On Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in your Eyes, death and control

 After stumbling over Caitlin Doughty's videos on YouTube and learning her thoughts on not only the (US) funeral industry but also many other death-related stories from all over the globe, I felt I had to get a copy of her first book: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, And Other Lessons From The Crematorium. What follows are my thoughts on this book, as well as (probably) copious spoilers for those who haven't read the book yet.


In this book, Caitlin details how her fascination with death formed at a young age due to a confrontation with the (presumed) traumatic death of a child at a shopping mall. The sudden disruption of a cheerful and carefree life to that point made young Caitlin realise the nature of mortality, and that - in fact - everyone around her would die some day. Perhaps less common a response, Caitlin felt compelled to 'do something' with death and mortality, to the point of making her career out of it.

Imagine spending part of your twenties shoving corpses into an incinerator, or retort as these corpse-burning machines are called. Shovelling bone dust and chunks of bone out of the machine and grinding these down into the fine ash that is commonly recognised by society as 'corpse ash'. Even though all organic matter got burned off and escaped into the atmosphere (with or without filtering) already.

The way society looks at and deals with death says a lot about the society. In the US, the funeral industry has moved more and more towards taking the 'death' out of the 'death industry', instead adding glamour and kitsch to it. From overly fancy caskets (instead of body-shaped coffins), to elaborate final resting places and of course the process of embalming, which aims to make a corpse as decay-resistant and eternally appealing as a McD Happy Meal, modern day (Western) society has become highly divorced from the true nature of death.


For the people who work at a crematorium or funeral home, there is the constant process of picking up bodies. Every few seconds another handful of people die, after all. That means that in a big city like San Francisco there are (white, unmarked) vans driving every which way each and every day to pick up the dozens of new corpses. These include everyone from the wealthy, rich and famous, to the poorest and most anonymous. Death is the ultimate equaliser.

One day each of us will die, and be whisked away by one of those vans or equivalent to be buried, cremated, chopped up to be fed to ravenous predators or given a Viking burial. So why are we (as in Western societies) so good at pretending death doesn't exist?


Here I feel I should interject my own thoughts as someone who grew up on a dairy farm. My view and that of others who grew up in similar conditions is that 'city folk' are the ones who are detached from reality. Not just in the sense that they often haven't the foggiest where their milk or meat comes from (beyond the grocery store or butcher), but also in the sense of having seen life and death from up close.

From a young age, the spectre of death was ever-present, as one of the aspects of running a dairy farm is that you have a lot of animals, some of whom will die on a regular basis. Of course we had the young male calves who'd be taken away by this big truck, knowing that they'd be fattened up and butchered, but we also had the occasional sheep and cows who'd succumb to some illness or injury. Seeing cattle, sheep and other corpses alongside the road near some farms wasn't uncommon. They were just waiting to be picked up by the corpse truck, much as human corpses get picked up.

Death is the great equaliser, no matter your species.

Except of course that a cow doesn't get a funeral or cremation. The remaining cows and sheep will often notice the absence in some manner, and a dead calf would lead to a distressed mother cow. Yet none of them got upset to the point of demanding a viewing of their dead family member or ask to receive the ashes. Where would a cow even leave the urn with ashes of her dead mother?

Growing up in this world where new life and new death is just part of everyday life, you come to accept it as The Way Things Are. Which is not to say that there are things which fall outside this pattern. I remember finding one of the farm cats as a child one day. She was frozen stiff, but I still took her into one of the stables and put her all warm in some straw, hoping she'd revive. Of course corpses do not come back to life.

Each year we'd also have litters of new kittens everywhere, from the farm cats that were roaming not just on our farm, but also between the other farms in the region. As nobody had bothered to neuter or spay these cats, there were a lot of kittens, and my dad would sometimes take a litter he found and drown a sack full of kittens in one of the water-filled ditches around the farm. Learning about that made me very upset. It didn't seem fair to me that such new life should face capital punishment for merely having been born. Even if they were seen as 'unwanted'.


While reading Caitlin's book, you can see the pattern of people moving into cities and pushing away this spectre of death. In a sense, a city is the ultimate death-denying place. Here one can see, hear, feel and experience people being alive every second, without a moment of solitude or reflection. Since there is no need to get to know the neighbours or everyone else who lives in the hundreds of anonymous flats within throwing distance, people dying in those apartments and being taken away by people emerging with a stretcher from an unmarked, white van is of little concern and easily forgotten. Even inside hospitals anything that may resemble death is quickly whisked away, smoothed over and scrubbed off.

