his Hummer.\u201d <\/span><\/span> Perhaps you\u2019ve seen it. It\u2019s white and emblazoned on both sides with the name of his company: 1-800-AUTOPSY.

Herrera is 58 and stocky, with a trim white beard and a round, lively face. The guys in the neighborhood call him \u201cMuerto.\u201d Today, standing in the courtyard of his Valley Boulevard compound in El Sereno, he is wearing a T-shirt that says What happens in the morgue stays in the morgue. In addition to performing complete autopsies for $3,000 a pop and harvesting and transporting donated organs, Herrera rents mortuary equipment to the studios for film and TV shoots and has a side business producing custom \u201ccoffin couches\u201d\u2014cut-down caskets transformed into sofas. He shows me one in silver and black with a Raiders logo embroidered on a cushion.

Despite his nickname, Herrera\u2019s vivacity is uncontainable. He takes me to his office and tells me about his years with the coroner\u2019s department, where he worked as a morgue attendant, a photographer, an autopsy assistant, and finally for five years as an investigator. <\/a> So he\u2019s not a pathologist? Wow.<\/span>Nope. But there must be one present at each autopsy. See Dr. Gray, below.<\/span><\/span>He talks about a woman in Compton eaten by her cats, about the time he retrieved a \u201cfloater\u201d from a drainage canal in Lomita and his clothes filled with maggots, and about his last day on the job in 1984, when he ruptured three disks in his spine trying to lift an obese pastry chef who had shot herself. \u201cShe reminded me of a gorilla,\u201d he says, and recounts his subsequent struggles with depression and the revelation that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Until a psychiatrist told him otherwise, he says, he had thought that his recurring nightmares of mutilated corpses were normal. On one wall of his office, among Halloween props and Grateful Dead posters, is a framed caricature of Herrera grinning in black surgical scrubs. A speech bubble above his head reads \u201cA chance to slash is a chance for cash.\u201d <\/a> Wow, \u201cbring out your dead\u201d indeed. These guys would have to be unsentimental, though, or else go mad. Did you get the urge to either explore or defend the survival mechanism of clinical coldness?<\/span>As a journalist who frequently goes to some pretty awful places, I wasn’t put off or surprised by the self-protective dark humor. Herrera was particularly mercenary , but he was extremely open and honest about it all. Compared with the professionally sentimental but no-less mercenary corporate types that I met at, for instance, Forest Lawn, I found him quite refreshing.<\/span><\/span>

If your survivors have suspicions about the cause of your death and can afford to put their minds at ease, they can call Herrera or one of his eager competitors. If they do, you will end up like the 60-year-old woman now lying naked on Herrera\u2019s stainless-steel autopsy table. She is short and overweight and hasn\u2019t breathed in five days. <\/a> \u201cHasn\u2019t breathed in five days\u201d is so much more artful \u2013\u00a0and relatable to the reader; personal \u2013\u00a0than the expected \u201cdied five days ago\u201d or \u201chas been dead for five days.\u201d<\/span><\/span> Her arms and lower legs are tanned a yellowish brown, but her belly, breasts, and thighs are a startling white because all of her blood has drained to her back. Her toenails are still crimson with polish. Herrera dons blue latex gloves and a long, black rubber butcher\u2019s apron for the occasion, but he\u2019s there only to watch. His autopsy assistant, Sean Sadler, will do the honors, along with a pathologist who asks me not to use his name. I will call him Dr. Gray.

Sadler begins with a Y-incision. <\/a> Had you ever observed an autopsy before? How\u2019d you do?<\/span>This was my first. I was a little nervous about it, mainly afraid of humiliating myself by needing to vomit or run from the room, but I did fine. One learns to disassociate extremely quickly. But I did find that for a few days I had a hard time looking at people in the street without imagining their viscera.<\/span><\/span> Using a scalpel, he slices down from each shoulder to the sternum and from there to just above the black snare of hair beneath her navel. The patient does not flinch, not even when Sadler peels back the skin of her chest with a retractor, causing her breasts to loll on her biceps. <\/a> Sounds gross to say this but very nice.<\/span> Thanks!<\/span><\/span> He cuts through her ribs with pruning shears, pausing to observe the softness of her bones\u2014osteoporosis, he suggests\u2014and the fractures left by whoever had attempted CPR. He trims away the heavy yellow fat around her heart, slices through the arteries and veins, and hands the once vital organ to Dr. Gray, who weighs and dissects it on a plastic cutting board. The lungs come out next. Sadler works the scalpel under the patient\u2019s chin to loosen the organs of her neck: the thyroid and parathyroid glands, the esophagus and trachea. He goes organ by organ, handing each to Dr. Gray, who slices and studies them, then drops a sliver of each into a jar of diluted formaldehyde. He traps another sliver in a plastic cassette for the toxicologist and tosses what is left into the \u201cgut bucket\u201d\u2014a small, wheeled trash can at his feet. <\/a> Wow. Almost primitive.<\/span>Yeah, in the end, despite all the scientific and bureaucratic trappings, they are in the business of cutting people up.<\/span><\/span>

