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

by Caitlin Doughty

“The Pornography of Death,”

The hospital was a place where the dying could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living.

We have put the dead beneath. Not just underground, but under the tops of fake hospital stretchers, within the bellies of our aircraft, and in the recesses of our consciousness.

The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has.

The more I learned about death and the death industry, the more the thought of anyone else taking care of my own family’s corpses terrified me.

“each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”

North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming.

If embalming were something a tradesman like Bruce would never perform on his own mother, I wondered why we were performing it on anyone at all.

The tragedy of the women who were accused of witchcraft was that they never actually ground the bones of babies to help them fly to a midnight devil’s Sabbath. But they were unjustly killed for it anyway, burned alive at the stake. I, on the other hand, did grind the bones of babies. Often I was thanked by their poor parents for my care and concern. Things change.

Geoffrey Gorer, the British anthropologist, compared modern death in Britain to a kind of pornography. Where sex and sexuality were the cultural taboo of the Victorian period, death and dying were the taboo of the modern world.

“Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.”

It is an entire city of dead bodies, a frozen sperm necropolis.

Medicine has given us the “opportunity”—loosely defined—to sit at our own wakes.

We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system.

It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely.

Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.

Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.