Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory
Caitlin Doughty
4.22
90,336 ratings11,008 reviews
Goodreads Choice Award
Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty—a twenty-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre—took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. Thrown into a profession of gallows humor and vivid characters (both living and very dead), Caitlin learned to navigate the secretive culture of those who care for the deceased.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters and unforgettable scenes. Caring for dead bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, Caitlin soon becomes an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. She describes how she swept ashes from the machines (and sometimes onto her clothes) and reveals the strange history of cremation and undertaking, marveling at bizarre and wonderful funeral practices from different cultures.
Her eye-opening, candid, and often hilarious story is like going on a journey with your bravest friend to the cemetery at midnight. She demystifies death, leading us behind the black curtain of her unique profession. And she answers questions you didn’t know you had: Can you catch a disease from a corpse? How many dead bodies can you fit in a Dodge van? What exactly does a flaming skull look like?
Honest and heartfelt, self-deprecating and ironic, Caitlin's engaging style makes this otherwise taboo topic both approachable and engrossing. Now a licensed mortician with an alternative funeral practice, Caitlin argues that our fear of dying warps our culture and society, and she calls for better ways of dealing with death (and our dead).
GenresNonfictionMemoirDeathScienceBiographyAudiobookBiography Memoir
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254 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2014
Book details & editions
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the author of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? as well as the New York Times best-selling books Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity. She is the creator of the “Ask a Mortician” web series and founder of The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, where she owns and runs a funeral home.
Community Reviews
4.22
90,336 ratings11,008 reviews
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January 13, 2020
if anyone needs me i’ll be living out my dream of working in a crematory
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Will Byrnes
1,323 reviews · 121k followers
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January 25, 2024
There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. “I’ll love you forever, darling,” and “Will it be a diamond this year?” are two fine examples. But young lovers take note: above all else, the phrase every girl truly wants to hear is, “Hi, this is Amy from Science Support; I’m dropping off some heads.”You have all seen The Producers, right? The version with Zero or Nathan, in the cinema, on TV, on the stage, whatever. Those of you who have not…well…tsk, tsk, tsk, for shame, for shame. Well, there is one scene that pops to mind apropos this book. In the film, the producers of the title have put together a show that is designed to fail. The surprise is on them, though, when their engineered disaster turns out to be a hit. During intermission of the opening performance, to Max and Leo’s absolute horror, they overhear a man saying to his wife, “Honey, I never in a million years thought I'd ever love a show called Springtime For Hitler. One might be forgiven for having similar thoughts about Caitlin Doughty’s sparkling romp through the joys of mortuary science, Smoke Gets in your Eyes. If you were expecting a lifeless look at what most of us consider a dark subject, well, surprise, surprise.
Yes we are, and dead-ender Caitlin is happy to help with the cleanup
Caitlin Doughty has cooked up a book that is part memoir, part guidebook through the world of what lies beyond, well, the earth-bound part, at least, and part advocacy for new ways of dealing with our remains. Doughty, a Hawaiian native, is a 6-foot Amazon pixie, bubbling over (like some of her clients?) with enthusiasm for the work of seeing people off on their final journey. Her glee is infectious, in a good way. The bulk of the tale is based on her experience working at WestWind Cremation and Burial in Oakland, California, her first gig in the field. She was 23, had had a fascination with death since she was a kid and this seemed a perfectly reasonable place in which to begin what she believed would be her career. Turned out she was right.
Caitlin Doughty from her site
Smoke Gets in your Eyes is rich with information not only about contemporary mortuary practices, but on practices in other cultures and on how death was handled in the past. For example, embalming did not come into use in the USA until the Civil War, when the delay in getting the recently deceased from battlefield to home in a non-putrid form presented considerable difficulties. She also looks at the practice of seeing people off at home as opposed to institutional settings. There is a rich lode of intel in here about the origin of church and churchyard burials. I imagine churchgoers of the eras when such practices were still fresh might have been praying for a good stiff wind.
No Kibby, no smoke monsters here
Doughty worked primarily in the cremation end of the biz, and offers many juicy details about this increasingly popular exit strategy. But mixing the factual material with her personal experience turns the burners up a notch.
The first time I peeked in on a cremating body felt outrageously transgressive, even though it was required by Westwind’s protocol. No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymous Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.Beyond her paying gig, Doughty has, for some time, been undertaking to run a blog on mortuary practice, The Order of the Good Death, with a focus on greener ways of returning our elements back to the source. (Would it be wrong to think of those who make use of green self disposal as the dearly de-potted?) One tidbit from this stream was meeting with a lady who has devised a death suit with mushroom spores, the better to extract toxins from a decomposing body. I was drooling over the potential for Troma films that might be made from this notion.
No, not pizza
One of life’s great joys is to learn something new while being thoroughly entertained. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes offers a unique compendium of fascinating information about how death is handled, mostly in America. Doughty’s sense of humor is right up my alley. The book is LOL funny and not just occasionally. You may want to make sure you have swallowed your coffee before reading, lest it come flying out your nose. I was very much reminded of the infectious humor of Mary Roach or Margee Kerr. Doughty is also TED-talk smart. She takes on some very real issues in both the science and economics of death-dealing, offers well-informed critiques of how we handle death today, and suggests some alternatives.
If the last face you see is Caitlin Doughty’s something is very, very wrong. The face itself is lovely, but usually by the time she gets her mitts on you should be seeing the pearly gates, that renowned steambath, or nothing at all. Preferably you can see Doughty in one of the many nifty short vids available on her site. You will learn something while being thoroughly charmed. Reading this book won’t kill you, even with laughter, but it will begin to prepare you to look at that event that lies out there, somewhere in the distance for all of us, and point you in a direction that is care and not fear based. If you enjoy learning and laughing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is dead on.
Review posted – 12/11/15
Publication date – 10/15/2014 (hc) – 9/28/15 - TP
I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. Well, not really. I mean they specifically said that there was no obligation to produce a review, so there is no quid pro quo involved, but it does seem the right thing to do, don’tchya think?
Me on social:
==========================
===EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages
You MUST CHECK OUT vids on her site. My favorite is The Foreskin Wedding Ring of St Catherine . All right, I’m gonna stop you right there. Go ahead. I know you wanna ask. No? Fine. I’ll do it for you, but you know this is what you were asking yourself. “If she rubs it does it become a bracelet?” Ok? Are ya happy now? Sheesh!
If you are uncertain about making a final commitment to reading this book you might want a taste of the product first (That sounds sooooo wrong) Here is an article Doughty wrote about her first experience with death as a kid, from Fortnightjournal.com. There are several other Doughty articles on this site as well.
Another book sample can be found here, in The Atlantic
Doughty offers a nifty list of sites to use for dealing with death, your own (presumably, you know, before) or others.
Interview in Wired
I came across this Caitlin Doughty video in June 2016. The caps are all hers. WHAT HAPPENED TO TITANIC'S DEAD?
