Lawn Of The Dead

"He was balding, and he walked with a cane, and, of course, he couldn't drive anymore, so I would drive him down to the barber to get a haircut and a shave when he was scraggly looking. He was still a gentleman, and he wanted to look nice," Aguilar says. "And I knew where he hid everything. When the dementia got worse, he would take things — little things like salt shakers, cups — and hide them in his room. He hoarded things, for some reason. If the kitchen was running low on something, I'd tell them to go to Felix's room. He got rude as he got worse. That happens, you know."

A woman named Rosa visited Esposito occasionally, but she was the only one. Aguilar was, by default, his closest companion.

Two weeks before he died, Rosa came to see him. He appeared to recognize Rosa but could not remember her name.

Aguilar, who saw him every day, asked if he remembered hers.

He considered the question for a few moments.

"Of course," he said at last. "You're my mama."

When Aguilar knew that Esposito was reaching the end, she managed to set up phone calls between Esposito and his son. By that time, Esposito couldn't remember most of the calls a few hours after they'd happened. The son hoped to come to America, but red tape prevented that from happening before it was too late. After Esposito died, Aguilar asked the son if there was a way to get the ashes to Cuba. The son refused to take them, insisting that Esposito would be happier to stay in a free country.

The man who burns the bodies is Andrew Buck.

Not many small family businesses have histories as long as that of Liz Loos' — she and Andrew mark her family's fourth generation — but Buck's family goes back just as far. His family started burying people in 1906. He was 3 years old when his father moved the family into a newly purchased funeral home. He grew up among the dead.

Like Andrew, Buck took his own shot at marketing in college rather than going directly into the family business. For him, it was hotel management, which he studied at Arizona State University and then at the University of Iowa. After leaving college, he spent a couple of years teaching special-education students and, in the summers, hauling tanker trucks of water for an Iowa co-op company.

Buck's epiphany came on a hot gravel road during a 110-degree summer day. He looked down at his workman's clothes and considered the 14-hour days and the $8.50-an-hour paycheck. It was time, he decided, to go back to school.

That brought him to Kansas City, Kansas, Community College, which has a program in mortuary science. Soon he was working as a pickup man for a company called First Call, collecting bodies for delivery to one of 50 area funeral homes or, when the deceased was indigent, the county's medical examiner.

Nursing-home pickups were generally the easiest, except when daylight runs made discretion necessary. Buck would go through a back door and cover the body with a quilt so that residents wouldn't be upset. Private residences were generally the hardest, especially those where people had died on the second floor. The body needed to remain balanced on the cot.

"When you have to deal with stairs, it's a little rough," he says. "Houses are built for vertical movement, not horizontal."

He graduated in 2004 with licenses to work as an embalmer and a funeral home director. Buck had met Andrew and Liz Loos through the delivery job, and he accepted a job at Heartland Cremation. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of the funeral home.

"Whenever I make new friends and ask them to come over, they always think there's going to be a stack of dead bodies in the closet or something," he says and laughs. "Growing up around it, I forget how uncomfortable death is for people sometimes."

Sliding the bodies into the silver steel crematorium in the converted garage, Buck's procedure is almost always the same, whether for indigents or the recently well-off.

The dead arrive from the medical examiner wrapped in a white sheet, zipped into a body bag. Buck checks for pacemakers, which need to be removed (the batteries will explode in the heat), and any jewelry or metal that the county employee may have missed. When the body is bloated in decay because it was not discovered promptly, Buck leaves it in the bag and waves a metal detector above it.

They always come with a golden identification tag, an inch long, that he hangs on one of the machine's switches before he starts the burn. Turned on, the crematorium sounds like a commercial jet engine. Unless there's a special request, everyone goes in a cheap, thin, cardboard coffin. It takes about three hours for the fire to consume skin, then fat, then muscle tissue.

The obese burn faster; the extra fat adds fuel. "It's the same as any kitchen grease fire," Buck says.

After the fire, the bones remain, white and brittle, on the crematorium's rack. Large bones, such as femurs, retain their shapes, whereas the ribs and bits of skull collapse in on themselves. Buck scrapes the bones into a container and deposits them into a processing unit, where steel blades grind the remains into gray ash.