Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Caitlin Doughty

Cannongate/Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, June 20th 2015

Mortician Caitlin Doughty may have called the memoir of her time as a crematory assistant and embalmer-in-training Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, but it is intended to reveal rather than obscure what happens to the bodies we consign to the flames. More specifically, she is convinced that our current approach to death and dying is profoundly and damagingly flawed. Her objections range from the headstone-free memorial parks full of chemically preserved and hermetically sealed corpses at one extreme to the expedient and impersonal option of direct cremation – in America you can even order your loved one’s cremation on line and have their ashes posted to you – at the other.  We are, she argues, living in a death-denying culture whose obsession with youth and beauty is driven by a refusal to face our own mortality (for further discussion of the social effect of death-reminders see http://chronicle.com/article/Mortal-Motivation/230303/).

Drawing on her studies on mediaeval death-rites and the customs of variety of cultures from the corpse-eating of the Wari’ to the Japanese kotsuage (gathering of the bones), Doughty contends that handling the dead is the only way conquer this fear of death and advocates a return to the days when families cared for and prepared their own loved ones for burial.

I certainly agree with some of her points, such as the extremely unnatural state of the ‘natural’ body we are presented with at the funeral home (her description of how the appearance of peaceful sleep is achieved made me wince). and, as she points out, Ebola aside, dead bodies are not such a health risk that they must be immediately removed, decontaminated and pumped full of preservative fluids.

Her critique of the death industry is curiously incomplete, however. Although providing detailed descriptions of various forms of bodily disposal, it ignores the associated funeral rites unless they involve a family attending the cremation itself, presumably because she considers such rituals hollow if they do not (literally) embrace the physical reality of the corpse. And despite her honesty about the deeply personal nature of her obsession with death (as an 8-year-old, she witnessed a young girl’s presumably fatal fall from the upper floor her local mall, the description of which was the most disturbing thing in the whole book), I’m not sure that the cultural acceptance of death she advocates a return to would have rendered such an event any less traumatic.

These criticisms aside, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is an honest, humorous and thought-provoking exploration of historical and contemporary death culture and the role of the commercial funeral industry in shaping our perceptions of the dead.  And, like Thomas Lynch before her, Doughty’s musings on death and dying both here and online in her popular Ask a Mortician web-series (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com) offer an insight for the interested that is all to often obscured.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/our-attitudes-death-questioned