Living desperately to ignore the spectre of one's death coming ever closer, this seems to be the overarching theme.


Would people be happier if they could just accept death for what it is? Caitlin thinks so, and I would agree. Death is a reality of existence, and to pretend that it doesn't exist, or - perhaps worse - that corpses are something to be terrified of, is not helpful in the slightest. To not accept death is akin to not accepting that a machine or electronic device will cease working one day.

The body is a marvellously complicated piece of biochemical processes, all working synchronously in order to sustain a living, breathing organism, which in the case of humans at least is also gifted with a brain that allows it to contemplate and consider the cessation of these processes and how this makes one feel. Here one can seek to further escape the obvious conclusion of oblivion by suggesting that the cessation of the body's essential functions is merely the prelude to 'something' else. To deny not death, but to deny what death means.

With the cessation of the heart's beating and the rapidly decreasing activity in the brain before complete neural depolarisation makes revival impossible, the person that was created inside that brain is no longer. All that remains is the now defunct body that used to sustain it. That's both a tragic, but also comforting thought, as there still is something physical and tangible there that used to be part of this person. Through rituals including the washing and clothing of the body, before it is put to rest for the last time, family members and loved ones can come to terms with this death, and channel their grief and mourning.

Taking away these rituals and by turning death into something abstract is in that sense as cruel as hiding the death of a child's pet by swapping them with a newly bought one, or by pretending that Fido didn't die, but just moved to the Big Dog Farm up-state where she's all happily hanging out with other dogs. Hiding death from a child who grows up on a dairy farm would be hard to impossible, and my parents never even tried to hide the truth from me. I do not feel that this in any way, form or shape harmed me. In fact, it probably is for the best to confront a child with mortality in such a safe setting as soon as possible.


Finally, Caitlin also touches briefly on the subject of immortality, and denounces it, stating essentially that this spectre of death looming over her shoulder is what drives her. Here I want to state first and foremost that I have absolutely no problem with people who feel comfortable with their own impending death and have no issues with embracing it. I do however think on the same note that it is equally wrong to have issues with those who do feel that they would like to 'cheat death'.

I think an important distinction here is how one regards the body. Whether one sees it as part of a cycle of life & death, or more as a machine. If one sees one's existence more as just a brief flicker in the former, then it would seem wrong, almost sacrilegious to not embrace the sweet embrace of death whenever it comes to you.

Yet to others the view of the body as a biological machine is obvious, and with it the same impulses that drives us to conserve countless parts of human history that by all rights should have turn to dust by now. From reconstructing ancient settlements and ruins, to restoring machines and devices decades to centuries old, we find the notion that with the right drive, spare parts and skills we can keep more than just a 1930s truck or 19th century steam engine running.


The funny thing here is that this also appears to tie into the whole 'right to repair' movement. When you 'own' a device or machine, shouldn't you be able to repair it if you desire so? Whether it's performing maintenance on an excavator or combine harvester, a computer-controlled gadget or a laptop or smartphone, nobody should have the right to tell you that you cannot repair it, or that it isn't worth it. That's up to you as the owner of the machine or device in question to decide.

If we extend that idea of ownership and control to one's own body, then I think that the notion of giving everyone the freedom and control to either repair their body or let it decay naturally is the only right choice. Yes, we should bring back the understanding of what death truly is - and with it put nonsensical scaremongering like zombies to rest - while also not demonising medical science today and tomorrow. After all, we happily embrace antibiotics, vaccines and living in clean, hygienic houses, instead of accepting 19th-century levels of death and not naming newborns as they'd likely die before their first birthday, conceivably along with their mother. We have been 'cheating death' for countless millennia at this point, and it seems unlikely we will cease doing so any time soon.


Today we know that we will certainly die one day, yet at the horizon we can see the day when this will be a personal choice. To me that represents the most beautiful part of what it means to be human: to use our intellect and reasoning skills to create more choice, health and happiness rather than settle for just raw survival as back in our hunter-gatherer days. The point of a brain is after all to use it, not merely to have it rot away in the ground or sizzle and evaporate in a retort's fiery embrace after decades of gathering proverbial dust.

Here is to life, death and human genius and intellect.


Maya