In the end, when her torso has been reduced to what is called a \u201ccanoe,\u201d and her skullcap rocks on the table beside her right shoulder, <\/a> Great precision of detail. How were you reporting in the autopsy room \u2013\u00a0notebook + tape recorder? Or notebook only? Or \u2026?<\/span>Notebook only.<\/span><\/span> and a single drop of blood-brown water hangs like a tear beneath her eye, Dr. Gray decides it was her heart that killed her, although she also had pneumonia and a terrible back injury\u2014four inches of spine swollen and saturated with blood\u2014that must have kept her in constant and excruciating pain. He shows me her butterflied heart. The two halves of her mitral valve don\u2019t quite match, which means more to him than it does to me. <\/a> In this case I kinda wanted to know what the mismatched mitral valve did<\/em> mean…<\/span>I believe that in an earlier draft, those secrets were revealed. She died of a heart attack. Though it wasn’t just the mitral valve that revealed that. <\/span><\/span>

If it were you instead of her, you would not recognize yourself. The yellowy red mess inside of you would seem to have little to do with even your most intimate understanding of yourself. You would be startled by the pleasant purplish hue of your liver, the graceful drape of your small intestines, the stubborn white ball of your skull. The smells you release would surprise you, <\/a> I admire that you didn\u2019t attempt to describe the smells \u2013\u00a0the absence of description and the \u201cwould surprise you\u201d work toward the idea almost as powerfully.<\/span>Thanks. Often, saying less accomplishes a lot more.<\/span><\/span> as would the awful groaning crack your spine makes when Sadler pries the vertebrae apart to get at the tender cord. But since the worst indignity\u2014your death\u2014has already occurred, do you think you\u2019d really mind?

A Happy Life<\/strong>

If your death is sufficiently unremarkable that the coroner has no designs on your remains, you will likely avoid the invasive curiosity of the county and go straight to the funeral parlor that will handle what are politely called \u201cthe arrangements.\u201d If the funeral director has the staff on hand, he will send a man with a van to fetch you, but chances are good that he will subcontract the task to someone like Angelo Patrick.

Patrick runs Patco Transportation Services. When I meet him at a Denny\u2019s in Hollywood, he is wearing a black suit and tie and a flawlessly white shirt with two golden pens protruding from the pocket. There is a somber intensity to him that is barely disguised by the softness of his voice or the formality of his speech and bearing. Patrick grew up in South Carolina and earned a degree in biology, but in 1971, there were not many jobs in the sciences for a black man in the South. Two years later he moved to L.A. and enrolled in mortuary school.

In the decades since Patrick graduated, the \u201cdeath care\u201d business, once known as the \u201cdismal trade,\u201d has changed sharply. Beginning in the late 1980s, the industry underwent a massive consolidation. Racing to corner the market before baby boomers started dying off, a few giant firms\u2014the largest of them being Houston-based Services Corporation International\u2014began buying up hundreds of independent mortuaries and cemeteries. Usually the conglomerate kept the individual locations\u2019 original names but combined their operations\u2014and jacked up prices.9 The traditionally American send-off\u2014a viewing at the funeral home, followed by services at the church and a motorcade to the cemetery\u2014gave way to the corporate all-in-one. The big cemeteries now have mortuaries, chapels, and even florists on-site, which cuts out the old side industries. So-called first-call services like Patco are among the few subsidiary contractors that have survived the shift. <\/a> Graceful compression of time\/industry history, getting us back to the characters.<\/span>Thanks. That’s often the hardest trick \u2013\u00a0weaving in and out of larger narratives, specific scenes.<\/span><\/span>

Technically, Patrick\u2019s job is fairly simple. The mortuary calls him and tells him where you are. <\/a> And back to the personal, so much more compelling than \u201ctells him where the body is.\u201d <\/span><\/span> He drives to the address, knocks on the door, rolls you into a sheet, ties off the ends, hoists you onto a gurney, wheels you to the van, drops you at the mortuary, and waits for his next call. \u201cThere\u2019s never any funny stuff,\u201d he says. \u201cThe dead, they don\u2019t say anything.\u201d

His work, however, does have its complications. First, there is \u201cdecomp.\u201d Patrick can tell it will be an issue before he even parks, when he sees the police officers standing at the far end of the sidewalk smoking cigars to cover the smell. <\/a> Great detail, about the cigars.\u00a0Did Patrick volunteer this or did you ask a specific question that yielded it?<\/span> He was another one who needed very little prompting. A thoughtful, introspective man who, I’m pretty sure, had never been asked to speak in any depth about his work before, or about his thoughts about mortality.<\/span><\/span> Aside from the odors, there are fluids to deal with and parts of you that stain his clothes. Stairs can be a problem. You don\u2019t get any lighter when you die. If you\u2019re a pack rat or a hoarder, you will make Patrick\u2019s task still more difficult. You might have too much junk around for him to wheel you out, which means he\u2019ll have to carry you. Sometimes he can\u2019t find the dead for all the trash that crowds their homes. <\/a> Oh my God I imagine people all over L.A. County started looking around their rooms. How did this piece change the way you work, or live?<\/span>I’m not sure that it did. On some subconscious level, it may have helped me to deal with my own anxiety about dying. And it made it very clear to me that I don’t wish to be embalmed.<\/span><\/span>

Then there are the living. Patrick remembers one large tattooed fellow who did not want to part with his mother\u2019s remains. \u201cHe had just come out of prison. He didn\u2019t want Mom to be dead yet. It took six guys, his uncles, to hold him down on the floor while I took the body and ran\u2014literally ran.\u201d Another man threatened Patrick with a hammer after Patrick had covered his wife\u2019s face. \u201cShe\u2019s going to suffocate,\u201d the man said. Patrick uncovered it.