You might want to check out one or more of the following
-----The Loved One
-----The American Way of Death
----- The American Way of Death Revisited
-----Six Feet Under
-----January 22, 2020 - Vox - Why millennials are the “death positive” generation - by Eleanor Cummins
-----March 6, 2022 - The Daily Beast - The Grassy Green Future of Composting Human Bodies by Mercedes Grant
-----July 27, 2022 - Smithsonian - Could Water Cremation Become the New American Way of Death? by Lauren Oster
Some items noted in Doughty's tale are getting a bit of attention. Here, a NY Times article by Katie Rogers - April 22, 2016 - Mushroom Suits, Biodegradable Urns and Death’s Green Frontier
Doughty has written at least two more books since this one
-----2017 - From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
-----2019 - Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
autobiography biography books-of-the-year-2014
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Larry
76 reviews · 8,725 followers
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January 20, 2020
Great sense of humor about a topic most people fear, without any irreverence. Enjoyed this book immensely!
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Petra on hiatus but getting better.Happy New 2024!
2,457 reviews · 34.7k followers
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June 19, 2015
I finished the book. The first part is 2-star fluffy. The main part is 5-star interesting with lots of gems on what we really look like dead and how even dead premature babies get shaved of their lanugo and cosmetically-enhanced so they will look 'natural' for their viewing.
That was creey, right? But that's what makes the book so interesting, it's
creepy Why crematory floors need to be old and pitted and why obese people are cremated early in the day and skinny old corpses later. Because with a starting cold crematory machine the fat burns off gradually. If it was hot already the body would burn before the fat. The floor is best pitted and not new and smooth hecause the melted fat of obese bodies pools into the pits and burns off slowly. On a smooth-painted floor, it runs out, in bucketfuls.,
creepy .There is this woman who doesn't want to pay $175 for a last viewing of their mother before she is consigned to the fires of the crematory machine. She doesn't want to pay. So the author, to us, describes why they charge. She describes exactly what a dead body looks like before it is prepared for viewing. And how after a long period on intravenous fluids and bed ridden a michelin-man body with skin slippage covered in oozing slime, gaping mouth and wide open milky eyes are not really what people think of as a body 'at rest'.,
creepy When the skull survives the crematory flames whole, the author smashes it with her sweeping-out broom before it goes it to a pulverizer to mash all tthe bone fragments into the ashes called "cremains".
But then the author is definitely out on the left field herself. When an athlete in school she and a couple of friends used to dress up in rubber Goth ballgowns and go to an S&M club to spend the night being tied to a cross and whipped by strangers. That's more than a little unusual. I wonder how she hid her bruises from her parents and school? She always dreamed of own funeral business and enlightening people to what happened after death, wanting to encourage them to take responsibility for their own family corpses. After nearly a year in the crematory she writes about, she went to a mortuary school which she didn't like (mostly because of the embalming).
The final part really does go off a bit. I wasn't terribly interested in the man she loved rejecting her which made her suicidal and so we get long musings on how she might kill herself. Although this didn't go on too long, apart from the interlude at the mortuary school which was only quite interesting, the book never really picked up again and at some point, just petered out.
The author can write and had obviously done a lot of research. I think a better editor would have made the book tighter and explored interesting aspects, like being a teenager who finds it a nice night out to be whipped by strangers, and forgotten the boring ones - we all had a first love that didn't work out, it's only interesting if you are the one involved (or like reading romances).
Definitely a good read especially if you like books about death, I have a whole shelf called death. I find it an interesting business but I cannot imagine who would actually want to work in it. The author though, seems very jolly, and I'd like to have lunch and a chat about work with her every now and again, but not too often.
_____
In spoilers are my initial thoughts and a bit about a jewelry scam that funeral directors - burials or cremations operate.
After reading Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our DecisionsI wanted something a little lighter. This is so featherweight I can scarcely keep my attention on it. I've been musing on 'fluffy' and 'light'. Does that equal flighty? What is one word to describe a book that has an interesting title and no substance whatsoever? The author has absolutely no respect for the dead people she is about to burn, or whose still-whole skulls she reduces to dust with her retort scraper.
2. The funeral business really is one of scam the grief-stricken customer while they are so emotional they won't notice. You can buy a 14k gold cross with a teeny 0.05 ct. diamond on the net for $120 and up. Or buy one at a crematory for $2,470! I was looking at another site which doesn't have gold crosses but does have a lot of jewelry you can fill with a bit of the dear-departed's ashes from about $50. They'll even make jewelry from the ashes Wearing a bit of old auntie Ada around your neck... If you want to look at some rather creepy (to me) funeral and crematory equipment, this site has a good selection.
Nothing has changed since Jessica Mitford wrote her expose of the money-making scam that is the The American Way of Death.
2015-read 2015-reviews death
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Elyse Walters
4,010 reviews · 11.2k followers
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November 23, 2015
Call me morbid? ....ghastly?.....Bonkers?
Right after I finished reading the memoir "When Breath Becomes Air", by Paul Kalanithi- a 4th year medical student working at Stanford Hospital ...(only 30 minutes from my house), - who died this year of Lung Cancer.., THIS book arrives in my mail box the SAME day (just 'hours' after I wrote a review for Kalanithi's book)
Creepy! AND .....what's even more creepy ... is I don't know who sent me this paper back 'new copy'. Thank You to the Mystery Person!!!!
Is somebody trying to send me a message?
So... I read it! Apparently, the author, Caitlin Doughty, a fascination with death, is her life's work.
The very first sentence made me laugh ( a little anyway)....
"A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves."
Caitlin also says.....
"It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity."
OK???? Mary Roach....( I'm thinking)... "Are you and Caitlin friends" ....(Mary Roach wrote the morbidly fascinating- oddly fun- engrossing book "STIFF").
They ' must' know each other ( and I love Mary Roach.... whom I've met twice ...as she lives in The Bay Area)
Caitlin also worked the suburban San Francisco's 'Westwind' Crematorium.
I can't believe how much I enjoyed reading Caitlin's memoir. ( it's a different take than STIFF)...but like STIFF, there is humor, historical anecdotes about death, body disposal, the death industry, and how things are done behind the scenes. ( GORY DETAILS r-us)) Yuck! ...
[DO NOT READ DURING EATING DINNER]...
However, I liked Caitlin's human warmth ...( she was real and personable). I also enjoyed her candor about her own struggles within the funeral industry ( her own infatuation and preoccupation- if you will about her own emotional- wired brain)
I think two books in a row - "imagining facing death" - and "behind the scenes" of what happens to the bodies ... Is enough for awhile to say ..,
"I've done my Mitzvah" reading for this month...
Worth reading...
Yet... mix it up with a good comic book - or an adorable youthful playful children's book, (as I did), to balance you 'chi'!
Hugs ... and "cheers-to-life", my sweet friends!
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Melki
6,336 reviews · 2,435 followers
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May 10, 2023
Ten months into my job at Westwind, I knew death was the life for me.
When Caitlin Doughty took a job at a California crematory, she learned more than just how to dispose of dead bodies. The daily exposure to death changed her thinking on the subject and turned her into a warrior fighting the good fight for the good death. While practicing the process of turning a former human into four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone , Doughty's way of thinking on the subject began to evolve.
Corpses keep the living tethered to reality. I had lived my entire life until I began working at Westwood relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them - stacked in the crematory freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those I loved. No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.
