46 pages • 1-hour read
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory
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Personal Acceptance of Death
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains graphic descriptions of dead bodies; the cremation, embalming, and decomposition processes; deaths, including violent deaths, of babies, children, and adults; and suicide.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a personal memoir about Caitlin Doughty’s experiences in the funeral industry. Her childhood was marked by a serious trauma when she witnessed the (likely) death of a fellow child. The incident caused her to become both fascinated and repulsed by death, unable to find a way to accept what she had witnessed. As a death worker, she is constantly confronted by reminders of her own mortality. Despite her outwardly cavalier attitude toward work that many people would find distasteful and challenging at best (and horrifying or traumatizing at worst), Doughty was still not prepared to accept death as an adult.
Working with corpses helps Doughty better understand what happens after death, somewhat reducing her fear. She can see a corpse in its natural state as something beautiful, not something frightening. Facing death directly helps her realize that death denial only increases fear. She realizes that hiding the reality of death through elaborate funerals only perpetuates the problem. She starts to contemplate the funerals of her loved ones, which is another important step toward acceptance. Being unprepared for a death makes the process of planning a funeral much more stressful, which is something Doughty sees in her clients all the time.
At the end of the book, Doughty’s journey of death acceptance comes to a resolution. She realizes that the end of a person’s story is not a romantic happily-ever-after ending, and that is okay. When she believes she is going to die in a car crash, she experiences a profound and unexpected sense of peace and acceptance that helps her understand that death is not something she needs to fear. Her final hurdle on the way to acceptance is her worry that when she dies, she will be leaving projects unfinished.
When she finally allows herself to accept that some projects may be ongoing at the time of her death, she is able to fully integrate death acceptance into her own psyche. Death, she finally feels, does not need to be something to fear. It is natural, inevitable, and potentially even a beautiful moment of transition. She is able to reach this conclusion even without a personal belief in an afterlife or any other spiritual framework. While religious and spiritual beliefs are immensely helpful for many people who are tackling death acceptance, Doughty’s story demonstrates that spirituality is not the only option for coming to terms with death.
North American Death Culture
One of Doughty’s major goals as a death worker is to change the culture surrounding death in North America. She examines historical trends like the increasing popularity of embalming and cremation to see how death culture reached its current point. Today, mainstream death culture in North America is largely devoid of ritual. There is no specific sequence of events that everyone knows to follow after an individual dies. Many people do not even have a plan for their funeral or for the care of their body after death. Most of the time, people do not even die at home. They die in a hospital, hospice, or care home, so their family members are completely uninvolved. If people do die at home, their family members usually call a funeral home immediately because of their worries about the health risks posed by corpses.
Funerals tend to be similarly impersonal. If an individual is cremated or not embalmed, the corpse is usually invisible or entirely absent throughout the funeral. An embalmed corpse is sometimes visible, but people tend to be very uncomfortable interacting with the dead in any way. Death is spoken of in euphemistic terms like “passing away,” and most people do not know what real dead bodies look like. Embalmed corpses are placed in heavy, sealed caskets in underground vaults, staving off decomposition for as long as possible. All these practices use death denial as their central tenet, rather than focusing on any particular cultural or spiritual beliefs. This is, of course, a generalization. North America is made up of people from many cultures, some of whom have maintained death rituals of great significance for them.
Doughty shows that mainstream death culture can still change in North America. Cultures around the world have many different funeral traditions that often follow a well-established pattern. That means that after a death, each person knows what their role is and how they should proceed to care for the body and heal from the death. In a North American context, that could mean shifting the death culture so that people know how to wash and dress the bodies of their own family members before calling a funeral home. It might also mean more witness cremations, or more participatory rituals in funeral settings. There is no current precedent for a more death-positive funeral culture, and that can be good news. It means that people have the power to create a better death culture for themselves.
The Challenges of Working in the Death Industry
Although the death industry is where Doughty genuinely wants to work, as evidenced by her determination to build a sustainable career in death work, she details the reasons it is a tough space to work in. The daily challenges of working with the dead are perhaps the most obvious, and they are indeed difficult parts of the job. Decomposing bodies can be disturbing, the job is physically strenuous, and there is always the risk of encountering situations that trigger disgust, such as large quantities of liquefied human fat. There is also the profound emotional toll that encountering some bodies takes, particularly the bodies of babies and young children. As much as Doughty promotes death acceptance, she does not deny that looking at death directly can be a very painful experience. Despite this pain, she still believes that taking the time to look at and cradle the body of a young child is a healthier response to death than ordering a cremation for a nine-year-old online.
A different kind of challenge in the death industry comes from people who judge Doughty for working with the dead in the first place. Everyone in her life is skeptical of her choice to become a death worker, except for Luke. Many people treat her with suspicion, as though she is doing something sinister or as though she is somehow deviant for touching and cremating the dead. Family members of the bodies she cremates sometimes harass her or accuse her of mistreating the corpses. Doughty is pushed into learning to embalm corpses because of the popularity of the practice, even though she does not believe that it is necessary or even particularly safe. Widespread ignorance regarding the funeral industry is one of the biggest challenges for people in Doughty’s position.
These challenges tie into many of the current problems in the North American death industry, alongside factors like low pay and scarce jobs. Although working in the death industry can be difficult, it also has big advantages for Doughty. She is able to make a tangible, positive difference in people’s lives, particularly when she gets to answer people’s questions about cremation honestly, assuaging fears and clarifying the process. She also notes that working with the dead makes her feel alive: It is a job that provides direct access to a facet of reality that many people cannot access. Dead bodies provide a clear counterpoint, helping Doughty genuinely appreciate life by accepting the role of death in the natural world.
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