Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & other lessons from the crematory, by Caitlin Doughty

[rachelmanija]

A memoir by the goth mortician Caitlin Doughty. I've enjoyed her surprisingly chipper YouTube series her YouTube videos, so I thought I would like this. Especially after I'd just read S. A. Cosby's noir My Darkest Prayer, whose hero works in a mortuary.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is part memoir of how Doughty got obsessed with death (as a child, her goldfish died and she witnessed a serious accident that may have killed someone) and got a job operating the crematory of a San Francisco funeral home, and part facts about death, corpses, and funeral customs.

The memoir part is fairly interesting but a bit marred by Doughty making the same points and jokes over and over with minor variations. It turned out that I already knew about 80% of the factual material, so that part was pretty dull for me. There's definitely some gross parts, but it's not that gross. Ultimately I was most interested in the stories of the dead people and their loved ones (or hated ones), a la the opening scenes of Six Feet Under, and the book is spread about in focus enough that there's not that much of that.

I will share my very favorite part though. The machine that grinds up bone bits is called a cremulator, which as Doughty points out sounds like a cartoon villain. "Beware the Cremulator!"

I've had more-than-average contact with death and dead people for someone who doesn't deal with it professionally, due to spending my childhood where people often just seemed to be dead where I could see them, and then, as an adult, volunteering for a number of years with the Crisis Response Team, which did crisis counseling on-scene when people died suddenly. So I not only attended some funerals where the body was burned on a pyre while we all watched, but with Crisis Response mostly no one had done anything at all to the body other than check to make sure it was dead.

I think Doughty was around corpses that had been sitting around for longer than the ones I encountered, and of course she encountered way way more than I ever did. Also, the deaths I'd get summoned to were exclusively ones that the police got summoned to, as we got called by the police. If someone has been declared by a doctor to be dying, the police don't get called. So the scenes I went to were exclusively unexpected deaths, which both means that they were more likely to be violent but less likely to be of someone who was in absolutely horrendous condition before they died. I think that explains our different experiences with them.

Cut for comparison of my and Doughty's experiences with corpses, but nothing really graphic.

Do corpses soil themselves in any noticeable way?

Doughty: Not always but often, unless the mortician inserts a butt plug.

Me: Not that I ever noticed and I was pretty close to some, as in two feet away. But again, if the mortician can stop it with a butt plug, that suggests a much longer time frame than I was ever involved in.

Do corpses look like they're just sleeping?

Doughty: No, never, they look extremely dead unless a mortician fixes them up.

Me: I definitely saw some that looked like they were sleeping. I think this is more likely if they died in their sleep and you're seeing them just a couple hours later.

If you watch a cremation will you actually see a flaming skull?

Doughty (who operated an industrial crematory): Yes.

Me (who saw bodies laid out on a woodstack, doused in kerosene, and set on fire): Maybe if I'd waited for twelve hours. We all went home long before that point.



This all sounds like Doughty was making a pitch for morticians, but in fact she ended up very against automatically embalming corpses and uncomfortable with efforts to hide the reality of death from loved ones, like shifting the washing of a body from the family to professionals. She talks a bit about death doulas, whose ideals she liked but whom she found to be too New Agey for her. The most interesting thing I personally got out of the book was the idea that being a death doula might be something I'd like doing if I could avoid the New Agier aspects of the community.

I've always found corpses and what we do with the corpse itself to be the least interesting part of death, and this book didn't change my mind about that. If you're curious about American mortuary practices plus a sprinkling of comparative anthropology, this book is okay. But honestly, her YouTube videos are better - and I say that as someone who would almost always rather read a book than watch a video.

Comments

[oracne]

I definitely don't want my body embalmed. They can cremate it right off.

[sovay]

This all sounds like Doughty was making a pitch for morticians, but in fact she ended up very against automatically embalming corpses and uncomfortable with efforts to hide the reality of death from loved ones, like shifting the washing of a body from the family to professionals.

I have an interesting-to-me reaction to this position, which is that I am all against embalming, but I like that tahara is performed by the chevra kadisha and I would not want to abolish the existence of such societies; they are endangered enough at this point in history and I like what they represent, which is a gift that cannot be and can never be expected to be repaid. (Full disclosure: I know people who are involved in this project and its successors.) It is in fact strange to me that I did not see my grandmother after she had died. My grandfather, I was there when it happened, which I preferred to disappearance.

[lucymonster]

Embalming is a lot less common in my country, and not a practice I’m tempted by, but it was interesting to learn about.

I did like her bit about caring for bodies at home and the death doulas and all. Took a lot of the horror out of my mental concept of death, which I’ve really never really been around so far.

[swan_tower]

You might be more interested in her book From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. That's less about her own experiences and more about contrasting a bunch of different traditions around the globe, digging into the effects of various approaches on the mourners, the environment, etc. It solidly convinced me that not only do I not want to be embalmed and interred in a stupidly overpriced casket, I don't want to be cremated, either; I have told my husband that my preference is for natural/green burial, or honestly, composting if the logistics of that have been solidly cracked by then (it turns out to be more complicated than it might appear at first glance).

I really enjoyed From Here to Eternity -- which I listened to in audiobook, with Doughty narrating -- but then, it was tailor-made to my anthropological inclinations.

[ratcreature]

When my father died my brother pushed for a funeral home that offered very customized services, so family could be involved more or less with the handling of the body depending on the preferences. We decided to have the mortician do the washing and underwear, but to participate in the dressing and placing grave goods, and then an open casket viewing for the day before the funeral so those who hadn't been in the hospital when he died or shortly afterwards could still see and touch the body. There was no embalming. (I don't think that's allowed here, even if you wanted, since the corpse has to rot in case the relatives don't rent the burial plot for longer than the minimum amount of two decades or so, and of course there's the environmental regulations.)

[meara]

(Wow wrong reply on wrong thread)

[viridian5]

Part of my problem with this book might be that I came into this expecting something different: more stories from her time working at the crematory and less personal story away from that. There are things about her life before, during, and after that I didn't feel I needed to know; I was hoping for far less memoir. (This is a problem for me with a lot of non-fiction books ostensibly about topics I'm interested in that turn out to be far more about the author's life. I don't know you, author, and often don't actually want to.)

I read this book years before the death of my grandmother. I have to say that I really appreciated having an expert makeup her body for the open casket viewing, because she looked like my grandmother again, who thoughout her life never went out the door without makeup and high heels and her hair dyed (well into her 90s) but in her five-month-long final decline stopped, and that was how we got the feeling that she didn't have much longer left. It was the way I wanted to remember her, when she was healthier and happier.

[yhlee]

A friend of mine is an undertaker's son and basically grew up in a funeral home. He says (and our other mutual friends who grew up with him confirm) that as a kid he had extremely weird ideas about what was "normal." XD (I would never have guessed - by the time I knew/met him, he seemed like a perfectly ordinary lawyer who also happens to be a gamer lolol.)