Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: A New Memoir That Argues For A Greater Intimacy With Death

The older I get, the younger even much older people seem. If you’d asked me in my teens, I probably would have thought that living to the ripe age of 60 would constitute a good, long life. Now, the absolute minimum age is 75, and really, anything below 80 seems a bit too close for comfort. Think of all the books I still need to read! I could blame the shift on becoming a parent (nothing makes you feel your own mortality like creating new life), but really, I don’t want to die. I’m the main character in my own story, and I don’t want it to end. You thought The Wheel of Time dragged on? Wait until you read The Book of Joel.

In her disquieting, ultimately life-(and death) affirming new book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, mortician Caitlin Doughty (the blogger behind the popular “Ask a Mortician” web series) argues that it is modern Western society’s distaste for, and remove from, the inevitable realities of the end of life that are to blame for the modern epidemic of thanatophobia. It’s a philosophy that led her to create the collective Order of the Good Death, a movement that advocates reconnecting with all the parts of death we’d rather not see: Die at home instead of in the hospital, if you can. Don’t treat the bodies of the dead like toxic waste that must be contained by professionals. Don’t try to cover corpses in makeup to make them look alive. Don’t essentially put hollowed-out shells filled with poison into overpriced boxes; let them truly return to the earth, and mingle with it, and live on through it.

Doughty didn’t come by her beliefs easily, but developed them through lifelong study. Most shy away from death, but she looked it full in the face, her fixation triggered in childhood when she witnessed a young girl’s death in a freak accident at a shopping mall. She spent years haunted by her own mortality, suffering frequent nightmares. In high school, she slotted in with the morbid goth kids. In college, she received a degree in medieval history, a time period not known for its cheer. In her early 20s, unable to shake death (and unlikely to find a job in academia), she got an entry-level position in a crematorium, manning the industrial machine that turned bodies to ash.

The early chapters will appeal to fans of the history-in-quirky-facts style of Mary Roach. Doughty shares the odd lessons of her working life: the way she ended her days coated in ashes, or how to tell when a body has been burning long enough (you want to see white ash; black char means it isn’t ready), or the proper way to send cremains via USPS. As you can imagine, it takes a delicate hand to render these details in such a manner that they remain compelling despite the fact that they are, well, kind of creepy.

But that’s the thing, and the real thesis of Doughty’s book: death is creepy because we don’t want to face it. Examining the funeral traditions of earlier cultures, before the “death industry” became industrialized (and later, commercialized), she determines that people dealt much better with death when it was all around them. Most people used to die in their homes. Bodies were buried by the immediate family. Sometimes, they would lie in the street for days, another fact of life in an age when that life wasn’t likely to last much past 40.

Doughty argues that the artificial barriers we’ve created to screen out death only make us more afraid of it, and more obsessed with extending our lives and grasping at our youth in an attempt to ward it off. The book does a pretty good job of laying out her philosophy and explaining how she came to it (she holds a particular contempt for the practice of embalming, and there we see eye-to-eye), and although it has the slight air of a hipster manifesto (in Brooklyn, everyone will have a free range, vegan funeral), in an age where the cost of the average funeral approaches the cost of a wedding, it’s hard to argue with many of her points. Dying is something we all have to look forward to, and no matter how you look at it, it’s going to cost us everything.

Will you read Smoke Gets in Your Eyes?