In addition to her philosophical musings, Doughty presents a nice historical overview of death and its many resulting rituals. Particularly interesting was how a book - The American Way of Death - helped popularize cremation in this country. Doughty's relaxed conversational tone, positive attitude and great sense of humor keep a potentially depressing subject from getting too bleak. She offers a unique perspective on the fate that awaits us all.
This book made me do a little rethinking of my own. Doughty's mention that to incinerate one body uses as much energy as a 500-mile car trip, made me question if cremation is right for me. And while it was Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers that first made me give some serious thought to what should happen to my carcass when I'm done using it, THIS book prompted me look up Green Burial options in my state.
There aren't many.
Hopefully, when I check out in a few decades - fingers crossed, knock on wood - the choices will be bountiful. But it doesn't hurt (too badly) to think about it now. After all, I'm just a (future) dead gal, typing.
death first-reads-giveaways memento-mori
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Diane
1,081 reviews · 2,960 followers
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January 8, 2016
I saw this title on a few Best Of lists for the year, but I thought it was just OK.
Caitlin Doughty worked at a crematory in the San Francisco area. She said she had been both fascinated by and terrified of death since she was a little girl, when she witnessed a child's fatal fall in a shopping mall. This book is a combination of her stories about cremating bodies, her research into the history of death practices around the world, and tales of woe about her love life and attending mortuary school. She also writes about wanting to help educate Americans about death so we aren't so afraid of it.
"We can do our best to push death to the margins, keeping corpses behind stainless-steel doors and tucking the sick and dying in hospital rooms. So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, 'The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.' The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves."
This is a book that was more interesting in theory than in practice. Caitlin's writing style is immature, and she relies heavily on pop culture references.
If this is your first book about death practices, you might find her stories interesting. If you want to read about grief rituals and bereavement, I recommend "The Death Class" by Erika Hayasaki.
death meh nonfiction
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Lois Bujold
175 books · 38.1k followers
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October 26, 2019
An arresting opening line like "A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves." is one any novelist might envy.
This is a fascinating memoir of a then-apprentice young mortician who is, I think, quite right in her self-evaluation that her work became, for her, a secular calling. A sometimes painful, sometimes refreshingly honest guided trip behind the scenes of a part of life most of us seldom see -- death is, after all, only a once-in-a-lifetime event -- but will all travel. Yet not experience, so this may be the only preview one may get.
Some of her anecdotes stirred up decades-old memories of my hospital-worker days I would rather have left unstirred -- a girl never forgets her first bedsore the size of a dessert plate, I guess. Doughty's work would have begun when ours ended, except for the part about living half a century and most of a continent apart.
I don't think I could ever share her secular reverence for corpses, nor her belief in the value of facing them, though I can only be glad, in her line of work, that she possesses it. It's possibly an effect of the way my subculture values the mind over the body. The mind-me I imagine I am is rather disembodied, like the light generated from a lightbulb, or music from an instrument, continuously created then eaten by time. The lightbulb, once broken and not making me anymore, is not something I particularly identify with or care about, apart from a vague hope that it will be disposed of promptly and properly. I want people to remember the light, not the broken bulb. But hey, maybe that's just me...
I don't often give five-star reviews to books I wouldn't hurry to read again, but this one earned it. Recommended.
Ta, L.
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Debbie "DJ"
361 reviews · 470 followers
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July 7, 2015
I think this book gets the award for best opening line.
"A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves."
So, yeah, I was pulled in from the beginning. Caitlin is 23 and lands her first job as a mortician. Why you ask? Well, turns out she is terrified of death. Has been ever since she saw a documentary that depicted death when she was very young. She is obsessed with thoughts of her, her family, and friends demise.
The beginning wasted no time in taking me right into the world of the mortician. I got to learn all about what it takes to be embalmed, (OMG) and just how a crematorium works. Yet, this is not the focus of the book. Doughty is on a mission to show how our society has become separated from the natural process of dying. She talks about other cultures, and the rituals they have around death. How we as Americans are becoming more secular and no longer have these rituals, and/or the priest/ spiritual leader in our final moments. It is the doctor now. How our culture is separated from death. She went from thinking it was strange our culture doesn't see dead bodies anymore, to believing this absence is the root cause of so many of our troubles. Death is now seen as a failure of the medical system, so we've cleaned it all up. Everything is designed to mask death. From our obsession with youth, to all the beauty products designed to keep us looking young, even the embalming, done to make us look our very best.
This book really has a lot to offer. It's not a heavy read either, in fact, sometimes it's too light. Still, I learned a lot of valuable information. Being exposed to death properly, at an early age is very important. I don't have to be embalmed, or even cremated. Most of all Doughty exposes the real fear of death, and is leading a call to teach people how to take care of their dead like our ancestors before us. Really an excellent read!
non-fiction
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Lori
372 reviews · 523 followers
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October 17, 2019
I think the MacArthur Foundation ought to give Caitlin Doughty a Genius Grant. I've been watching her vlog and reading her blog with fascination for a while, and now this book has taught me a lot and given me more to admire too. She's brilliant, a great writer and I so appreciate her direct, unsparing and frequently funny fact-filled book based on her education and experience working in the death industry as well as her studies of death practices across cultures. I disagree with comparisons to Mary Roach's "Stiff." I enjoyed it, but Roach is a journalist whereas Caitlin is a practicing mortician. She has an insider's viewpoint and investment, with deeper and broader knowledge as well as a trove of anecdotes from personally doing many things to many dead bodies.
Sure I couldn't read about her loading each body into the cremulator (that name!) then smashing the skull of the deceased with a cremator's shovel before processing the cremains into a fine powder which cumulatively coats her clothes...without thinking of cremated loved ones or my own cremation to come. I only hope the person operating that cremulator is as respectful and devoted to my remains as Caitlin is to all the dead bodies in her care. (But I'm skeptical). Whether she's telling us about purge fluid, which sometimes comes out of the mouth of a corpse and sometimes gets on a person in contact with said corpse or skin slip, when decomposition causes the top layer of the skin to slide right off the body , she writes and speaks of the dead with devotion, affection and the humor of a stand-up comic. This is not for the squeamish, but thanks to Caitlin I'm not nearly as squeamish as I was. I know this because I tested myself using Google and Youtube, though I'm sure I wouldn't do so well with in-person studies.
She's full of ideas and I so admire her commitment to The Order of The Good Death, where professionals across specialties work for change in Western society to make death and death practices natural, the way they used to be before the Civil War led to the practice of embalming. Members of The Order want to normalize dead bodies, make them not something to dread and disguise and fill with artificial preservatives. Their commitment is to return death and the idea of it to what it is and should be seen as: the natural and inevitable outcome of life. That's the way it used to be. Bodies were often tended to by loved ones and seeing corpses in different stages of decomposition was a lot more common and the thought of them a lot less frightening. The Order of the Good Death's mission is to take the fright and formaldehyde out of our deaths, use the energy generated by cremulators to power the cremulators and other things, in all sorts of ways to innovate across disciplines. I so admire its aims and especially its founder, Caitlin Doughty, which is why I think her worthy of a MacArthur Grant.