\u201cYou get them in the bathtub, on the toilet, in the bed, in the backyard. Everywhere people go, we pick them up,\u201d says Patrick, leaning over his eggs and grits, which he does not touch. \u201cFrom the littlest person to the most important person. Musicians, Indian chiefs, whoever. I pick them up.\u201d

Patrick was raised a Baptist. When he was 12, he watched his father die of a heart attack and found he could no longer believe in the God who had taken his father from him. He married an observant Jehovah\u2019s Witness and became one, too. Religion, he says, \u201coffered the possibility that I might one day see my father again.\u201d His work has eroded that faith. Patrick is 60 now and no longer married, and he doesn\u2019t bother himself with God. \u201cWhen people die, I don\u2019t know where they go, just like I don\u2019t know where we come from,\u201d he says. \u201cI see a lady die at 115. I see babies die at three months\u2014I can hold the baby in my hand. I see kids die at 3, 4 years old. I see teenagers, rich people, poor people, white people, black people. Everybody dies.\u201d

The only ones that disturb him, he says, are the lonely ones, the ones he finds decomposing in their living rooms, surrounded by empty bottles with the television still on. He remembers a woman he found lying on her kitchen floor. She had been there for two weeks even though her daughter lived just four doors down.10

Patrick smiles a tight, sad smile. \u201cIt\u2019s like the Epicurean philosophers <\/a> Wow, he really said \u201cIt\u2019s like the Epicurean philosophers say\u201d?<\/span>Yep. He was a fascinating guy.<\/span><\/span> say, \u2018Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.\u2019 There\u2019s a lot of truth to that. How much of your life are you willing to be unhappy? How much of your life are you willing to give up? What is a happy life?\u201d <\/a> So this is also a cautionary tale. <\/span><\/span>

Euphoria<\/strong>

Los Angeles holds a special place in the history of death. <\/a> Interesting way to set up this section, considering we don\u2019t connect the dots until about L.A.\u2019s specialness until later.<\/span>A placeholder for now \u2013\u00a0<\/span>just to promise that we’ll return to this.<\/span><\/span> Until relatively recently, Europeans \u201cwere as familiar with the dead as they were familiarized with the idea of their own death,\u201d writes the French historian Philippe Ari\u00e8s. They painted decomposing cadavers in manuscripts and carved them on church walls. Starting in the high Middle Ages, though, Ari\u00e8s argues, Western attitudes began to change: \u201cDeath, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced\u2026would become shameful and forbidden.\u201d By the middle of the 20th century, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was writing about \u201cthe pornography of death,\u201d observing that \u201cnatural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting\u201d\u2014just as sex had been rendered obscene by the Victorians. The dead had become an affront to the living.11

Neither Gorer nor Ari\u00e8s knew quite what to make of the United States, which in many ways followed the general Western trend, banishing decay from polite conversation. At the same time, Americans ritualize death in a manner extraordinary to Europeans. Until a few years ago, even a basic working-class American funeral\u2014from the open-casket display of the chemically preserved and cosmetically improved decedent to the long, slow procession of cars to the graveside\u2014matched a level of pomp reserved across the Atlantic only for the most celebrated dead.

Southern California, home to the theme-park necropolis Forest Lawn, came to represent the apotheosis of America\u2019s disturbingly \u201ceuphoric\u201d approach to mortality, to borrow Ari\u00e8s\u2019s term. Angelenos not only failed to tastefully ignore death, they did everything they could to render it sunny, cheerful, lifelike. To Evelyn Waugh, who parodied Forest Lawn in his 1948 novel The Loved One, such vulgarity was symptomatic of the \u201cendless infancy\u201d of West Coast culture. To the journalist Jessica Mitford, the \u201cAmerican way of death\u201d was a crude product of capitalist manipulation: We had elaborate funerals because the funeral industry was able to charge us more for them; Forest Lawn\u2019s kitsch was just a sophisticated strategy for lubricating the checkbooks of the grieved. <\/a> All so interesting \u2013\u00a0<\/span>Forest Lawn has no doubt been profiled, excuse me, to death<\/em> and could have had its own section here, but I\u2019m glad it doesn\u2019t. Any conversations about that?<\/span>Probably because it has been covered so much, and because so many celebrities are buried there, the management was extremely wary of press. They gave me a very stiff (forgive me) VP to interview, otherwise politely blocked access. I had enough strong material from elsewhere that it didn’t seem worth chasing them.<\/span><\/span>

