In Aotearoa 70% of people who die are cremated. One crematorium operator talks us through how it happens.

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I spent 28 years in the fire service. Quite often I tell people I spent 28 years keeping people out of the flames, and I’ve spent the last eight years putting them in. My job did a full 180. I left my last job a few months ago but am looking for new work in the area.

I’ve always been in what you might call “macho” jobs: the Marines and the fire service. It wasn’t until I did this job that I realised where my true qualities are. And that’s helping people. I really, really enjoy helping people. I’ve had a lot of really positive feedback from families and funeral directors saying that they loved how they were treated. I talk them through everything and make sure nothing is ever too difficult. If they said they wanted X Y Z, they got X Y Z. 

The bodies at the crematorium never bothered me because in the fire service I saw death at the dirty end. My colleague that I’ve been working with for the last four years occasionally has a little bit of a teary moment. 

There were always two of us. One week one of us would be down in the crematorium cremating people, and the other would be upstairs in the chapel playing the slideshows for the funerals and just making sure the funerals went OK. The next week we’d swap roles.

The crematorium was directly below the chapel. The room was the size of a big tea room, and there were two cremators in there. They were about five feet wide. They went from floor to ceiling, but the door was about three feet off the ground.

It would generally take about an hour for the cremator to heat up to the required temperature, at least 760 degrees Celsius. There were two chambers: the chamber that the body went in and another, hotter chamber above to burn off all the smoke. There were extractor fans and filters so that the only thing you saw coming out of the chimney was a heat haze, unless something went wrong.

We started at 7.30 in the morning, and we finished at 4.30 in the afternoon. Obviously, if there was a four o’clock funeral, we would work late.

Saturdays tended to be busy. We didn’t open on Sunday. But a lot of people of Hindu culture like to cremate within 24 hours of death. So quite often, I would get a call from the manager asking me if I’d be prepared to come in on Sunday and do the service and then cremate the person. I never turned them down unless I really couldn’t.

Sometimes you could have six funerals in a day and the following day, nothing. But it was rare not to have funerals. I’d say the average would be about three or four a day. 

I’d look at the sheet every morning to see how many cremations we had. I’d work out a time schedule: when to heat the cremator, what time the first one was going in, and work it all out – roughly 90 minutes per person. Some are quicker, some are longer. 

We could get through 12 cremations in a day, providing that you got them early. But because a lot of funerals are late in the day, you might get four or five bodies coming in late, in which case we’d have to work over. We didn’t hold anybody over. We always cremated them on the day. 

I was quite surprised by how industrialised the process is. The cremation is computerised, with a touch screen.

For the first five minutes or so you get a stoplight, and then it goes out, because the inside of the cremator is quite volatile at that point – the coffin’s burning, the person’s burning. There’s a viewing plate so you can actually look inside the cremator. You’ll see black smoke and flames swirling around. The computer won’t allow you to stop, or to open the doors yet because it’s not safe. 

A lot of people have started to use what we call liners. They lease nice, expensive, flash-looking coffins, but they’re actually in a plywood coffin inside that coffin. Those coffins burn really quickly. What happens to a body during cremation is the muscles contract. The arms lift up and the knees lift up. You can see all of that. 

After about 40 minutes, the stoplight comes on again. By then the casket is gone, most of the flesh is gone. What you’re left with is pretty much a skeleton, with a little bit of charred flesh, generally around the pelvic area. We stop the cremator, lift the door, and rake the remains under the burner, so they cremate quicker.

For the raking process we’ve got these long metal poles with a oblong thing at the end. The concrete floor of the cremator is smooth, you rake the person into the pit at the fire end of the cremator. The heat has made them very brittle, very crumbly, fragile. The minute you rake them, you break them.

Then we restart the cremator in 20-minute cycles. What we’re aiming for is to have clean bones, white bones. If after 20 minutes it isn’t quite ready, you give it another 20 minutes, until the cremator operator is satisfied that all the flesh was burnt off.

Then there’s a flip switch at the rear of the cremator, which lifts open the flap and the bones fall down into a steel tray. 

We take the tray with the bones and go through it with a big baton that’s magnetic. We got to take out all the screws and nails from the coffin. Anything that’s not going to grind will disrupt the process. 

Once we’ve gone through with the baton, we go through with our hands, moving them gently across, looking for things that aren’t meant to be there. Things like hip joints are easy because they’re massive. There’s knee joints, there’s stents, there’s lots of that. We have to pick out anything like watches. There’s a lot of metal teeth, and none of it is magnetic. They’re hard to pick out because the porcelain is resistant to the heat.

Quite often, there are books or bottles of whiskey in the coffin. Well, the glass melts, and bone sticks to it. We can’t get the bones out of the glass. They’ve lost those bones. 

Processing the ashes is not as long as the cremation, but it’s quite a difficult job.

We rarely have people that request things back, so those things go into a plastic bin to get recycled.

The bones then go into what we call an ash room where the cremulator is. This is what turns the bones into ash. It’s a big grinder. What you end up with is a nice fine white powder ash, most of the time. It’s almost entirely bone because that’s all that’s left. There is ash from the coffin as well – it’s generally not as white – more creamy or grey.

If you’ve cremated the person, you bought them in, put them in the cremator, then the ash room, you process the ashes, put them into the cremulator, and then you put them into an urn with a name on it. You might have met the family, you might even have met the person before the day. They come in to plan their own funerals, to have a look at the facilities. We don’t take them into the crematorium, but we talk them through the slideshow routine and talk to them about music and things. 

When I get cremated, I want nothing on but my boxers. I’ve got quite a lot of metal fillings, so they’re gonna have a job getting rid of them.

As told to Gabi Lardies