Profile of a 21-Year-Old Water Cremation Evangelist
Portrait of California’s soon-to-be youngest funeral director, in plaid. Courtesy of Chris Taktak.
Studying for the California Funeral Director Examination is not like studying for the written test one must pass in a grimy, electric blue booth at the DMV before obtaining an Illinois Class D driver’s license. It is not like studying to take the SAT, and it’s not even like studying to take the SAT’s avant-garde younger sister, the ACT. (I checked.)
Christopher Taktak, who graduated from Columbia University a semester early this past December, is no stranger to studying. And now, locked down in L.A. with three friends, he’s doing it daily, for hours on end, dutifully memorizing thousands of pages’ worth of regulatory minutiae of the most macabre sort. If your plan is to become California’s youngest funeral director before the clock strikes February, this is what it takes.
I interrupt his studying to speak with Chris virtually on a Friday afternoon in mid-January. The clean, white walls and high ceilings that frame his face are sun-dappled and distinctly Californian. He is as warm and inviting as ever, quick to laugh, and occasionally twirls a turquoise Muji pen in one hand—a pen which, he knows as well as I do, he could sell me in a matter of seconds.
In June, Chris plans to launch Doola, a user- and eco-friendly virtualized alternative to traditional body disposal. Someday, he anticipates, Doola will be the whole country’s go-to for water cremations.
Otherwise known as alkaline hydrolysis, water cremation is a rising star in the funeral industry. It’s legal in 21 states and counting, with the strongest opposition coming from the Catholic Church. To be cremated by water, the corpse enters a metal chamber filled with warm water and an alkaline solution, which raises the pH level until all but bone has dissolved. Those bones are then dried and heated, and pulverized into a much whiter ash than flame cremation yields. Of course, “ash” is a misnomer here, Chris clarifies. It’s bone that you get. But—and they won’t teach you this in school—the same is true of traditional cremation.
In L.A., traditional cremations normally face strict quotas, part a county-wide effort to lessen harmful emissions in an already smog-choked city. That these limits were just temporarily lifted due to record-high COVID-19 deaths seems only a greater reason to turn to alternate methods of disposition, whose effects on air quality will not compound other public health crises.
As urban cemeteries fill up, and cremations as a whole are on the rise, the affordability, stunningly small carbon footprint, and perceived gentleness of water cremation have afforded it moderate buzz across the U.S. in the decade since the initial commercial water cremations were performed.
Doola, Chris explains, will make the entire end-of-life process gentler for all parties involved. “You can basically just go online and order cremation through our website… And once you've ordered a cremation with us, first of all, [there are] no hidden fees, no need for price comparison, none of that. We’ll send the ashes back to you via mail.”
I first knew Chris only peripherally, as a lifelong family friend of my friend, Ruba. Chris was popular—he was friends with more or less all of London, as far as I knew—and he attended an actual British school, as Ruba and her younger sister Lila had before they made the switch to the American School in London, where I met them.
When Chris and Ruba moved into their dorm rooms at Columbia and Barnard, respectively, each was relieved to have a pseudo-sibling by their side.
Raised in West London with frequent visits to Beirut, his mother’s hometown, Chris has always been outgoing; the open-armed host of the first party I ever stayed at until well past sunrise. I’d have guessed that he was moving to L.A. to produce a Hollywood blockbuster long before I’d land on funerary entrepreneurship.
But Chris has been “this way” as long as Ruba can remember. When he was about 10, she recalls, he encountered a box of cereal that didn’t meet his discerning standards. So he sent it back to corporate with a note, “and then he got like, a year's worth of cereal.”
Chris says that it didn’t happen precisely like that. “Hahaha,” he texts when I reach out to fact-check. “Ruba is right that I liked to voice my dissatisfaction a lot when I was younger. Though I didn’t get free cereal for a year, I was thoroughly rewarded for my comments and suggestions.” With all the requisite modesty of someone 11 years older and wiser than they once were, Chris adds, in parentheses, “I’m not sure why!”
The youngest of four sons, Chris was his mother’s right-hand businessman in his early teens, helping her found not one, but two businesses: a now-defunct Arab-centric media and lifestyle website called “Arab Women Now,” as well as her own clothing and jewelry brand.
“He took advantage of New York and lived his life to the fullest, but he never took his studies for granted,” Ruba recalls, telling me that Chris stood out, even at Columbia, for the exceptionally hard work that he always made look effortless. But it’s his skill with people that’s always been his most valuable asset. “I knew whatever he did, because he’s a great communicator… he’d do it well.” Then Ruba adds, with a giggle: “I did not expect this. I’ll be honest.”