No aspect of American funereal ritual has been more consistently alarming to foreign observers than embalming, <\/a> Wow, I did not know that. Did this piece lead you to make any decisions about your own future \u201carrangements\u201d?<\/span>No, but it did give me a lot more reasons to want to be cremated.<\/span><\/span> <\/a>Oh right, you said that. See? Obsessed.<\/span><\/span> which is practiced nowhere else in the world with the near universality that it achieved in North America. Mitford characterized embalming as expensive quackery, a recently revived pagan practice without roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The funeral industry\u2019s insistence on its hygienic necessity, she argued, lacked any scientific or medical foundation. Waugh was better humored about the practice, if no less horrified at the notion of being, as he put it, \u201cpickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, \/ Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before.\u201d <\/a> Clearly you read broadly on the subject. Will you name a few of the relevant books that kept you company throughout the research? Also, whom, if anyone, did you read, in terms of lyricism and\/or tone, in order to prepare for the writing? Or do you usually go in cold?<\/span>Philippe Ari\u00e8s’\u00a0Western Attitudes Towards Death<\/a><\/i> and The Hour of Our Death<\/a><\/i> particularly shaped my thinking while I was writing the piece. Jim Crace’s<\/a>\u00a0novel, Being Dead<\/a><\/i>, which I read several years ago, was certainly an influence as well. I don’t think there was any one text or writer who influenced me in terms of tone or voice.<\/span><\/span>

To Kenneth Schenk, however, embalming is an art, perhaps soon to be lost. Schenk could not be more different from Mr. Joyboy, Waugh\u2019s priggish, pink-eyed chief embalmer. \u201cThrough the whole sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll era I was known as the rebel embalmer,\u201d he says with more than a hint of pride. Schenk is a trade embalmer, which means he freelances for the few remaining independent mortuaries. He is 70, and his hair stops well short of his collar, but back before it turned its current lustrous white, he wore it to the middle of his back. He came to L.A. from Florida in 1960 and did his apprenticeship with the legendary Jack Lowry, who famously embalmed Jean Harlow and who, Schenk says, \u201cmixed his own fluids at Pierce Bros. down in the basement.\u201d

In those days L.A. still had a \u201cMortuary Row\u201d\u2014a string of grand funeral homes with high-ceilinged lobbies and marble staircases stretching along Washington Boulevard. <\/a> Fantastic bit of local history to include \u2013we back up and see\/experience the city.<\/span>Yeah, this was an unexpected delight, mortuary-L.A.’s lost glory…<\/span><\/span> Sitting in a booth at the Pantry downtown, Schenk waxes nostalgic about that now invisible geography, long since sliced in half by the Harbor Freeway and transformed into a jumble of repair shops and warehouses. Spearing a bite of coleslaw with Russian dressing, he tells me exactly what he will do to you if you fall into his able, practiced hands. <\/a> Curious about why you give us the restaurant scene and have him explain himself over coleslaw. There were a few ways you might\u2019ve rendered this, in other words: Having him walk us through an actual embalmment or talk about his work from some more relevant place. Did you intend contrast or \u2026?<\/span>Yeah, for contrast. Coleslaw has never seemed so unappetizing.<\/span><\/span>

You will be there waiting for him when he arrives in the mortuary\u2019s prep room.12 He will put on a paper gown and latex gloves. He will wash you and position your limbs. He\u2019ll insert small, nubbed plastic disks beneath your eyelids to make sure that they stay shut. He will suture your lips closed, and if they don\u2019t stay shut, he will Superglue them.

When he\u2019s ready, Schenk will select his fluids, taking into account the time that has passed since your death (the longer it has been, the stronger the chemicals), the cause of your death (some medications interact poorly with embalming fluid), and the color of your skin (\u201cFormaldehyde,\u201d he says, \u201cwill turn a white person a nice shade of green\u201d). He will choose a spot for his incision, usually the carotid or femoral artery. He will lift the artery with a steel hook and insert a plastic injection tube attached to an embalming machine. Another tube will go into the corresponding vein. Schenk will turn on the machine, adjusting for pressure and flow, and it will pump preservative fluid in through your arteries, pushing your blood out through your veins, into the sink, and down the drain.

The process lasts about an hour, depending on your size and the condition of your circulatory system.13 Then Schenk will poke a pointed, hollow instrument called a trocar through your abdominal wall. It will act as a sort of siphon, sucking gases and liquids from your intestines, stomach, bladder, heart, and lungs. \u201cIt\u2019s not for the weak of heart,\u201d Schenk says. Once you\u2019ve been sufficiently cleaned out, he will inject more embalming fluid directly into your organs.

If you\u2019ve been autopsied, all this will take a little longer and cost a little more. \u201cBasically the arterial system is gone,\u201d Schenk says, so he will have to inject fluid directly into each of your limbs and both sides of your brain. Then he will sew you up \u201cnice and tight.\u201d All that\u2019s left is makeup, hairstyling, perhaps a touch of the \u201crestorative arts\u201d if disease or injuries have damaged your features. An eyelid, a nose, even an ear can be sculpted out of beeswax. <\/a>Beeswax. Wow. Who knew.<\/span><\/span>

Not long ago Schenk got a call from a mortuary offering him a job everyone else had refused. \u201cIt was a gal that had been murdered and put in the trunk of a car and not found for 12 days, and it was the heat of the summer.\u201d Schenk demurred, but the funeral director persisted. \u201cMiracles can be done,\u201d Schenk says. \u201cWe preserved this gal and made her viewable. The family was almost ecstatic.\u201d

