Caitlin Doughty, host of Ask a Mortician, has a new book out—<em>Smoke Gets in Your Eyes</em>—and is reading at the University Bookstore tonight at 7 pm.
  • Caitlin Doughty, host of Ask a Mortician, has a new book out—Smoke Gets in Your Eyes—and is reading at the University Book Store tonight at 7 pm.

So, how do you want to go? Not as in how you’d like to die—I’m guessing “in my sleep” or other variations on “quick and painless” are going to be number one, with a bullet (so to speak). I’m asking a question you actually have some control over, and responsibility for: What do you want to happen to your body after you die?

The top corporations in the funeral industry would, of course, like your default answer—or, if you haven’t talked about it, your family’s default answer—to be something like “embalming, hearse, burial plot, graveside service,” which averages $8,000–$10,000 in America these days. (That’s according to the National Funeral Directors Association, the chamber of commerce for the death-care industry.) If you live in Seattle, however, you’re one of the most likely people in the country to opt for cremation—72.6 percent likely, in fact, second only to the residents of Nevada but well over the national average of 43.2 percent.

But Caitlin Doughty, founder of the Order of the Good Death, host of the popular YouTube video series Ask a Mortician, and author of the new book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, would like you to think a little more creatively about your options. “It was important to undo the lockstep of embalming,” she said in a telephone interview last week, saying an anti-embalming campaign inspired by Jessica Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death convinced many baby boomers that the process is expensive, typically involves toxic chemicals, and isn’t necessary. “But now it’s important to undo the lockstep of cremation,” she added, “this push to remove the body from the equation: ‘The soul isn’t in there, so the body doesn’t matter.’”

As Doughty puts it in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, this embalm-or-cremate dogma of American death-care—which is, fundamentally, a reflection of cultural squeamishness about corpses—robs some people of a chance for real closure with the natural, non-plasticized body of a loved one:

A corpse doesn’t need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn’t need anything anymore—it’s more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom.

Part memoir, part manifesto, and part survey of death practices around the world, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a distillation of Doughty’s experiences in the mortuary world, starting with a job she got as a twentysomething at a scrappy San Francisco cremation and burial service run by a few thick-skinned old-timers. Under their tough-love tutelage, she learned how to retrieve bags of fetuses from the hospital for cremation (bring your own cardboard box), how to talk to a grieving family as you’re wheeling their newly deceased matriarch out the door (be sympathetic but not too effusive), and what advanced human decomposition smells like. “The first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone,” she writes...

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