From left: Chris, Ruba, and Lila in New York. (Not pictured: Aida Nadar and Daniel Taktak, the other members of this crew.) Courtesy of Ruba Nadar.
Chris came to Columbia on a student visa, which allows him 60 days to find an employer after graduation. Of those 60, about 25 remain. He thinks that his application for an entrepreneurship visa, which is how he plans to stay in the country once his current permission elapses, hinges on a vote of confidence from the Small Business Administration, from whom he’s requesting a loan of $1.2 million. And that money is staked on his provision of collateral: $300,000 raised from a first round of investments.
When I ask Chris what a “high” investment looks like right now, he deftly evades the question. “My end goal is an investment that an angel is comfortable with; an investment that a VC is comfortable with… What I really appreciate is the fact that people are trusting me with anything at all. Because that means that people believe in me, and I really take that as a big sign of respect.”
Chris’s polar opposite in more ways than one, I’m an American who yearns for the right to work in the U.K. Since he’s lucky enough to be a British citizen already, I wonder, what’s stopping him from pursuing Doola back in London instead?
“I think the U.K. isn't really ready to have a brand made out of this death process,” he offers. In addition to California being the obvious choice in other ways—he cites its innovative, eco-conscious culture, and its still wide-open market for water cremations—Chris says that the U.K. operates locally in a way that’s increasingly rare in the U.S., motherland of franchising and Starbucks.
For now, a virtualized crematory brand with a Glossier-influenced aesthetic and an outspoken, friendly marketing strategy that draws inspiration from a weed-delivery service called Eaze, might make for a uniquely American success story.
The current concept for Doola’s logo. Courtesy of Chris Taktak.
Chris’s pitch is well-polished; no doubt shined and sharpened at each of the hundreds of investor meetings and market research interviews he’s conducted over the past ten months, not to mention the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) course he took on a whim last spring, which—alongside the tragedy of this age of mass death we’re experiencing—first gave rise to Doola.
Chris majored in Urban Studies at college, always with an eye toward sustainability, and generally assumed that he would go to architecture school after graduating. “I [had] never taken an engineering class at all. [I’d] never taken an operations course at all. But the class, you know, sounded interesting… Little did I know that a month into it, we would be virtual,” he reflects. “A lot of other students chose to focus on more, perhaps, banal problems, like food packaging, or advertising, or marketing, while I couldn’t get my head around the whole death process that was going on. [Death] was all around me; it was on the news. You couldn’t get away from it. So I decided, Why not focus on that?”
That IEOR class took an approach to product-building that centered people rather than problems. Initially, as the world bore witness to families forced to say goodbye to loved ones on FaceTime rather than in person, Chris considered crafting a service that would improve virtual funerals. “But that didn’t really seem to tackle the root of the problem. And so I decided to take this project outside of the classroom. I focused on death for three months, I did a lot of research, I interviewed a lot of people, and then I came up with what I have today.”
In October, Chris entered the Columbia Venture Community’s 10th Annual Columbia Alumni Demo Night. Of hundreds of applicants, Doola was selected as one of five finalists, the four others each from graduate students at Columbia Business School. Chris, and Doola, won the evening.
When Lila told me in December that Chris had moved to L.A. to found a funeral start-up, I laughed, and she did too. I asked what he was really doing in California—just riding out the darkest, coldest days of the pandemic in the sun?
Still laughing, she told me that she was serious. Chris had already amassed significant investments, and was rapidly building out his own water cremation business.
I was delighted by the news, and I hurled questions at Lila. Hearing Chris practice his pitch for meetings and presentations over long dinners in the fall had armed her with statistics, so she tried her best. She couldn’t explain how alkaline hydrolysis worked, but she stressed that it produced up to 60 percent more ashes than traditional cremations.
“Is that something people want?!” I asked, incredulous.
Lila paused for a moment, trying to conjure up how Chris would phrase it, but came up blank. I privately doubted that anyone my age could convincingly sell any one method of body disposition over the next.
At some point, Lila and I moved on to lesser news, sipping cappuccinos at either end of a long wooden bench as we observed clouds passing along the surface of a shallow pool in the heart of Regent’s Park. Triton and Dryads Fountain, it’s called. In its center, a bronze-sculpted sea god triumphantly blows into a conch shell held aloft, sending a stream of water forcefully into the sky, and then back into the fountain, where two mermaids at the god’s feet are caught in a ceaseless spray. They stare at one other in alarm.
(Or maybe, they’re impressed.)
Triton and Dryads Fountain. Photo from The Royal Parks website.
