Exporting the Dead 

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A Mission-raised Latina who happened into her job nine years ago, Hernandez is the answer to critics who say the funeral industry is an impersonal business. Death has become her fascination. She clips articles about homicides and obituaries in the newspapers, not because it's required for her job, but "because I'm curious and because I care." She says she can't relax until she gets the paperwork approved, so the deceased can "lay their head down" in Latin America. That can often mean communicating in sign language at some consulates, since she doesn't speak much Spanish. She hopes to pick up her own passport one of these days, so she can visit Mexico for the Day of the Dead.

"The dead haunt me," she says. "They want to go home, back to their family. ... It's just so sad. They're children when they're here, and they're still children when they go home and they're six feet under."

Back at the mortuary, she walked into the chilly, dark chapel where Lopez' casket lay. This was her last stop, a moment to pay her respects or sometimes say a prayer.

She pushed open the lid and peered in on a young man with a thick mustache and eyebrows, full cheeks and lips, a cross tucked into the crook of his arm, his dark skin just slightly gray.

Hernandez clasped her hand to her mouth and shook her head. "Oh, what a pretty boy," she said, and the tears started as if on command. "Oh, how sad. You're gonna break your mama's heart."

On the day Lopez' body was to be flown back to Mexico, the casket has been locked and set into a plywood pallet known in the industry as a shipping tray. An embalmer had slathered a thick cold cream on Lopez' face and hands to keep the skin hydrated during the journey. Quilted cotton was pressed onto the cream, and plastic sheaths were slipped behind his head and over his chest like a bib, to prevent staining of his suit or the casket's lining. He was ready for departure.

Driscoll's manager Tom Barry rolled the box out the funeral home's back door into the alley to heave it into the funeral home van, with its front seats pushed all the way forward to make room.

Funeral planner and unofficial deliveryman Melvin Peña steered the van down 25th Street and merged onto 101-South toward the airport. He veered onto McDonnell Road, a row of cargo offices in the shadow of 101, and backed up to Northwest Airlines' warehouse, the company that processes 30 to 40 bodies a month for Mexicana.

"A few human remains to drop off," he delicately told the desk clerk inside, and handed over multiple packets of documents that would pave the way for Lopez' return home. Another packet had been slipped into the casket itself for good measure.

Back outside, Peña thrust the box onto the forklift. The forklift driver maneuvered it through the fluorescent-lit warehouse, past 25 boxes of electronics from Thailand, past boxes marked Supreme Comfort from China, size small, and loaded it onto a luggage buggy. "Handle With Extreme Care," it read on the side. An identical box sat on the buggy behind.

"People want to be back where they were born," a Northwest cargo agent says. "Or where they were happiest."

Lopez' casket, in its box, was loaded into the luggage compartment of Mexicana Flight 145, traveled south through the night, and arrived in Guadalajara at 6:10 the next morning, just three days later than he would have been passing through by truck. At the cargo department, the box was loaded into the hearse of a funeral home contracted with the state government of Michoacán. For the last 12 years, the state has covered the cost of transporting bodies from international airports to the deceased's hometowns. Of the 319 cases the state helped with in 2008, 44 percent were from California.

Mexican funeral home staff removed the cold cream and reapplied light cosmetics to Lopez' face, so when the hearse drove up to Trinidad Lopez Miranda's house (the one she paid for with the money Lopez wired home) Thursday afternoon, she said her son looked exactly how she remembered him.

"I never thought my son was going to come here like they brought him," she said. "I thought he was going to come home alive. I felt sad, but at the same time happy that they brought him to me."

The coffin was set up on the front patio, so the dozens of relatives and neighbors arriving that evening to pray for Lopez to be accepted into heaven could flow out into the dirt road blocked off to traffic. Magali wore a white dress, a bride for her deceased groom.

The next evening, the six mariachis hired for the wedding instead played forlorn ballads as Lopez' white casket was lowered into Mexican soil. At least this death had a conclusion, unlike that of his father, whom the family assumes has been buried in a nameless border grave.

"What the United States has brought me is sadness," Trinidad says in a phone interview. "It hasn't brought me good memories. ... For me, it's very sad."

Now, when she hears boys in the neighborhood talking about going north, she tells them it's not worth it. Her other sons are 18 and 20, ripe for migrating to the United States. But she says she'll never let another one of her boys go again.