Death in America: A Reflection on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by: Caitlin Doughty

 The following essay is different from the normal content on the blog.  Instead of a review, the following is more an analysis of the major theme Doughty employs in her 2014 memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory.  It is intended as an open ended discussion on the topic of death and how people react to it.

“Whether you loved or hated the book, you’ve faced your own mortality–and for that I commend you” (Doughty 256).  This is how author Caitlin Doughty approaches the supplemental material to her memoirs on her time working in a crematory, a lifechanging experience which refined her own already macabre outlook on life.  The book chronicles Doughty’s personal journey, starting with the inability to describe a corpse as a person or an object and ending with a reflection on how poorly society handles death.  Doughty intends to make readers face the fact that they are going to die: their life is going to end.  This is all wrapped in a humorous style, setting the tone from the start by opening the book with “A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.  It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand” (1).

            Doughty illuminates to an unsuspecting reader what cremation entails in the United States, and the general sterilization and commercialization of death.  Doughty writes with a sense of going behind the curtain of how death is essentially saying how “our relationship with death was fundamentally flawed…I felt naïve for having ever imagined putting the “fun” back in funerals. Holding “celebration of life” ceremonies with no dead bodies present or even realistic topic of death…seemed akin to putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one” (64).  Society doesn’t talk about death as a natural process which is the destination for everyone in the end.  Parents give children euphemisms when their pets die and as Doughty says, there is an idea that fun must be some part of a funeral.  Several anecdotes included in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes are concerned with how the families of the dead react to death, often with grief, mourning, and denial about what has happened and what eventually will happened.  Doughty sympathizes with those she meets through the work but advocates for a death that is somehow more natural.  Making the dead look as close as they can to being alive is something that Doughty places at the center of her arguments towards accepting death.  On the topic of embalming she argues against the modern practice of embalming, contrasting it with the complex ancient Egyptian funeral rites:

“every step of the process—from removing the brain through the nose with a long iron hook to placing the internal organs in animal-head vases called Canopic jars to drying the body out for forty days with natron salt—had profound significance.  There are no brain hooks or organ-storage jars in modern North American embalming, which instead involves the removal of blood and fluids from the body cavity and replacing them with a mixture of strong preservative chemicals.  More important, modern embalming was born not from religion but from stronger forces altogether—marketing and consumerism” (Doughty, 73).

It is that “marketing and consumerism” which Doughty argues is the cause of America’s problems with acknowledging death.  The market increases prices on every option for dying, and attempts to make it a unique experience, offering various features for each coffin, or urns which have elaborate designs.  There is a sense that failing to make one’s death unique would be morally wrong, that those the dead leave behind do not love the individual in question.  It goes back to the question of if the body is an object or a person, corrupting what it means to be a person: that a person should somehow always be remembered, not allowed to be tainted by a natural process of death.  Doughty doesn’t suggest making death a religious experience, instead wanting a reclamation of mortality where people understand death and are living with that understanding (236).  Death must be treated as a simple fact of life, something that is to be faced, not by hiding it, but by acknowledging it.  Instead, America, and it is specifically America that creates this attitude.  Doughty’s follow-up to this memoir is From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death, exploring funeral practices outside of the United States of America.

There are discussions online which I have had about practices and even in an English-speaking country like the United Kingdom, death and funerals are treated differently.  The American death is one where every detail must be perfect: the body must be perfectly preserved and only decay long after those that knew the person are gone, the funeral must be elaborate and unique, nobody must actually talk about the death, and often become affairs where everybody is present and makes a show.  British and Scottish services, on the other hand, have a more reserved outlook on death, making it an affair for close family and friends to say goodbye.  There isn’t the sense that it must somehow be perfect, but it allows those involved to truly come to terms with mortality.  Americans, on the other hand, become preoccupied with celebrating the person, not the death, and taking the death out of the end of life.  As Doughty posits “Of course your anxious to get the whole thing over with and leave the funeral home” (113).  Death is something that should be confronted, not cheated by rushing through it.  Those affected should take the time to grieve and be prepared for the inevitable situation of everybody they know dying at any moment, and not fearing it as somehow an evil event.  Death is the culmination of life.