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— Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
WESTWIND’S TWO CREMATION MACHINES could handle six bodies (three in each retort) on a typical 8:30–5:00 day—thirty souls a week during busy periods.
Each removal took at least forty-five minutes, far longer if the deceased was across the bridge in San Francisco.
By all rights Chris and I should have been out fetching bodies constantly.
Chris was out constantly, but often just to avoid Mike by volunteering to run petty errands like picking up death certificates and going to the post office.
I mostly stayed at Westwind and focused on cremation, since the majority of body pickups didn’t require a number two.
==Most deaths no longer happen at home.
Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept.
In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one.
Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family.
As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 85 percent of Americans still died at home.
The 1930s brought what is known as the “medicalization” of death.
The rise of the hospital removed from view all the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds of death.
Whereas before a religious leader might preside over a dying person and guide the family in grief, now it was doctors who attended to a patient’s final moments.
Medicine addressed life-and-death issues, not appeals to heaven.
The dying process became hygienic and heavily regulated in the hospital.
Medical professionals deemed unfit for public consumption what death historian Philippe Ariès called the “nauseating spectacle” of mortality.
It became taboo to “come into a room that smells of urine, sweat, and gangrene, and where the sheets are soiled.” The hospital was a place where the dying could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living.==