Once, he says, \u201cduring the hippie era,\u201d he embalmed a fallen rock climber whose long hair, matted with blood, had been shaved and stuffed into a bag. Schenk washed out the blood and painstakingly laid the hair out to dry. One at a time, he matched the strands by length, texture, and curl and, as patient as his silent client, reconstructed the climber\u2019s coiffure. \u201cIt takes a guy that has an artist\u2019s eye,\u201d says Schenk, beaming. \u201cNot everyone can do it.\u201d <\/a> Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to end this section this way, or to go into detail about Schenk\u2019s skills? It seems we\u2019re moving toward various states of accompaniment for the dead but perhaps that\u2019s wishful thinking.<\/span>I was intrigued by these men’s pride in their work, in the existence of these crafts that most of us would rather not think about, but that people pour their whole lives into. Also that men like Schenk are able to find an opportunity for artistry, something to boast of over coleslaw, in situations that most of us would merely find tragic.<\/span><\/span>

1,550 Degrees<\/strong>

Maybe you\u2019re not fond of worms or maybe you\u2019re claustrophobic. Perhaps you\u2019ve read Jim Crace\u2019s novel Being Dead, which lovingly chronicles the decomposition of a murdered couple, or the chapter in Mary Roach\u2019s Stiff about the stages of decay, from elementary autolysis to full-blown putrefaction (when you become \u201csoup\u201d). Maybe your imagination suffices to make you prefer quick, purifying flame. Or perhaps you\u2019d just rather be portable: No one stays put for long these days, and urns pack more easily than caskets. Maybe you\u2019re Buddhist and believe the flames will help you cast aside the now useless shell of this life so that you can move unencumbered to the next. Or perhaps the thought of being scattered to the breeze feels more like freedom than any other image of eternal rest you can conjure.

Whatever your reasons, you wouldn\u2019t be alone. According to a funeral industry data tracker, inaptly named Vital Statistic Analyses, more than half of Californians were cremated in 2009. <\/a> Wow that\u2019s high. Was curious about whether Californians cremate more than any other state or whether such a detail would\u2019ve even been meaningful considering the population.<\/span>I don’t remember if California was significantly higher, but everywhere in the U.S., increased cremation rates are the trend.<\/span><\/span> In Greater Los Angeles cremations have gone up 40 percent over the past five years. The trend is recent: In 1970, fewer than 5 percent of Americans met that final flame.14 Philippe Ari\u00e8s calls incineration \u201ca manifestation of enlightenment, of modernity\u201d and suggests that, as \u201cthe most radical means of getting rid of the body and of forgetting it, of nullifying it,\u201d cremation is the method best suited to the abstraction and uprootedness of modern life.

It is also a lot cheaper. A bare-bones cremation at downtown\u2019s Armstrong Family Malloy-Mitten mortuary will set your survivors back $665, less than a third of the cost of the lowest-end burial plot at Forest Lawn (not counting casket, vault, memorial plaque, embalming fees, burial charges, and carnation boutonnieres). If you\u2019re not afraid of fire and you choose to go that way\u2014or someone chooses for you\u2014your mortuary will likely dispatch you to a crematorium. Few mortuaries cremate their own, and few crematoriums deal directly with consumers. An employee of a transport service like Angelo Patrick\u2019s will drop you off at the crematory door, fill out the requisite paperwork, and depart confident that you will be much easier to carry when he returns to pick you up. <\/a> You use humor here and there, and it works. How much did you play with humor in this piece, considering the subject matter, and where did you dial it in? Can you give us some examples of lines\/ideas you ultimately cut for the sake of message\/tone?<\/span>I don’t remember specifics, but I did cut a few lines. I knew the piece had to be funny if it was going to work, but also that it would require a very light touch, that anything too heavy would destroy it.<\/span><\/span> Specifically, you will fit in a five-by-seven-by-ten-inch box, and you will weigh between three and ten pounds. \u201cI call that radical weight reduction,\u201d says Aida Bobadilla, who manages Odd Fellows Cemetery in Boyle Heights, the same Odd Fellows that David Smith at the coroner\u2019s office contracts with for the fiery disposal of the morbidly obese. <\/a> And was there any discussion on lines like this one, from Bobadilla? It seems somehow crass for a person who specializes in caring for the remains of the morbidly obese to make fun of them. Or am I misreading?<\/span>I suspect that few of her clients have complained.<\/span><\/span> <\/a> Good point.<\/span><\/span>

The process is simple. \u201cIt\u2019s very much like you\u2019re cooking,\u201d Bobadilla says. A pale, slender woman with dark eyes and a sudden, flashing laugh, she is 63 but easily could pass for 50. Sitting on the couch in the lobby, she looks me up and down. \u201cYou, three hours,\u201d she says. \u201cMe, three hours.\u201d <\/a> This quote helps me understand something about how people like her see the world. Perspective. <\/span><\/span> Heavier folks take longer. Lieutenant Smith\u2019s 710-pounder took six hours. They are also more complicated to burn. Fat produces a great deal of heat,15 which means that someone has to be there standing by to regulate the chamber\u2019s temperature.

