On her first day working at Westwind Cremation & Burial, Doughty must shave the body of a man named Byron. She is only 23 and unsure how exactly to shave the face of a corpse. Doughty got the job at Westwind after six months of applying to different funeral homes in San Francisco. She has been morbidly fascinated by death from a young age, and she majored in medieval history in university. 

After Doughty finishes shaving Byron, his family comes to the mortuary for a last viewing, and then her new boss, Mike, takes Byron to be cremated. Mike shows Doughty the cremation machines, called retorts, and after two hours shows her how to rake the bones out of the machine. He leaves her to this task and goes to answer the phone. Alone with the remains, Doughty picks up Byron’s skull and it crumbles in her hand. She thinks about how one day her body will also disintegrate.

On Doughty’s second day at Westwind, she sees the body of a woman in her thirties named Padma, which is in a state of advanced decomposition. A “spidery white mold” (18) grows from her nose and covers half her face. Doughty tries to prove she can be as clinically detached as Mike, but the reality of working with corpses starts to hit her. Despite the disgust she sometimes feels, Doughty genuinely looks forward to encountering each new corpse. She gradually gets used to her daily routine: turning on the cremation retorts, going through cremation permits, selecting those bodies for each day’s cremations, then preparing the corpses for cremation. 

Doughty always refuses help from Mike, wanting to prove that she can be trusted with her job. Once a body is ready for cremation, Doughty takes it to the retort and keeps an eye on it until the process is complete. When the body has finished burning, she must rake out the bones and put them in a machine called the Cremulator, which crushes the bones into a fine dust. She considers other cultures where bones are not reduced to dust but are instead incorporated into funerals. A layer of person dust constantly coats her while at work. When the bones are dust, they are added to the rest of the ash and placed in a sealed plastic bag in an urn.

Doughty grew up in Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawai’i. In early childhood, she “saw death only in cartoons and horror movies” (32), except for a dead pet fish. However, when she was eight years old, she saw a young girl fall 30 feet from a balcony at a mall. The sound of the girl hitting the floor haunted Doughty, and she understood for the first time in her life that one day she would die. Her parents never discussed the incident with her, and Doughty never learned whether the girl died. Her fear of death became so extreme that she developed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as she tried to cope. Though she eventually grew out of the OCD symptoms, Doughty maintained a “thick layer of denial about death” (36) as a teenager. 

As an adult, Doughty reflects that it is unusual in human history that a child could go eight years without encountering death directly. She wanted a job at a mortuary so that she could finally confront her fear of death. She imagines starting a funeral home called La Belle Mort, where funerals could be fun and the old “doom and gloom” (38) way of doing funerals could be done away with. She reasons that fear of death must come from these traditions and imagines a future where she can make death “safe, clean, and beautiful” (38) for children.

Doughty meets Chris, Westwind’s removal tech, whose job it is to fetch dead bodies from hospitals, homes, and coroners’ offices. Doughty immediately likes Chris upon meeting him. When Chris makes house calls to collect bodies, Doughty always goes with him to assist. On their first job together, Chris calmly talks Doughty through what to do while making it seem like he is explaining the process to the deceased’s family. Doughty appreciates this immensely, as she is nervous about messing up such a delicate operation. 

Though she does at times help Chris with home body removals, most deaths do not happen at home anymore. Throughout the 20th century, death became medicalized. With the rise of comprehensive hospital systems, the act of dying was hidden from public sight. She recalls her time volunteering at a hospital as a teenager, where the morgue was in the basement, and dead bodies were hidden in false stretchers so as to not upset patients or families. Doughty enjoyed her time volunteering at the hospital, particularly when she got the opportunity to transport corpses.

Chris and Doughty retrieve the body of a 90-year-old woman who died peacefully at home. Her daughter is angry that they did not arrive sooner, because she believes that leaving her lying in her bed is undignified. Doughty reflects that death has been so hidden from view in America that when people do see a dead body, it is a spectacle and a scandal.