I love learning from Caitlin. She makes the harshest things palatable, like the deceased whose head was swelled to the size of a basketball and looked like one too because it was covered with an orange fungus. Her audiences are always made to feel like students, not voyeurs. Her new book, "Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions From Tiny Mortals about Death" arrived yesterday. Since there are other books ahead of it I'll probably peek later, because I want to know the answer to the question in the title because I keep imagining my departed darling Annabel Lee chomping on my eyeballs. But I know when Caitlin explains it, no matter the answer I'll be able to deal. And when I get my next cat, wild Ligeia, one of the first things I'll tell her is: hey, do what you have to do.
reviewed
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====
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages
You MUST CHECK OUT vids on her site. My favorite is The Foreskin Wedding Ring of St Catherine . All right, I’m gonna stop you right there. Go ahead. I know you wanna ask. No? Fine. I’ll do it for you, but you know this is what you were asking yourself. “If she rubs it does it become a bracelet?” Ok? Are ya happy now? Sheesh!
If you are uncertain about making a final commitment to reading this book you might want a taste of the product first (That sounds sooooo wrong) Here is an article Doughty wrote about her first experience with death as a kid, from Fortnightjournal.com. There are several other Doughty articles on this site as well.
Another book sample can be found here, in The Atlantic
Doughty offers a nifty list of sites to use for dealing with death, your own (presumably, you know, before) or others.
Interview in Wired
I came across this Caitlin Doughty video in June 2016. The caps are all hers. WHAT HAPPENED TO TITANIC'S DEAD?
You might want to check out one or more of the following
-----The Loved One
-----The American Way of Death
----- The American Way of Death Revisited
-----Six Feet Under
-----January 22, 2020 - Vox - Why millennials are the “death positive” generation - by Eleanor Cummins
-----March 6, 2022 - The Daily Beast - The Grassy Green Future of Composting Human Bodies by Mercedes Grant
-----July 27, 2022 - Smithsonian - Could Water Cremation Become the New American Way of Death? by Lauren Oster
Some items noted in Doughty's tale are getting a bit of attention. Here, a NY Times article by Katie Rogers - April 22, 2016 - Mushroom Suits, Biodegradable Urns and Death’s Green Frontier
Doughty has written at least two more books since this one
-----2017 - From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
-----2019 - Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
autobiography biography books-of-the-year-2014
...more
492 likes
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Larry
76 reviews · 8,725 followers
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January 20, 2020
Great sense of humor about a topic most people fear, without any irreverence. Enjoyed this book immensely!
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Petra on hiatus but getting better.Happy New 2024!
2,457 reviews · 34.7k followers
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June 19, 2015
I finished the book. The first part is 2-star fluffy. The main part is 5-star interesting with lots of gems on what we really look like dead and how even dead premature babies get shaved of their lanugo and cosmetically-enhanced so they will look 'natural' for their viewing.
That was creey, right? But that's what makes the book so interesting, it's
creepy Why crematory floors need to be old and pitted and why obese people are cremated early in the day and skinny old corpses later. Because with a starting cold crematory machine the fat burns off gradually. If it was hot already the body would burn before the fat. The floor is best pitted and not new and smooth hecause the melted fat of obese bodies pools into the pits and burns off slowly. On a smooth-painted floor, it runs out, in bucketfuls.,
creepy .There is this woman who doesn't want to pay $175 for a last viewing of their mother before she is consigned to the fires of the crematory machine. She doesn't want to pay. So the author, to us, describes why they charge. She describes exactly what a dead body looks like before it is prepared for viewing. And how after a long period on intravenous fluids and bed ridden a michelin-man body with skin slippage covered in oozing slime, gaping mouth and wide open milky eyes are not really what people think of as a body 'at rest'.,
creepy When the skull survives the crematory flames whole, the author smashes it with her sweeping-out broom before it goes it to a pulverizer to mash all tthe bone fragments into the ashes called "cremains".
But then the author is definitely out on the left field herself. When an athlete in school she and a couple of friends used to dress up in rubber Goth ballgowns and go to an S&M club to spend the night being tied to a cross and whipped by strangers. That's more than a little unusual. I wonder how she hid her bruises from her parents and school? She always dreamed of own funeral business and enlightening people to what happened after death, wanting to encourage them to take responsibility for their own family corpses. After nearly a year in the crematory she writes about, she went to a mortuary school which she didn't like (mostly because of the embalming).
The final part really does go off a bit. I wasn't terribly interested in the man she loved rejecting her which made her suicidal and so we get long musings on how she might kill herself. Although this didn't go on too long, apart from the interlude at the mortuary school which was only quite interesting, the book never really picked up again and at some point, just petered out.
The author can write and had obviously done a lot of research. I think a better editor would have made the book tighter and explored interesting aspects, like being a teenager who finds it a nice night out to be whipped by strangers, and forgotten the boring ones - we all had a first love that didn't work out, it's only interesting if you are the one involved (or like reading romances).
Definitely a good read especially if you like books about death, I have a whole shelf called death. I find it an interesting business but I cannot imagine who would actually want to work in it. The author though, seems very jolly, and I'd like to have lunch and a chat about work with her every now and again, but not too often.
_____
In spoilers are my initial thoughts and a bit about a jewelry scam that funeral directors - burials or cremations operate.
After reading Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our DecisionsI wanted something a little lighter. This is so featherweight I can scarcely keep my attention on it. I've been musing on 'fluffy' and 'light'. Does that equal flighty? What is one word to describe a book that has an interesting title and no substance whatsoever? The author has absolutely no respect for the dead people she is about to burn, or whose still-whole skulls she reduces to dust with her retort scraper.
2. The funeral business really is one of scam the grief-stricken customer while they are so emotional they won't notice. You can buy a 14k gold cross with a teeny 0.05 ct. diamond on the net for $120 and up. Or buy one at a crematory for $2,470! I was looking at another site which doesn't have gold crosses but does have a lot of jewelry you can fill with a bit of the dear-departed's ashes from about $50. They'll even make jewelry from the ashes Wearing a bit of old auntie Ada around your neck... If you want to look at some rather creepy (to me) funeral and crematory equipment, this site has a good selection.
Nothing has changed since Jessica Mitford wrote her expose of the money-making scam that is the The American Way of Death.
2015-read 2015-reviews death
...more
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Elyse Walters
4,010 reviews · 11.2k followers
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November 23, 2015
Call me morbid? ....ghastly?.....Bonkers?
Right after I finished reading the memoir "When Breath Becomes Air", by Paul Kalanithi- a 4th year medical student working at Stanford Hospital ...(only 30 minutes from my house), - who died this year of Lung Cancer.., THIS book arrives in my mail box the SAME day (just 'hours' after I wrote a review for Kalanithi's book)
Creepy! AND .....what's even more creepy ... is I don't know who sent me this paper back 'new copy'. Thank You to the Mystery Person!!!!
Is somebody trying to send me a message?
So... I read it! Apparently, the author, Caitlin Doughty, a fascination with death, is her life's work.
The very first sentence made me laugh ( a little anyway)....
"A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves."
Caitlin also says.....
"It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity."
OK???? Mary Roach....( I'm thinking)... "Are you and Caitlin friends" ....(Mary Roach wrote the morbidly fascinating- oddly fun- engrossing book "STIFF").
They ' must' know each other ( and I love Mary Roach.... whom I've met twice ...as she lives in The Bay Area)
Caitlin also worked the suburban San Francisco's 'Westwind' Crematorium.
