Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

by Caitlin Doughty

To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

In a famous treatise called “The Pornography of Death,” the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote, “In many cases, it would appear, cremation is chosen because it is felt to get rid of the dead more completely and finally than does burial.” I was not Mr. Martinez’s family; I did not know him, and yet there I was, the bearer of all ritual and all actions surrounding his death. I was his one-woman kotsuage.

“Look, Cat, we see people at their worst moments. Maybe if someone’s buying a new car, or a new house, they want to be there. But what are they buying from us? Nothing, we’re charging money to take away someone they love. That’s the last thing in the world they want.”

Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world.

I feel as if this book is poisting this as some moral failing. And I disagree

I wanted to throw open the crematory doors to the train conductor and the other commuters. I wanted them with me that day, gathered around Jacob’s body so I could announce, “Look, here he is; he wanted to die. He is dead, but you’re not. You are not dead.”

The burial practice in North America—embalming (long-term preservation of the corpse), followed by burial in a heavy sealed casket in the ground—is offensive and foreign to the Wari’. The “truth and dignity” of the Western style of burial is only the truth and dignity as determined by our immediate surroundings.

Sorry. Cultural relativism only stretches so far for me.

The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.

No!!

Yet witchcraft was as real to medieval men or women as the Earth being round or smoking causing cancer is real to us.

??? no

We logged their names, if they even had names. Often they would be labeled only as “Baby Johnson” or “Baby Sanchez.” It was sadder when they had full names, even when they were something terrible, like Caitlin spelled KateLynne. Full names showed how ready their parents were for them to be born and become a part of the family.

Is this really a necessary joke? Is death meant to be reverent and respected, or are dead baby jokes fine? This book feels very contradictory in what it presents

Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause. I tried to imagine my parents receiving word of my death. My mother would turn to my father and say, “Now, John, I wonder if we could find an inexpensive online cremation for Caiti? Remember how easy it was to order the Chinese food online last week? Since I don’t need to discuss any questions or concerns about my precious offspring with an actual human being, I’m sure the Internet option will be just fine.”

This is very judgemental

If a North American has seen a dead body, that body has likely been embalmed, made up, and dressed in its Sunday finest by a funeral-home employee.

I feel like this is not true statistically

At Elena’s visitation the next morning, her daughter pulled her hair and howled in grief. It was a genuine, haunting sound that I wanted to take in and appreciate as profound. But all I could focus on was the gnawing fear that an eye would slide open or a saran-wrapped arm would spring a leak. Elena looked pretty put-together, considering. Nevertheless, the farce of the experience had gotten to me. They say you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig. The same holds true for a dead body. Put lipstick on a corpse and you’ve played dress-up with a corpse.

I think this is pretty emblematic of why this isnt working for me

Less than a 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.