Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

“How it would one day emerge after everything that could be recognized as Caitlin—eyes, lips, hair, flesh—was no more. My skull might be crushed too, fragmented by the gloved hand of some hapless twentysomething like me.”

Doughty’s flippant way of talking about her eventual end is also very existential. She thinks a lot about what being dead will mean for her physical form, and at this point in her life, she has not achieved a Personal Acceptance of Death or overcome her fear of fragmentation.

“At Westwind, for what felt like the first time, I was seeing, smelling, feeling, experiencing. This type of encounter was an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.”

Taking part in death work opens Doughty’s eyes to the reality of death and helps her on her own journey toward a personal acceptance of death. She finds her proximity to the dead exhilarating and finds a new appreciation for her own life.

“Until that night I hadn’t truly understood that I was going to die, that everyone was going to die. I didn’t know who else had this debilitating piece of information. If others did possess this knowledge, I wondered, how could they possibly live with it?”

Confronting her own morality as a child is a pivotal moment in Doughty’s life. She does not understand as a child how people function with the knowledge that they will one day die. No one in her life properly talks to her about death, reflecting the North American Death Culture of silence and denial.

“Everything—the false stretcher, the secret morgue in the basement—was artfully designed to mask death, to distance it from the public. Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.”

Doughty criticizes North American death culture for hiding the realities of death from the public. In her opinion, it is the very act of hiding death that makes death so upsetting to people. Her commentary on the medical system foreshadows later discussions on the role of modern medicine in extending the process of dying.

“As I gained more experience in the crematory I no longer dreamt of the gracious cover-ups of La Belle Mort Funeral Home. I began to realize that our relationship with death was fundamentally flawed.”

Working at Westwind helps Doughty on her own journey to a personal acceptance of death and helps her think more deeply about the relationship North American society has with death. She concludes that hiding death, or making it pretty as she originally dreamed of doing, is not the right approach.

“If we had been born into the Wari’ tribe, the cannibalism we dismiss as barbarism would have been our own cherished custom, one we engaged in with sincerity and conviction. The burial practice in North America—embalming (long-term preservation of the corpse), followed by burial in a heavy sealed casket in the ground—is offensive and foreign to the Wari’. The ‘truth and dignity’ of the Western style of burial is only the truth and dignity as determined by our immediate surroundings.”

Bringing the anthropological concept of cultural relativism into her discussion, Doughty explores the funerary practices of cultures outside of North America in order to illustrate that society dictates norms around burial practices. What constitutes dignity in death is prescribed by what culture or belief system a person comes from.

“Appalling? Absolutely. But if I let myself be sucked into the sorrow surrounding each fetus—each wanted but wasted tiny life—I’d go crazy. I’d end up like the security guard from the hospital: humorless and afraid.”

Throughout her career, Doughty faces The Challenges of Working in the Death Industry. She finds it especially difficult to think about her work cremating fetuses and babies and has to come up with coping mechanisms in order to keep going. This echoes the notion of “clinical detachment” that her coworker, Mike, exhibits and that Doughty envies.

“The idea that a nine-year-old girl can magically transform into a neat, tidy box of remains is ignorant and shameful for our culture. It is the equivalent of grown adults thinking that babies come from storks.”

Doughty frequently laments the dominant North American death culture that obscures the reality of death and points some of the blame toward people who remain deliberately ignorant. She finds this case of parents ordering their daughter’s cremation online, without talking to anyone, particularly disturbing.

“If the American optimism led to a prettying-up of the corpse with makeup and chemicals, British pessimism led to the removal of the corpse and the death ritual from polite society.”

Here, Doughty compares American and British death cultures (as outlined in Jessica Mitford’s book), finding faults with both. She argues that death should neither be made pretty nor ignored, but rather engaged with directly and realistically.

“Your mother was dying and you damn well knew it. Refusing to talk about it and then calling it ‘unexpected’ is not an acceptable excuse.”

Doughty is not just frustrated by people who refuse to acknowledge death, but also by those who refuse to prepare for it. In this case, an individual whose mother was in hospice care for six months before she died still claimed to be unprepared. The author argues that the majority of deaths that people experience throughout their lives are expected deaths, and people should be prepared in advance.

“In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve our relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality. For all of Mitford’s good intentions, direct cremation has only made the situation worse.”

Jessica Mitford’s book, written in 1963, changed the burial choices of a large number of Americans, but Doughty disagrees with Mitford’s issues with the funeral industry. While Mitford was trying to make funerals cheaper when she advocated for direct cremation, Doughty pushes instead for the opportunity for people to die a good death, where they are free to make their own informed decisions about what happens to their body after death.

