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rachelmanija Feb. 22nd, 2023 10:47 am)
rachelmanija Feb. 22nd, 2023 10:47 am)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.
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.
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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.
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She also goes into open-air pyres in the U.S., industrial crematories and mourning temples in Japan, a thing in Spain where you can sit with the corpse for as long as you like but there's always glass between you and them, something in Southeast Asia (I can't recall the exact location) where they keep the skulls of the deceased and bring them out once a year for ceremonies -- a whole gamut of possibilities for how we relate to the dead. Doughty's overall conclusion is that most of 'em have their merits and demerits, and the only one she thinks is failing to really serve people's emotional needs at all is the modern U.S. funeral industry.
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I wanted to do this with my horse, but could not talk my husband into trying. (We lived in a rural area, on 10 acres, surrounded by 10 to 40 acre parcels.) I live alone now, in a small city with a 0.2 acre yard, and have successfully composted two of my dogs (55 lbs and 70 lbs.) Lots of sawdust and wood chips underneath, 3 cubic yards of compost and composting material on top, no odor.
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