I can't believe how much I enjoyed reading Caitlin's memoir. ( it's a different take than STIFF)...but like STIFF, there is humor, historical anecdotes about death, body disposal, the death industry, and how things are done behind the scenes. ( GORY DETAILS r-us)) Yuck! ...
[DO NOT READ DURING EATING DINNER]...
However, I liked Caitlin's human warmth ...( she was real and personable). I also enjoyed her candor about her own struggles within the funeral industry ( her own infatuation and preoccupation- if you will about her own emotional- wired brain)
I think two books in a row - "imagining facing death" - and "behind the scenes" of what happens to the bodies ... Is enough for awhile to say ..,
"I've done my Mitzvah" reading for this month...
Worth reading...
Yet... mix it up with a good comic book - or an adorable youthful playful children's book, (as I did), to balance you 'chi'!
Hugs ... and "cheers-to-life", my sweet friends!
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Melki
6,336 reviews · 2,435 followers
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May 10, 2023
Ten months into my job at Westwind, I knew death was the life for me.
When Caitlin Doughty took a job at a California crematory, she learned more than just how to dispose of dead bodies. The daily exposure to death changed her thinking on the subject and turned her into a warrior fighting the good fight for the good death. While practicing the process of turning a former human into four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone , Doughty's way of thinking on the subject began to evolve.
Corpses keep the living tethered to reality. I had lived my entire life until I began working at Westwood relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them - stacked in the crematory freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those I loved. No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.
In addition to her philosophical musings, Doughty presents a nice historical overview of death and its many resulting rituals. Particularly interesting was how a book - The American Way of Death - helped popularize cremation in this country. Doughty's relaxed conversational tone, positive attitude and great sense of humor keep a potentially depressing subject from getting too bleak. She offers a unique perspective on the fate that awaits us all.
This book made me do a little rethinking of my own. Doughty's mention that to incinerate one body uses as much energy as a 500-mile car trip, made me question if cremation is right for me. And while it was Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers that first made me give some serious thought to what should happen to my carcass when I'm done using it, THIS book prompted me look up Green Burial options in my state.
There aren't many.
Hopefully, when I check out in a few decades - fingers crossed, knock on wood - the choices will be bountiful. But it doesn't hurt (too badly) to think about it now. After all, I'm just a (future) dead gal, typing.
death first-reads-giveaways memento-mori
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Diane
1,081 reviews · 2,960 followers
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January 8, 2016
I saw this title on a few Best Of lists for the year, but I thought it was just OK.
Caitlin Doughty worked at a crematory in the San Francisco area. She said she had been both fascinated by and terrified of death since she was a little girl, when she witnessed a child's fatal fall in a shopping mall. This book is a combination of her stories about cremating bodies, her research into the history of death practices around the world, and tales of woe about her love life and attending mortuary school. She also writes about wanting to help educate Americans about death so we aren't so afraid of it.
"We can do our best to push death to the margins, keeping corpses behind stainless-steel doors and tucking the sick and dying in hospital rooms. So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, 'The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.' The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves."
This is a book that was more interesting in theory than in practice. Caitlin's writing style is immature, and she relies heavily on pop culture references.
If this is your first book about death practices, you might find her stories interesting. If you want to read about grief rituals and bereavement, I recommend "The Death Class" by Erika Hayasaki.
death meh nonfiction
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Lois Bujold
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October 26, 2019
An arresting opening line like "A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves." is one any novelist might envy.
This is a fascinating memoir of a then-apprentice young mortician who is, I think, quite right in her self-evaluation that her work became, for her, a secular calling. A sometimes painful, sometimes refreshingly honest guided trip behind the scenes of a part of life most of us seldom see -- death is, after all, only a once-in-a-lifetime event -- but will all travel. Yet not experience, so this may be the only preview one may get.
Some of her anecdotes stirred up decades-old memories of my hospital-worker days I would rather have left unstirred -- a girl never forgets her first bedsore the size of a dessert plate, I guess. Doughty's work would have begun when ours ended, except for the part about living half a century and most of a continent apart.
I don't think I could ever share her secular reverence for corpses, nor her belief in the value of facing them, though I can only be glad, in her line of work, that she possesses it. It's possibly an effect of the way my subculture values the mind over the body. The mind-me I imagine I am is rather disembodied, like the light generated from a lightbulb, or music from an instrument, continuously created then eaten by time. The lightbulb, once broken and not making me anymore, is not something I particularly identify with or care about, apart from a vague hope that it will be disposed of promptly and properly. I want people to remember the light, not the broken bulb. But hey, maybe that's just me...
I don't often give five-star reviews to books I wouldn't hurry to read again, but this one earned it. Recommended.
Ta, L.
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Debbie "DJ"
361 reviews · 470 followers
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July 7, 2015
I think this book gets the award for best opening line.
"A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves."
So, yeah, I was pulled in from the beginning. Caitlin is 23 and lands her first job as a mortician. Why you ask? Well, turns out she is terrified of death. Has been ever since she saw a documentary that depicted death when she was very young. She is obsessed with thoughts of her, her family, and friends demise.
The beginning wasted no time in taking me right into the world of the mortician. I got to learn all about what it takes to be embalmed, (OMG) and just how a crematorium works. Yet, this is not the focus of the book. Doughty is on a mission to show how our society has become separated from the natural process of dying. She talks about other cultures, and the rituals they have around death. How we as Americans are becoming more secular and no longer have these rituals, and/or the priest/ spiritual leader in our final moments. It is the doctor now. How our culture is separated from death. She went from thinking it was strange our culture doesn't see dead bodies anymore, to believing this absence is the root cause of so many of our troubles. Death is now seen as a failure of the medical system, so we've cleaned it all up. Everything is designed to mask death. From our obsession with youth, to all the beauty products designed to keep us looking young, even the embalming, done to make us look our very best.
This book really has a lot to offer. It's not a heavy read either, in fact, sometimes it's too light. Still, I learned a lot of valuable information. Being exposed to death properly, at an early age is very important. I don't have to be embalmed, or even cremated. Most of all Doughty exposes the real fear of death, and is leading a call to teach people how to take care of their dead like our ancestors before us. Really an excellent read!
non-fiction
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Lori
372 reviews · 523 followers
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October 17, 2019
I think the MacArthur Foundation ought to give Caitlin Doughty a Genius Grant. I've been watching her vlog and reading her blog with fascination for a while, and now this book has taught me a lot and given me more to admire too. She's brilliant, a great writer and I so appreciate her direct, unsparing and frequently funny fact-filled book based on her education and experience working in the death industry as well as her studies of death practices across cultures. I disagree with comparisons to Mary Roach's "Stiff." I enjoyed it, but Roach is a journalist whereas Caitlin is a practicing mortician. She has an insider's viewpoint and investment, with deeper and broader knowledge as well as a trove of anecdotes from personally doing many things to many dead bodies.
