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Death avoidance and its consequences
Now that I have surpassed all my reading goals for the year, including the one to read at least 25 books that I had already owned as of the end of last year (to try and put a dent in the TBR Shelves of Doom), I treated myself to a nice cozy winter treat: a big old stack of library books, volumes that I’d wanted to read but dutifully been refraining from dropping the money on to buy new. One of these was Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, her first book, published three years before From Here to Eternity, which I read last December. December seems like a good month to stay in and read humorous books about death.
While From Here to Eternity is structured as a travelogue, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is more of a coming-of-age memoir, only in true 21st century fashion, the coming of age happens after you graduate college and have to figure out how to live your life on your own dime in your mid-twenties. Having acquired a fascinating but not particularly marketable undergraduate degree in medieval studies, our morbid protagonist decides she’s had enough of reading about dead bodies (a very prominent theme in medieval… anything) and wants the real deal. After much fruitless job-hunting she is hired at a small crematory in the Bay Area. Crematories are the low-cost burial option, costing only several hundred instead of several thousand dollars, because the death industry in the United States is a giant ripoff, based upon selling and upselling a lot of overpriced nonsense to grieving families to fill the gaping hole in our culture where meaningful rituals should be (so, not so different from how our culture approaches a lot of things, really). In working at the crematory, Caitlin learns a lot of things, from how to put makeup on a dead baby to all the interesting colors of mold that can grow on a corpse (basically all of them). She also slowly develops and refines her own philosophy and cultural critique about death, increasingly convinced that the US culture of death avoidance leaves Americans particularly ill equipped to handle it when it happens, which the death industry then feeds by promising ever more elaborate (and usually expensive, though sometimes the draw is that it’s less expensive) ways to remove them from having to deal with it. (Sometimes you can see why they’d want to do that for reasons besides financial extraction; Americans’ expectations around death are often quite belligerently wrongheaded.)
This book is not for the squeamish; it contains a lot of content that is extremely fun and exciting to the morbid weirdos who are its target demographic. Young Caitlin also makes a great main character for college-educated Goth girls like me who did not do anything as hardcore with our humanities degrees as “abandon them to go burn corpses for a living” to live vicariously through. I devoured the book in about a day. I loved the gross details, the insights into the industry, the various cultural and historical comparisons, the philosophizing, the humor. And I think the work that Doughty and other “alternative death” folks are doing to push back on our dysfunctional funerary industrial complex is very important, although that hasn’t yet caused me to do any actual research or planning on what I want done with myself when I die (I should get on that).
I think it might be time for me to actually catch up on all those Ask A Mortician videos…
While From Here to Eternity is structured as a travelogue, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is more of a coming-of-age memoir, only in true 21st century fashion, the coming of age happens after you graduate college and have to figure out how to live your life on your own dime in your mid-twenties. Having acquired a fascinating but not particularly marketable undergraduate degree in medieval studies, our morbid protagonist decides she’s had enough of reading about dead bodies (a very prominent theme in medieval… anything) and wants the real deal. After much fruitless job-hunting she is hired at a small crematory in the Bay Area. Crematories are the low-cost burial option, costing only several hundred instead of several thousand dollars, because the death industry in the United States is a giant ripoff, based upon selling and upselling a lot of overpriced nonsense to grieving families to fill the gaping hole in our culture where meaningful rituals should be (so, not so different from how our culture approaches a lot of things, really). In working at the crematory, Caitlin learns a lot of things, from how to put makeup on a dead baby to all the interesting colors of mold that can grow on a corpse (basically all of them). She also slowly develops and refines her own philosophy and cultural critique about death, increasingly convinced that the US culture of death avoidance leaves Americans particularly ill equipped to handle it when it happens, which the death industry then feeds by promising ever more elaborate (and usually expensive, though sometimes the draw is that it’s less expensive) ways to remove them from having to deal with it. (Sometimes you can see why they’d want to do that for reasons besides financial extraction; Americans’ expectations around death are often quite belligerently wrongheaded.)
This book is not for the squeamish; it contains a lot of content that is extremely fun and exciting to the morbid weirdos who are its target demographic. Young Caitlin also makes a great main character for college-educated Goth girls like me who did not do anything as hardcore with our humanities degrees as “abandon them to go burn corpses for a living” to live vicariously through. I devoured the book in about a day. I loved the gross details, the insights into the industry, the various cultural and historical comparisons, the philosophizing, the humor. And I think the work that Doughty and other “alternative death” folks are doing to push back on our dysfunctional funerary industrial complex is very important, although that hasn’t yet caused me to do any actual research or planning on what I want done with myself when I die (I should get on that).
I think it might be time for me to actually catch up on all those Ask A Mortician videos…