State law requires that you be combusted in a container, which might be a cardboard box or a hand-buffed walnut casket with mattress springs and quilted velvet lining. Once it has burned away, you will, too. \u201cWe direct the flame toward the torso,\u201d Bobadilla says, \u201cand the flames feather out to the extremities.\u201d If for any reason you roll to one side or otherwise attempt to flee the flames, a technician may open the door to the retort, as the cremation chamber is called, and nudge you into place with a pole. The retort will rise to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to turn most of you to vapor. \u201cThe skin melts, the skin bubbles, and then it\u2019s gone.\u201d

And the smell? I ask Bobadilla if her neighbors complain about the scent of singed hair and roasting meat. <\/a> Back to primitive ideas. Animal. Calculated wording choice?<\/span>Sure. We are meat.<\/span><\/span> She assures me that the temperature is too high for anyone to notice anything. At most, \u201cyou may smell like paper burning,\u201d she says, and that\u2019s probably just the casket going up. <\/a> Here\u2019s a question: Instead of relying on others to describe the smell, why not observe (if possible) a cremation and describe for yourself? Not possible?<\/span>I tried. They don’t even let the families watch.<\/span><\/span> Cremation chambers are designed to capture any unseemly emissions. The only way to tell that someone\u2019s cooking, she says, is to search the sky above the smokestacks for wavy lines of heat.

When all of you has burned that can be burned, the technician will turn off the gas and rake out what little is left: charred and brittle fragments of bone\u2014sometimes a femur or a piece of skull will be recognizable. He or she will collect these shards of you in a metal pan, allow them to cool, then pass a magnet over them to catch any metal intermingled with you: eyeglass frames, fillings, buttons, zippers, the cotter pins, springs, and hinges from your casket.16 Bobadilla once found a gold fingernail.

You are at this point officially cremains. In a large industrial blender you will be processed into powder. Your relatives will not want to find chunks. You will then be poured into a gusseted plastic pouch, which will be sealed and placed inside a \u201ctemporary plastic urn\u201d\u2014i.e., a box\u2014wrapped in brown paper, and meticulously labeled inside and out. The mortuary will send someone to get you, and you, more portable than ever, will have a lot of options.

You can stay in your plastic urn and go straight to the back of the closet. You can express your personality until the end of time in an urn shaped like a golf bag, or an angel, or a duck. You can doze <\/a> Back to the opening image of the dead napping forever without a snore.<\/span><\/span> in a locket on a loved one\u2019s neck. You can rest eternally in the Buddhist Columbarium atop the highest peak in Rose Hills Cemetery, commanding a view (if only you still had eyes!) of the entire L.A. basin, from Catalina to Mount Baldy and beyond. You can be scattered at sea to commune with the fish. You can be packed in fireworks and rocketed into the heavens. But you cannot be scattered on the infield at Dodger Stadium, or the outfield, or anywhere in Disneyland at all\u2014do not even ask. <\/a> Ha. What led you to the no-nos?<\/span>I had been asking funeral directors about unusual requests. These,\u00a0it turned out, were pretty common. I have a vague recollection of a story of someone running out into the outfield in Dodger’s stadium, emptying an urn and dashing back to the stands.<\/span><\/span>

Odd Fellows is also a cemetery, so Bobadilla walks me outside to show me the Civil War graves <\/a> It\u2019s weird to think about Civil War graves in L.A. or even in California.<\/span>We do have history here, we just, you know, bury it.<\/span><\/span> and tell me about the ghosts\u2014not just the ones that she sometimes spots flitting around the office but the one she\u2019s only heard about: the Phantom Lowrider. People arriving for funerals have told her they\u2019ve seen it in their rearview mirrors. Some say it\u2019s white, others black. No one can describe the driver\u2019s face. When they turn to look, Bobadilla says, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing there.\u201d

I walk around and don\u2019t see any ghosts. There\u2019s a funeral going on to my right, a family gathered around a grave. They\u2019ve hired mariachis. Right now they\u2019re singing \u201cAmor Eterno,\u201d and the tune is so perfectly sad that the air above the graveyard seems to expand a little. I circle past the mourners and back to the gates until I see it\u2014a low chimney of beige brick just behind the lobby where Bobadilla and I had been sitting. She was right. There is no smoke, but the palm trees and the eucalyptus on the far side of the smokestack are shivering and slipping, as if the sky itself has lost all confidence and allowed the atmosphere to sag. <\/a> Plenty of sobering notes\/moments in this piece but to the great credit of your restrained and almost (appropriately) clinical tone, this is the first time I feel a little bit sad.<\/span>Good. I don’t mean that cruelly, only that that was the idea, that the sadness that hovers over this story should be allowed to leak through in places. Like this one.<\/span><\/span>

The Moment You\u2019ve Been Waiting For<\/strong>

Then there are the holes. If you feel sometimes that the surface streets are just that, surface, that the concrete and asphalt crust of the city is hiding something big beneath our feet, you are right. In 2003, construction workers digging a drainage canal for the Playa Vista condo complex unearthed the bones of 396 Gabrieli\u00f1o-Tongva Indians at the edge of the Ballona wetlands. The site is now a soccer field. Two years later on the other side of town, crews working on the Eastside extension of the Metro Gold Line found the remains of 174 people, most of them Chinese laborers, just south of Evergreen Cemetery. Some of the graves dated to the 1880s. At that time, and for decades to come, Chinese could not be buried alongside white Angelenos and were consigned to a potter\u2019s field outside the cemetery grounds. They have since been moved into the cemetery proper and rest on the other side of a low chain-link fence from the current potter\u2019s field. <\/a> This information serves the idea that death is happening, has happened, all around us. In class we often talk about theme, and the thru-lines of theme. This information beautifully serves theme. <\/span><\/span>

If no one else will, you can count on the county to put you in a hole. Once officials have given up finding someone to take you off their hands, you will be cremated, says Estella Inouye of the county\u2019s Decedent Affairs Division. You will be stored for three years and then buried, along with everyone else who died that year, in a mass grave behind the county crematorium. This December, Inouye expects to inter the unclaimed remnants of at least 1,700 people who died in 2007. It will be crowded down there, but everyone will have at least a little privacy: The ashes stay in their urns. \u201cI don\u2019t have the staff to be scattering,\u201d Inouye says.