“That gap of expectation has become a problem for funeral homes, under constant threat of being sued by families when a body doesn’t look how they expect it to look. It is challenging, of course, to feel sorry for the funeral industry, as the rise of embalming was what created this gap in the first place.”

One of the challenges of working in the death industry is the expectation that families have that the bodies of their deceased loved ones will look a certain way. She reminds readers that the reality of a corpse is something that most people never really have to deal with in their lives, a fact she blames partly on the funeral industry itself.

“Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening’s performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion.”

The funeral industry feeds into North American cultural norm of making death pretty and unthreatening for families, often at the expense of the dead. She criticizes the industry for selling “dignity” to families and putting dead bodies through very undignified processes in order to do so.

“The most salacious stories—bones ground in a metal blender or torture-spike eye caps—had the power to disrupt people’s polite complacency about death. Rather than denying the truth, it was a revelation to embrace it, however disgusting it might sometimes be.”

As an antidote to the dominant North American death culture, Doughty talks to those around her about her work, leaving in all the gruesome details. Though people express shock at her stories, she finds it can be helpful, even cathartic, to talk about death so candidly.

“Because we’ve never encountered a decomposing body, we can only assume they are out to get us. It is no wonder there is a cultural fascination with zombies. They are public enemy number one, taboo extraordinaire, the most gruesome thing there is—a reanimated decomposing corpse.”

To Doughty, the cultural lack of contact with decomposing bodies—due to funereal practices like embalming, which serve to delay decomposition—explains fears of monsters like zombies. This is an example of how that which is hidden or misunderstood becomes that which is feared.

“If decomposing bodies have disappeared from culture (which they have), but those same decomposing bodies are needed to alleviate the fear of death (which they are), what happens to a culture where all decomposition is removed? We don’t need to hypothesize: we live in just such a culture. A culture of death denial.”

Doughty draws a direct line between the lack of decomposition of the dead, through embalming and cremation, to the North American cultural norm of death denial. She argues that without engaging with decomposition or letting corpses decompose, society will never overcome its fear of death.

“In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but also a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women ‘give birth astride of a grave.’ Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop.”

Doughty sees life and death as inextricably linked; of course there can be no life without death, and no death without life, but the way Doughty sees this dialectic helps to deconstruct death, making it less abstract or incomprehensible. She links death to life explicitly and feels that as a woman, she is closely tied to death as well as life.

“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.”

Spending time with a body, Doughty argues, helps people come to terms with the death and allows mourners to move toward a personal acceptance of death. This act of sitting with the body happens rarely in North American culture; in fact, the bereaved often move quickly to call for bodies to be collected, minimizing their time with them. Doughty argues that sitting with the dead is one thing people can do to achieve a better understanding of their own death and the deaths of their loved ones.

“Both of the promises my culture made to me were broken, my webs of significance snapped. None of my privileged assumptions about the world could be counted on anymore.”

When Luke rejects Doughty’s romantic advances, she finds that her expectations about life have been shattered. She wishes that she had been brought up differently, with fewer Disney fairy tales and instead a more realistic view of life, both in regard to romance and death.

“And now, the cultural norm is that Americans are either embalmed and buried, or cremated. But culture no longer dictates that we must do those things, out of belief or obligation.”

Doughty sees North American death culture as something that is devoid entirely of belief. There is no cultural or religious reason that embalming and burial or cremation should be the two most common funerary practices, and she worries that without some kind of touchstone for addressing death, people will never be able to understand their mortality.

“Once I had been terrified at the thought of my body being fragmented. No longer. My fear of fragmentation was born from fearing the loss of control. Here was the ultimate loss of control, flung across the freeway, but in the moment there was only calm.”

After her near-death experience, Doughty realizes that she has more or less achieved the personal acceptance of death she had chased since her childhood traumatic experience and that propelled her into her career. She does not feel fear at the thought of dying anymore, but rather acceptance and calm.

“We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system.”

Doughty worries that modern medicine has progressed to the point where people are kept alive longer than is natural, despite lacking enough healthcare workers to properly take care of elderly people. She argues that society is so afraid of death that people are kept alive so that doctors and family members do not have to face their fear of their own mortality. This passage echoes an earlier passage in which she refers to death as “a failure of the medical system” (46), highlighting the cultural expectation that death be delayed as long as possible and by any means necessary, regardless of dignity or quality of life.

“A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn’t forget how quickly other cultural prejudices—racism, sexism, homophobia—have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth.”

Doughty sees the dominant North American death culture as standing in the way of a good death. She likens the fear of death to other cultural prejudices and argues that as these prejudices have started to be dismantled in society, so too must society begin to overcome its prejudice against death.