Sure I couldn't read about her loading each body into the cremulator (that name!) then smashing the skull of the deceased with a cremator's shovel before processing the cremains into a fine powder which cumulatively coats her clothes...without thinking of cremated loved ones or my own cremation to come. I only hope the person operating that cremulator is as respectful and devoted to my remains as Caitlin is to all the dead bodies in her care. (But I'm skeptical). Whether she's telling us about purge fluid, which sometimes comes out of the mouth of a corpse and sometimes gets on a person in contact with said corpse or skin slip, when decomposition causes the top layer of the skin to slide right off the body , she writes and speaks of the dead with devotion, affection and the humor of a stand-up comic. This is not for the squeamish, but thanks to Caitlin I'm not nearly as squeamish as I was. I know this because I tested myself using Google and Youtube, though I'm sure I wouldn't do so well with in-person studies.
She's full of ideas and I so admire her commitment to The Order of The Good Death, where professionals across specialties work for change in Western society to make death and death practices natural, the way they used to be before the Civil War led to the practice of embalming. Members of The Order want to normalize dead bodies, make them not something to dread and disguise and fill with artificial preservatives. Their commitment is to return death and the idea of it to what it is and should be seen as: the natural and inevitable outcome of life. That's the way it used to be. Bodies were often tended to by loved ones and seeing corpses in different stages of decomposition was a lot more common and the thought of them a lot less frightening. The Order of the Good Death's mission is to take the fright and formaldehyde out of our deaths, use the energy generated by cremulators to power the cremulators and other things, in all sorts of ways to innovate across disciplines. I so admire its aims and especially its founder, Caitlin Doughty, which is why I think her worthy of a MacArthur Grant.
I love learning from Caitlin. She makes the harshest things palatable, like the deceased whose head was swelled to the size of a basketball and looked like one too because it was covered with an orange fungus. Her audiences are always made to feel like students, not voyeurs. Her new book, "Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions From Tiny Mortals about Death" arrived yesterday. Since there are other books ahead of it I'll probably peek later, because I want to know the answer to the question in the title because I keep imagining my departed darling Annabel Lee chomping on my eyeballs. But I know when Caitlin explains it, no matter the answer I'll be able to deal. And when I get my next cat, wild Ligeia, one of the first things I'll tell her is: hey, do what you have to do.
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Review
Alternately heartbreaking and hilarious, fascinating and freaky, vivid and morbid, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is witty, sharply drawn, and deeply moving. Like a poisonous cocktail, Caitlin Doughty's memoir intoxicates and enchants even as it encourages you to embrace oblivion; she breathes life into death.--Dodai Stewart, deputy editor of Jezebel.com
Caitlin Doughty takes you to places you didn't know you wanted to go. Fascinating, funny, and so very necessary, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals exactly what's wrong with modern death denial.--Bess Lovejoy, author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses
Demonically funny dispatches.-- "O Magazine"
Demonically funny.-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"
Doughty...a trustworthy tour guide...keeps us laughing most of the way.--Rachel Lubitz "Washington Post"
Frank...philosophical...engaging, and even wicked.--Natalie Kusz "New York Times Book Review"
In a moving--and often funny--memoir about working in a crematorium and other parts of the 'death industry, ' Caitlin Doughty argues for radical change in how we face the details of death.--Jessica Ferri "Daily Beast"
It may well blow your mind wide open.--Elisabeth Donnelly "Flavorwire"
Think Sloane Crosley meets Six Feet Under.--Kevin Nguyen "Grantland"
Upbeat, brave and brilliantly, morbidly curious...Her measure of society is fierce, right on, and radical...[A]n important and timely book.--Helen Davies "Sunday Times"
This book absolutely must be read, if only to remind all of us that exercise, organic food, and plastic surgery only work up to a point. Doughty is my kind of death crusader--compassionate, unblinking, and very, very funny.--Meg Rosoff
About the Author
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? She is the creator of the web series Ask a Mortician, and the founder of The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she owns a funeral home.
168 in Sociology of Death (Books)
410 in Love & Loss
732 in Self-Help for Death & Grief
Customer Reviews: 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 11,945 ratings
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Top reviews from Australia
Linda
5.0 out of 5 stars You need to know this
Reviewed in Australia on 23 October 2022
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Such an interesting book on a subject that is rarely discussed before a death in the family. So worthwhile.
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Kristie
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, cant put it down
Reviewed in Australia on 2 May 2019
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I've read this book twice and will do it again and again. Caitlin has a way of tying together history, philosophy, medical facts and her own experience to make this a great read time and time again.
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Catmistress
4.0 out of 5 stars Behind the Scenes of the Funeral Industry
Reviewed in Australia on 4 June 2017
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Author Caitlin Doughty found her graduate degree of Mediaeval Studies limited help in the job market, so embarked on a career in the funeral parlour/cremation industry. This was an interest that had its origins in witnessing the accidental death of a young child, when the author herself was quite young.
The book gives all the behind-the-scenes details about which so many of us know little or nothing. Although the tone is not morbid, and indeed the book at times is quite funny, I can imagine that anyone inclined to be squeamish about the subject may be revolted by some descriptions. However, Doughty's main aim is to reduce the squeamishness and to bring the subject out into the open.
Some of the latter parts of the book dwell too much on her own personal circumstances, which is not to say I didn't find those parts interesting, just that perhaps they may have been less relevant than they ought to have been.
Four solid stars.
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Katt Taylor
5.0 out of 5 stars Adding my branch to the bonfire of praise
Reviewed in Australia on 12 April 2017
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The best reason to read this book is, I believe, the reason Caitlin wrote it: You cannot fully accept life unless you fully accept death and we all deserve at least the opportunity to understand that fact. The next best reason is that Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is well-written, interesting and entertaining. Enjoy!
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Amanda J Hanrahan
5.0 out of 5 stars A timely read
Reviewed in Australia on 22 April 2015
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This book helped me at my time of loss, it answered questions I had been asking myself for a while, I love the authors writing style, just academic enough to be interesting without being stodgy.
I think everyone should come to grips with dying and the business of death, and make good choices about what you really want, not just what the undertaker pushes at you!
I loved this book!
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Stan Murray in OZ.
5.0 out of 5 stars Well done Ms K ...
Reviewed in Australia on 16 August 2018
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A fun read ... you would gladly except another 100+ Pages. Found Kaitlyn on her Web Site ... which I. am slowly working my way through those many episodes.
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Pandora
4.0 out of 5 stars Learnt lots about what happens to the body after death!
Reviewed in Australia on 3 November 2020
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To help make an informed decision about where I want my body to go after I'm gone
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Love it!
Reviewed in Australia on 2 June 2018
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Amazing book 😍 definitely will read again and recommend to friends and family. Fantastic view on life and death 👌
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lauren bruce
5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant, funny, brave
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2024
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As a nurse dealing with grief, illness and death i found this book refreshing.
Death has become a taboo subject in our society, something which people tread around uncomfortably, mumbling awkard sympathies. Yet death comes to all us.
This book advocates for a good death and more openess around dying. Its humorous, well written and reflective of much of western society.
I really recommend
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Jen B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Oh My Genius!
Reviewed in the United States on 19 January 2021
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Never have I found such a satisfying read that both entertained and educated simultaneously throughout its entirety. I LOVED THIS BOOK. Doughty addresses a major societal/cultural issue from a fresh perspective that will truly broaden your horizons and make you reconsider life - or more importantly, death - plans. The purpose of the book being "to ensure that more people are not robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence."