If you are lucky, you will be neither so poor nor so alone in death that you will end up in the county\u2019s care, which means that you might find a plot on the other side of the fence at Evergreen, beneath the brown grass with the dead elite of yesteryear: the Lankershims and the Van Nuyses, the Rimpaus, Hollenbecks, and Breeds. It is peaceful there. Birds glide from tree to tree. Families sit in the shade on folding chairs, sharing a meal six feet above someone dear. Traffic is a distant oceanic hum. <\/a> Lovely, birds to hum. You\u2019ve kept most of your sentences simple, modest. How would you describe your voice? How would you hope others would classify\/describe it?<\/span>I would have a very hard time describing it. It’s a bit like trying to describe your own face. A writer friend once referred to the “muscular lyricism” of my prose. Which, I think, was nice of him.<\/span><\/span>

Cemeteries are quieter and most of them are greener than the cities of the living that surround them, but these cities of the dead are not so different otherwise. They are, for instance, just as segregated. At Evergreen you\u2019ll find an outlying Armenian neighborhood, sprawling Mexican sections (someone has spelled out the words \u201cte amo\u201d in small stones at the foot of a new grave), an inner circle of shiny headstones engraved in Japanese, and an early stratum of dead whites with streets named after them.

Evergreen is unusual in that it never banned the burial of African Americans. The same cannot be said of the original Forest Lawn in Glendale, where the giant wrought-iron gates for decades refused entrance to blacks, Jews, and Chinese\u2014even after they had been reduced to permanent passivity. Today all paying guests are welcome. At Forest Lawn, though, the apparent democracy imposed by the lack of headstones\u2014everyone gets the same bronze marker flush with the grass, which makes mowing that much easier\u2014hides a rigid real estate hierarchy that reflects L.A.\u2019s own, from lumpen, lowland subdivisions to gated hilltop mansions. Anyone can stroll through the Courts of Remembrance or the Wee Kirk o\u2019 the Heather (satirized by Waugh as the \u201cWee Kirk o\u2019Auld Lang Syne\u201d) or meditate beneath the stained-glass replica of Da Vinci\u2019sThe Last Supper, but if you want to visit the elect who rest in the Garden of Honor,17 a sign on the locked gate says you will need a \u201cgolden key of memory, given to each [plot] owner at time of purchase.\u201d Jim Wilke, park vice president of Glendale Forest Lawn, will not tell me how much such a plot might cost, except that it reaches \u201cinto the six figures.\u201d <\/a> Ugh. What reporting challenges did you face with this piece? What did you hope to do or learn that you were unable to do\/learn?<\/span> There is a considerable code of silence among people who work with the dead. Since Jessica Mitford, they have rarely received any good press, and they pretty universally (and correctly, I suspect) figure that their success relies on their silence, i.e. that people don’t want to know what they do, that we’d rather just have them make grandma disappear in some dignified manner. This mainly meant that I had to talk to three or four people before I could find one who was willing to speak openly with me, or even to return my calls. And it meant that I was able to do a lot less than I wanted to. I wanted to witness a cremation, an embalming, a make-up artist at work on a cadaver. (State law forbids the presence of unlicensed personnel in mortuary prep rooms.) I wanted to ride along with the coroner’s inspectors, but post-CSI<\/em> the coroner is less open to that sort of thing, and stopped answering calls when I started to press.<\/span><\/span>

It was not Forest Lawn\u2019s ill-concealed class structure that Waugh and Mitford found so distasteful but the cemetery\u2019s brash modernity and autocratic cheer.18 Forest Lawn was designed to be \u201cas unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness,\u201d declared founder Hubert Eaton (\u201cThe Builder\u201d) in his \u201cBuilder\u2019s Creed,\u201d which begins with his assertion that \u201cI believe in a happy eternal life\u201d and goes on to banish every symbol of judgment or even grief from its architecture.

The mantle of necrological innovation, however, has been passed. When Tyler Cassity bought Hollywood Forever cemetery in 1998, one of the goals, says longtime friend and executive vice president Jay Boileau, \u201cwas to revolutionize memorialization.\u201d Technology, Boileau and Cassity believed, could transform funeral practices that hadn\u2019t changed significantly in millennia. Ultimately they hoped to do away with the material side of death, preserving just a shred of DNA and a digitally archived memorial to the departed: uploaded interviews, documents, photos, music. \u201cWe pretty quickly realized that rituals have meaning to people,\u201d says the 40-year-old Boileau, who with his shaggy hair, jeans, and untucked shirt looks more like a graphic designer than a cemetery executive. \u201cPeople want to come to the cemetery, they want a headstone, they want to have a funeral.\u201d

