Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

I don't remember when I first came across Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, but here we are. This is Doughty's memoir of her first year working in the death industry at a crematory.  It's both insightful and amusing and I really admire Doughty's ability to write in a conversational tone, stay humorous, and still impart valuable thoughts. 

Doughty's main thesis is that there is a culture of death denial in the United States and much of the world. Most of us are removed from the day-to-day of death. It used to be that most people died at home and family members bathed and cared for the body and there were days of "laying out." That is not the case anymore.

"Most deaths no longer happen at home.

Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 85 percent of Americans till died at home.

The 1930s brought what is known as the "medicalization" of death." (Loc 609)

I was actually a little bit shocked by this, mostly because both my father and mother-in-law died in their homes, although my father's death was unexpected (he apparently had an aneurysm while my mom and sister were in different rooms and they didn't notice anything had happened for a couple of hours) and my mother-in-law's was expected after cancer ravaged her for years. However, in both of those cases, the bodies were removed within an hour of being found, taken away in stretchers by men in uniforms. 

Doughty sees this death denial as a huge problem in the modern world. We all try to be younger, using anti-aging creams and pretending that the clock stops at twenty-five. We try to deceive ourselves that we won't actually die and we only see dead bodies after they've been made to look "natural" at funeral homes. 

"Less than year after donning my corpse-colored glasses, I went from thinking it was strange that we don't see dead bodies anymore to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world...

No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses." (Loc 2215) 

In among her reflections about cremating bodies, watching someone embalm a body, what really happens to bodies that have been donated in the name of science, and what happens to uncollected human remains, Doughty also goes through some brief history lessons about how we went from laying dead bodies in the front room of our homes to having embalmed and made up corpses in luxury caskets and tombs. She discusses the big movers and shakers in the death industry, from Thomas Holmes, the father of embalming to Hubert Eaton, a man who literally recreated the funeral process from the ground up. All the while, she argues that our current system is not a good system. 

We are untied from our funeral customs in belief, she says. We used to have religious reasons for doing what we do, but now a lot of the customs are secular and more people are areligious or secular and all of this means we're scared of death and not doing a great job of helping people who are dying or work in death industries, including healthcare and funerary. 

"A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death." (Loc 3049)

Despite the heaviness of this recap, I swear to you that this book is actually a light, quick read. There are many humorous anecdotes and even the history parts are fascinating and not at all dull.  It also provoked me to ask my husband all kinds of questions about how he wants his body to be disposed of and what customs he would like to have when he dies.  

If you're squeamish about reading about dead bodies and what happens to them in funeral homes (and it is NOT pretty), this might be hard to get through. That said, I liked it a lot, learned a bunch, and highly recommend it.

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note (I read this on Kindle with no corresponding page numbers, so I've provided Kindle locations):

It was my first day as a crematory operator at Westwind Cremation & Burial, a family-owned mortuary. (Or a family owned funeral home, depending on which side of the United States you live on...) (Loc 94)

I thought this was an interesting linguistic distinction, but I can't find any source to back it up that there are geographic differences. I've never heard anyone use the term mortuary, but only funeral home, so that's common in the Midwest. Anyone else want to weigh in from your geographic location?

No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you've seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi's face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination. (Loc 270)

You can see what I mean about how Doughty integrates humor with serious material. 

Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch -  Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148822

The average train conductor will involuntarily kill three people in his career. (Loc 742)

Another interesting fact I couldn't really find any other data to support.

Formaldehyde, a colorless gas in its pure form, has been classified as a carcinogen. Cliff the corpse was long past caring about cancer, but Bruce [the embalmer] was a sitting duck if he didn't take proper precautions. The National Cancer Institute has found that funeral embalmers are at an increased risk for myeloid leukemia, abnormal growth in the bone-marrow tissue, and cancer of the blood...this chemical preservation of the corpse, had no place in American death customs prior to the Civil War...(Loc 1028)

The previously mentioned Thomas Holmes used his newly created embalming method to ensure thousands of soldiers would be able to be shipped back to their families during the Civil War and this meant that embalming became more acceptable and common in funeral practices. 

...Yvette Vickers, the B-movie actress and star of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, who was found completely mummified in her Los Angeles home more than a year after her death. (Loc 1972)

Sad. Really sad story. She was an actress in the 50s and her body was found in 2011.  

Yvette Vickers By Film screenshot (American International Pictures) - https://archive.org/details/AttackOfTheGiantLeeches, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116977825

...decomposition and decay have all but disappeared from our way of death. The modern corpse has two options: burial with preservative embalming, which grinds decomposition to a halt into perpetuity (or at least until the body starts to harden and shrivel like a mummy); and cremation, which turns the body into ash and dust. Either way, you will never see a human decaying. (Loc 2089)

And Doughty argues that this is really a bad thing because it makes us less likely to accept death.  

Left to their own devices, human bodies rot, decompose, come apart, and sink gloriously back into the earth from whence they came. Using embalming and heavy protective caskets to stop this process is a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, and demonstrates our clear terror of decomposition. (Loc 2107)

Natural burial is...The body goes straight into the ground, in a simple biodegradable shroud, with a rock ot mark the location. It zips merrily through decomposition, shooting its atoms back into the universe to create new life. Not only is natural burial by far the most ecologically sound way to perish, it doubles down on the fear of fragmentation and loss of control. (Loc 2190)

I left this book hoping that natural burial becomes more commonly available. I'd love to help nourish a tree in my death, but it's unlikely unless there are massive changes to the funeral industry.