I feel as though I've had the same thoughts about death that were presented in the book as I'm certain most everyone has. I've had thoughts about how I will meet my end, what will become of my body, the hypothetical situations where someone you wouldn't want to have see you in that state is front and center; witnessing the worst. But I feel like we never go beyond those thoughts. We don't research the answers. We don't possess realistic expectations.
Doughty turned those thoughts into an obsession of sorts. She was pained by the fact that the United States in particular chooses time and time again to avoid acceptance of the realities of death all together. We have been conditioned during our upbringing by society and surroundings to not openly discuss the subject. Instead we focus on ways to cheat death or take any measure necessary to prolong life and are always in search of the fountain of youth.
Embalming was born from marketing and consumerism. No one wants to look behind the "formaldehyde curtain" and look natural decomposition in its "repulsive" eye. But once you understand that presentation methods involve being "sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed" all in order to transform a common corpse into your expectation of what they should look like, you may reconsider.
To say that this book opened my eyes would be an understatement. It changed my views drastically and added a great calmness. If you associate your own future death with chills down your spine or have attended viewings of others and had the thought "they don't even look like themselves" cross your mind or can't for the life of you recall any familial/cultural death rituals/traditions that are done at the time of a loved one's passing, YOU need to invest a little time in this book. Death isn't scary. Ignorance toward death is scary.
How would you choose to forever be laid to rest? Before this book, I wasn't even aware of all the possibilities. To be expensively embalmed, beautified, sealed in a golden casket, placed into a marble vault, crowned with a stylish headstone that has purposely been inscribed with such poetry to surely turns heads of each and every passerby. To be cremated and placed into an urn that will ironically collect its own dust sitting on the mantle or be thrown out to sea following the goodbyes of its tosser. To be admirably donated to science. To recycle yourself through green burial. Or as the author mentioned, if she had the choice, to offer herself back to nature; being free to lie where she dies and allow all surrounding elements to receive her. "My whole life I had eaten other animals, and now I would offer myself to them. Nature would at last have its chance with me."
The author noted that there was no Art of Dying manual readily available to guide us through our decision making and thus, she created one. The reason behind preparing and designing your own "Good Death" is to ensure that your wishes will be met and your loved ones will be considered - as they generally have to manage the aftermath.
"For me, the good death includes being prepared to die, with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware; it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain. The good death means accepting death as inevitable, and not fighting it when the time comes.... Your relationship to morality is your own." - Caitlin Doughty
Check out orderofthegooddeath.com for some insight from the author herself.
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Alan Rodriguez Gonzalez
5.0 out of 5 stars Extremadamente interesante, ameno e importante.
Reviewed in Mexico on 13 December 2019
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Este libro es excelente. El mensaje que manda es uno que debe ser oído por todo individuo del mundo moderno. No se puede negar la importancia que la muerte tiene en la psique humana, y aún así los medios de comunicación hacen todo lo posible por darle a la muerte la apariencia de tabú, de algo malo, en lo que debe evitarse pensar.
La autora nos lleva en un viaje de reflexión, acompañado con numerosas anécdotas, sobre el destino que nos aguarda a todos. Gran libro.
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SPlannerer
5.0 out of 5 stars Lots of dark humour and startling realizations
Reviewed in Germany on 8 November 2020
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This book will give you whiplash with realizations about death, the death industry, and yourself.
Besides giving insight in how a body is handled after death, you *will* be forced out of your comfort zone in the best ways possible. Caitlin Doughty manages to do this by re-telling and reflecting on her own experiences while working at a crematory in the most respectfully humorous ways possible.
An absolute recommendation!
P.S.: She also has an amazing YouTube channel (Ask A Mortician), and I recommend checking that out, too. You are guaranteed to fall down a rabbit hole.
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Laura
5.0 out of 5 stars Taboe doorbrekend en verassend inhoudelijk
Reviewed in the Netherlands on 12 October 2020
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Na het lezen van 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' voel je je een ware expert op het gebied van de wereld de begravenisondernemingen. Niet alleen neemt Caitlin Doughty de lezer mee in opmerkelijke verhalen over bijv. het Tri-State Cremetory scandal maar ook word dieper ingegaan op verschillende nieuwe en duurzame manieren van uitvaart. Het boek is extreem laagdrempelig geschreven en weet een zwaar onderwerp op een luchtige manier te brengen. Al met al is het een verhelderend en verrassend boek waarvan ik hem aan iedereen kan aanraden.
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Review
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty review – startling stories from the crematorium
This article is more than 8 years old
‘Death-positive’ mortician Doughty explores attitudes to mortality in her enthralling memoir. Also reviewed: Brandy Schillace’s Death’s Summer Coat and GP Margaret McCartney’s Living With Dying
Gavin Francis
@gavinfranc
Thu 16 Apr 2015 21.00 AEST
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In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, there’s a scene in which one of the characters cries out at the futility of life: “They give birth astride of a grave,” he shouts, “the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” During an unforgettable paragraph in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes the mortician Caitlin Doughty goes further: a visibly pregnant woman attends her funeral home to arrange a cremation for her baby. “That’s a shame about your baby,” a colleague says to her, “but you’re lucky you’re pregnant, and gonna have another child.” He shouldn’t have spoken so soon: it was her unborn baby that needed the funeral.
In what gets called the “natural” world it’s usual to die in infancy, but for human beings, there remains something deeply unacceptable about that truth. Advances in medical care over the last few decades, and the attendant shift in death from home to hospital, now mean that few of us spend time with those who are dying. The unprecedented longevity of many of our grandparents, and the creeping atomisation of communities, have reinforced many people’s alienation from death. It’s become fashionable to complain that as a society we’re out of touch with death, but for the most part, that’s a good thing. We should celebrate our lack of acquaintance with the stench and the agony that, for much of human history, all too often accompanied the last days of life. Still, modern life permits a distance from death and dying that brings its own problems, not least a difficulty in accepting the inevitable, or being able to adequately grieve. Doughty is a trailblazer of a “death positive” movement, beginning in the US but now very much over here, that seeks to normalise the contemplation of mortality with “death cafes” and “death salons”. Her story about the pregnant mother arranging a funeral for her unborn baby is just one of many sobering tales she offers, but her book is not a catalogue of horror; it’s a hilarious, poignant and impassioned plea to revolutionise our attitudes to death.
As a little girl growing up in Hawaii Doughty was death-obsessed; on teenage work experience at a local hospital she asked to be assigned to the mortuary. She went on to study medieval history, and wrote a thesis about dead babies in witchcraft. “Functionally morbid”, after college she had the ambition of working at a crematorium. “Academic papers had provided a fix, but they weren’t enough,” she writes. “I wanted the harder stuff: real bodies, real death.”
Her memoir of Westwind Cremation & Burial in San Francisco is shot through with arresting descriptions of how modernity deals with the dead: “a girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves”; “seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination”; “there is nothing like consistent exposure to dead bodies to remove the trepidation attached to dead bodies”. She describes the process of embalming in shuddering detail, as well as the importance of a good seal on a cremation-chamber door: “from the chute where the bones are swept out, came a sluice of gushing molten fat … I plunked down on the floor with a pile of rags, sopping and swabbing up the fat as it cascaded out.”
