Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Mike, Chris, and Bruce are Doughty’s coworkers at Westwind Cremation & Burial. Mike, Doughty’s boss, is a gruff man of few words. When Doughty is first hired at Westwind, she is desperate to prove to him that she can handle the job and share his “clinical detachment” (19). He offers her no words of praise until she runs the crematorium by herself for two weeks toward the end of her time at Westwind. Despite his stoic exterior, Doughty learns that Mike is a sensitive man who often feels the burden of their job keenly. He is affected deeply by the deaths of babies and children and clearly cares a great deal about the bodies that come into their crematorium.

Chris is the body-transport driver for Westwind. Doughty and Chris get along immediately, and Doughty often accompanies him on body retrievals. Chris has a calm and soothing demeanor, and Doughty notices the positive impact he has on grieving families. She is grateful for his ability to talk her through new situations and for the care he takes in mentoring her.

Bruce is the embalmer at Westwind. He is friendly and enthusiastic and also gets along well with Doughty. He teaches her about the art of embalming and passes on his sense of humor about dead bodies. Although embalming is his livelihood, he finds the practice somewhat uncomfortable, and he would not want it to happen to his own loved ones.

Doughty credits all three men with teaching her how to be “an ethical, hard-working funeral director” (205).

Doughty’s immediate family includes her mother and father. Although Doughty has a good relationship with both of her parents, she wishes they had been more open to talking about death with her when she was a child. Her parents’ failure to talk to her about her witnessing the death of a little girl greatly impacts Doughty’s life from her childhood all the way into her adulthood. When Doughty realizes that the funeral industry is deeply flawed, she thinks about what she would do in the event of her parents’ deaths. She concludes that she could never have them embalmed and begins to imagine being able to take their bodies to a “beautiful crematory with huge windows that let in gobs of natural light” (60), a place where death could be embraced rather than hidden. It is this idea that sparks Doughty’s interest in alternative funerary practices. 

Doughty’s other family members include her grandfather, who dies of Alzheimer’s disease, and her grandmother, who dies several years after suffering a traumatic brain injury. When her grandmother dies, Doughty flies back to Hawai’i to take care of all the funeral arrangements. She is disappointed when, despite her experience working in the funeral industry, she is unable to insist that her grandmother’s body stay at home for longer or ensure that she does not get her mouth wired shut for the viewing. Doughty’s experience of her grandmother’s death solidifies her desire for alternative death customs and her plan to open a crematorium “with floor-to-ceiling windows to let the sunshine in and keep the weirdo death stigma out” (196).

Luke is Doughty’s friend and eventually someone she has romantic feelings for. When they are friends, Luke is one of the only people who understands her relationship with death. He is the first person she tells when she gets the job at Westwind, and Doughty cares deeply about him. Doughty realizes she has feelings for him after seeing a corpse that resembles him. The incident forces her to reckon with Luke’s mortality. She begins to make plans to move to Los Angeles, where he lives. Though she also moves there to attend mortuary school, she explains that he was also a major draw to the city. 

Luke ultimately rejects her advances, and Doughty discusses how losing his friendship felt like a kind of death. This rejection sends Doughty into a deep depression, even pushing her toward suicidal ideation. The experience forces her to confront many preconceived ideas she had about how her life is going to go. While she had spent much of her twenties thinking about her ideas about death, she realizes that it is also her ideas about romance and true love that she needs to reconcile before she can fully achieve her personal acceptance of death.