Boileau now keeps busy curating Hollywood Forever\u2019s cultural programs, bringing concerts and screenings to the mausoleum lawns, letting the living party where the esteemed dead\u2014Cecil B. De Mille, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Dee Dee Ramone\u2014sleep. His ambitions, though, have not shrunk. When I ask what he wants done with his own remains, Boileau hesitates, then answers that he has hoped for a while to establish an ossuary at Hollywood Forever. \u201cI\u2019ve offered my skull to adorn the door,\u201d he says. \u201cWhy not, right?\u201d

Cassity, in the meantime, has been pushing innovation in a different direction, toward \u201cgreen burial\u201d\u2014no embalming, no casket, no headstone, native grasses instead of fertilized fields of sod. In 2004, he bought Fernwood Cemetery in Marin County as a pastoral, live-oak-and-eucalyptus yin to Hollywood Forever\u2019s glamorous urban yang. The trend is spreading. Joshua Tree Memorial Park, the only cemetery offering green burial in Southern California, boasts hand-dug graves. So far it has only done two green burials\u2014one in a wicker coffin, the other in a shroud.

Chances are that you will spend eternity in something more substantial, a repository somewhere between a $195 fiberboard #1650 Alternative Container and the $25,000 polished bronze Promethean.19 Chances are also good that your burial will be more corporate and industrial than breezily bucolic. Dave Worker takes me through the routine at Whittier\u2019s Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary, the largest cemetery in North America and possibly the world, where he is the park superintendent. \u201cWe average 30 a day, six days a week,\u201d Worker says. Much of his job is logistical: dispatching crews and plotting traffic, making sure that processions do not collide, that tractors don\u2019t block the lanes for hearses. Wearing black jeans and a striped shirt, his gray hair slicked neatly back, Worker, who is 46, looks more casual-Friday than Quasimodo-Gothic. He sends his grave diggers to Dale Carnegie seminars to sharpen their communication skills. <\/a> Wow.<\/span>Yep.<\/span><\/span>

Two days before your funeral one of Worker\u2019s workers will locate your plot and paint a perfect 40-by-96-inch rectangle around your hole-to-be. Another will come by later with a sod-peeling machine and roll the rectangle of grass into three tidy cylinders. Next comes the dig team. No unnecessary back pain here: Worker\u2019s crew will use a backhoe to scoop out six and a half feet of earth. It won\u2019t take more than 20 minutes. On the day of the event a setup crew will install a \u201cvault-lowering device,\u201d into which they will place the bottom half of your vault.20 They will then cloak the border of the hole with artificial turf, unfold a few chairs, and erect a canopy to shelter your guests from sun or rain. <\/a> Did you observe burials here?<\/span>I observed several pre- and post- stages, but I didn’t want to disturb anyone’s actual funeral (in the best of circumstances, a stranger with a notepad makes people nervous), so except at a considerable distance, I didn’t impose myself during an actual burial.<\/span><\/span>

Now it\u2019s your cue, the moment you\u2019ve been waiting for. You make your entrance. Your pallbearers roll your casket from the hearse and shoulder you up and over to the grave. They set you down in the vault so that your casket creates \u201ca sort of visual focal piece\u201d for the ceremony, as Worker puts it. Somebody says something. Somebody cries. Probably they pray. You can\u2019t hear anything. Your lid is closed, and you\u2019re dead. <\/a> Back to the opening\u2019s repetition.<\/span><\/span> Somebody turns a crank and lowers you slowly into the ground. Somebody removes the straps and the lowering device. The show is over. Your mourners embrace. They exchange tissues and comforting words. They leave you there in your box at the bottom of your hole. <\/a> The staccato delivery here does two things: moves us almost breathlessly through the process and structurally suggests simple finality. You\u2019ve got some lovely varying language in here, from the collision of \u201cSomebody cries. Probably they pray,\u201d to, \u201cin your box at the bottom of your hole.\u201d<\/span>I wanted these short, quick sentences to build momentum, to give a sense that we are racing towards something (the end), and also to echo the sentences in the lede, to let that structural symmetry act as another cue that we’re coming to the end.<\/span><\/span>

Don\u2019t despair. Worker\u2019s crew has not forgotten you. With a special dolly they lower the lid of the vault over your casket. They seal you in with tape. The backhoe returns. Somebody shovels the dirt on top of you while someone else tamps it down around the edges of the vault. They roll out the sod. They water it. They collect the flowers, the canopy, the chairs. They work steadily. They have other graves to dig and other graves to fill. They leave you there. You\u2019re done. <\/a> I love this two-word kicker. What others did you consider?<\/span>That was it. It came out on a first draft and was clearly the one.<\/span><\/span>

Ben Ehrenreich<\/strong> is a contributing writer for<\/em> Los Angeles magazine and author of the novels <\/em>Ether<\/a> and <\/em>The Suitors<\/a>, which Booklist described as a “richly imagined novel loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey and inspirited by a dazzling display of verbal gifts.”\u00a0<\/em>

For more installments of Annotation Tuesday!, go\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The subject of death has proven inexhaustible, from the Greeks to Hamlet to E.B. White’s pig. In “The End,”\u00a0Ben Ehrenreich\u00a0examines The Inevitable from an unexpected postmortem angle, and with a clever bit of a wink. The story explores death within the context of a particular place \u2013\u00a0Los Angeles, a city built upon an industry that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[61],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-paige-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnotation Tuesday! 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