Once the body itself has burned, bones are often intact – most jurisdictions insist these be ground in a cremulator before being returned to the family. The cremulator doesn’t work for babies’ bones – these she has to grind by hand. “I had written my thesis on medieval witches accused of roasting dead infants and grinding their bones,” she observes. “A year later I found myself literally roasting dead infants and grinding their bones.”
The intensity of such a life, confronted with the reality of death and an enforced intimacy with the grief of others, deepens her emotions: “It felt as if my life up to this point was spent living within a tiny range of sensations, rolling back and forth like a pinball. At Westwind that emotional range was blasted apart, allowing for ecstasy and despair like I had never experienced.” She becomes more philosophical about the fragility that we embody as human beings. She wants us to experience the peace she’s achieved through her work – her acceptance of her mortality: “This confident, stable feeling was available to anyone,” she writes, if only “society could overcome the burden of superstition”.
Buy Death's Summer Coat by Brandy Schillace from the Guardian Bookshop
Buy Death’s Summer Coat by Brandy Schillace from the Guardian Bookshop
Another death-positive campaigner is Brandy Schillace, a cultural historian based in Cleveland, Ohio, whose book opens by lamenting the curtailment of western death culture. We have forgotten how to grieve, she says; psychiatrists now categorise disabling grief as “pathological” only two months after the death of a loved one. This places immense demands on the bereaved to “get over it”, and promotes the medicalisation of sadness. In the first half of her book she articulates this problem, surveys other cultures’ death practices and offers a history of western attitudes to death, dwelling in particular on the Victorians’ memento mori practices. In their human-hair brooches and skeleton pendants she finds a message for the modern world: “The modern westerner has lost loss; death as a community event, and mourning as a communal practice has been steadily killed off.”
During the Victorian era, doctors began to replace clergy as the familiars of death; Schillace examines how dissecting cadavers became a rite of passage for medical students, and the attendant ways clinical science has sequestered the dying from everyday life. Just as lay birth assistants (“doulas”) are becoming more commonplace, she calls for more layfolk to become “death midwives” – skilled in assisting the dying – so that death can be mediated by professionals other than clinical staff.
Schillace teaches humanities at the medical school in Cleveland, and is shocked by how much information her trainee doctors have to cram, leaving little time for the literary or historical texts she sets them. “You enter [medical school] as a human,” one doctor tells her, “and years later, you get to be a human again.” That particular pendulum of medical training may be reaching the end of its arc; in the UK, at least, there are hopeful signs that we may be swinging back towards a more personalised, respectful and mutually negotiated model of medical care. End-of-life care is relatively well developed in the UK as opposed to the US, and hospices are consulted and respected for their expertise in providing a good death. But the provision of these “palliative” services is still patchy, provided by charities rather than being a cornerstone of the NHS as it should be. In her book Living With Dying, GP and BMJ columnist Margaret McCartney has written a manifesto for a more humane approach to dying, urging fewer pills and protocols, and greater attention to individuals’ wishes.
Buy Living With Dying by Margaret McCartney from the Guardian Bookshop
Buy Living With Dying by Margaret McCartney from the Guardian Bookshop
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Death’s Summer Coat are short on statistics, but McCartney makes up for them: between 2000 and 2010 the death rate in the UK fell by an extraordinary quarter for men (from 8,477 to 6,406 deaths per million), and a fifth for women (from 5,679 to 4,581 deaths per million). There has been a near doubling in life expectancy over the last 100 years. The success of specialised medicine and the development of institutionalised care has meant less and less of us now look after the sick in our own homes, so when a loved one wants to come home to die, family carers struggle: “Dealing with bathing and washing, toileting and personal hygiene, vomit and faecal matter … can be arduous, unrelenting, back-breaking work.” McCartney wants to see palliative and hospice services expanded from their current postcode-lottery status to a more comprehensive system. But at the same time she challenges the wisdom that everyone should be able to die wherever they want to, reminding us that families have a say too: one Canadian study found that while only 5% of terminally ill patients wanted to die in an institution, 14% of carers wanted their relatives to die in one. While 30% of patients didn’t die in their preferred location, 92% of their carers felt that they’d died in the most appropriate place. The family carers I meet in my work as a GP are also my patients; the death of their loved one will be just the beginning of a voyage through grief – a voyage that can be harder, and more prolonged, if their own preferences haven’t been respected. McCartney also acknowledges the uncomfortable truth that relatives are often expected to care for someone with whom they’ve had a fraught, fractured or even abusive relationship.
In terms of improving quality of life, good personalised care is more valuable than pills or medical interventions, yet “care” can’t be assessed by Nice, and clinicians can’t prescribe it. This is the infuriating paradox McCartney wants to address: “The obvious and far more ethical answer,” she writes, “would be for doctors to be able to prescribe more time and contact with skilled carers first, rather than medication.” Local councils now routinely “auction” care contracts to the lowest-bidding private firms, which must use zero-hour contracts and pittance-paid staff just to balance the books – the situation in care homes is just as bad. The low value we now place on care is an enduring tragedy – a collective scar on our society’s conscience. Those in the caring professions see how damaging this attitude is: since one of my own patients began using a wheelchair, she has had 70 different strangers through the door to help her with intimate care such as bathing, dressing and toileting.
John Sassall treating a patient
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Another target in McCartney’s sights is institutional expectation that doctors sign Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR) agreements with the terminally ill, even in cases when resuscitation would be overwhelmingly likely to cause harm. The conversation itself often causes distress, and signing such disclaimers wouldn’t be contemplated for other medical interventions with as little likelihood of success. She proposes that we replace the DNAR forms with “AND” ones – “Allow Natural Death” – quoting a woman whose mother was assaulted in her final hours by paramedics who ignored her DNAR form anyway: they “robbed [her] of her natural death”, the woman wrote, causing “prolonged dying in a manner that was contrary and repugnant to her wishes”.
“Few can welcome death,” McCartney writes, “but acceptance of it is something that we all must do, though it is difficult and often traumatic.” One of the roles GPs perform is “bearing witness”, and McCartney’s laudable goal is that “everyone will have the funding for hands-on, personal care, that hospice care would be statutorily funded, and that choices in treatment could be offered even if it meant that the time of our death would be accelerated”.
For Samuel Beckett’s character, life was a glimmer of light between the darkness of the womb and that of the grave. Vladimir Nabokov agreed: his memoir Speak, Memory declares “the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”. Our lives might pass in a flash, but what we do with our own flash of light, and its inevitable dying, still matters. It’s not true that as a society we’ve rejected death: some of my patients meet it with dignity and acceptance, and their loved ones with good grace. The families who do so have usually been able to talk about it, articulate their fears, and be honest about what’s important to them. Books such as these are a valuable contribution to the debate about death, but will also facilitate those private conversations. Reliable and compassionate care helps too: “If we are fearing our death,” writes McCartney, “let us at least not fear for the things that we as a society can and should provide.”
Gavin Francis’s book about medicine, culture and the body, Adventures in Human Being, is out next month. To order Smoke Gets in Your Eyes for £9.99 (RRP £12.99), Death’s Summer Coat for £13.59 (RRP £16.99) or Living With Dying for £9.59 (RRP £11.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min P&P of £1.99.
