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

by Caitlin Doughty

But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror.

So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals.

The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves.

I probably called her Mom or Mommy, but in my memories I’m a very polite British child with exquisite manners.

first lesson in death was the possibility of cheating it.

I learned very early in life how to fast-forward videocassette tapes. With that skill I was able to skip the death scene of Bambi’s mother, the even more traumatic death scene of Little Foot’s mother in The Land Before Time, and the “off with her head” scene in Alice in Wonderland. Nothing snuck up on me. I was drunk with power, able to fast-forward through anything.

Then came the day that I lost my control over death.

What is most surprising about this story is not that an eight-year-old witnessed a death, but that it took her eight whole years to do so. A child who had never seen a death would have been unheard-of only a hundred years ago. North America is built on death.

The 1930s brought what is known as the “medicalization” of death. The rise of the hospital removed from view all the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds of death. Whereas before a religious leader might preside over a dying person and guide the family in grief, now it was doctors

Medicine addressed life-and-death issues, not appeals to heaven. The dying process became hygienic and heavily regulated in the hospital.

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

The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has. Life can become unbearable in all respects, and “this world can take everything from us . . . but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Cioran, a man “obsessed with the worst,” died an insomniac and recluse in Paris.

Nietzsche, who famously said in Twilight of the Idols, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” suffered a mental breakdown at age forty-four.

THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures.

This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.

we never stop knowing that the game is lost. We know death awaits us, and it affects everything we do, including the impulse to take elaborate care of our dead.

But there is a crucial difference between what the Wari’ did and the Tibetans do with their deceased compared to what Bruce did to Cliff. 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.

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.

When you begin a new part of your life, you think you’re leaving the older part behind.

“Our great-grandparents were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes or cabbages; our children are likely to be told that those who have passed on . . . are changed into flowers, or lie at rest in lovely gardens.”

One summer when I was a child, I visited her in Iowa and was awoken in the middle of the night to find her crying in the dark living room because she knew “that there are some people who don’t know the love of Jesus.”

Rather than denying the truth, it was a revelation to embrace it, however disgusting it might sometimes be.

There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. “I’ll love you forever, darling,” and “Will it be a diamond this year?” are two fine examples. But young lovers take note: above all else, the phrase every girl truly wants to hear is “Hi, this is Amy from Science Support; I’m dropping off some heads.”

There are many positives to donating your body to science. In the modern death landscape, body donation is the only surefire way to make sure your death is free.

Ho-ho-horrible Christmas morning to you too, family.

There is a slim possibility that your donated head will be the head, the head that holds the key to the mysteries of the twenty-first century’s great disease epidemics. But it is equally possible your body will end up being used to train a new crop of Beverly Hills plastic surgeons in the art of the facelift. Or dumped out of a plane to test parachute technology. Your body is donated to science in a very . . . general way. Where your parts go is not up to you.

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

“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

In the early days, when our pool still looked like any other pool, the game of choice for the gang of seven-year-old neighborhood girls was based on The Little Mermaid. The Disney film had come out in 1989 and it was our everything.

The entire Disney oeuvre, The Little Mermaid in particular, gave me a hopelessly warped understanding of love.

Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. Children of the Disney princess era grew up with a whitewashed version of reality filled with animal sidekicks and unrealistic expectations. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

Marin County (recently described by the New York Times as being “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth”).

When you know that death is coming for you, the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love.

Even if all we love will die, I still ached for a love like theirs, to be adored so completely. Had not Disney guaranteed all of us such an ending?

The Portuguese have a word with no equivalent in English, saudade, which indicates a longing, tinged with nostalgia, madness, and sickness over something you have lost.

I needed him now, for tomorrow is not promised. But I was willing to play the long game. No matter how long it took, I had to figure out a way to be with him.

For those of you who have not had the privilege of smelling Eau de Decomposition, the first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone.

a can of orange-scented industrial bathroom spray shot directly up your nose. Add to that a day-old glass of white wine that has begun to attract flies. Top it off with a bucket of fish left in the sun. That, my friends, is what human decomposition smells like.

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves,” he once said.

We don’t need to hypothesize: we live in just such a culture. A culture of death denial. This denial takes many forms. Our obsession with youth, the creams and chemicals and detoxifying diets pushed by those who would sell the idea that the natural aging of our bodies is grotesque. Spending over $100 billion a year on anti-aging products as 3.1 million children under five starve to death. The denial manifests in our technology and buildings, which create the illusion that we have less in common with road kill than with the sleek lines of a MacBook. The way to break the cycle and avoid embalming, the casket, the heavy vault, is something called green, or natural, burial.

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.

“Not only am I aware that I’m a helpless, fragmented mass of organic matter, I celebrate it. Vive la decay!”

I understood that I had been given my atoms, the ones that made up my heart and toenails and kidneys and brain, on a kind of universal loan program. The time would come when I would have to give the atoms back, and I didn’t want to attempt to hold on to them through the chemical preservation of my future corpse.

There, I could sit among the cemetery’s rolling hills, looking down over the mounded graves and contemplate my date with decay. The monks found liberation through their discomfort, and in a way I was doing the same. Staring directly into the heart of my fear, something I could never do as a child, and ever so gradually, starting to break clear of it.

In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but also a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.”

There were midwives for babies and layers-out for corpses; women to bring you into the world and women to take you out of it.

The rare virus that survives longer (for example, HIV, up to sixteen days) poses no more harm in a dead body than in a living body.

It’s more dangerous to your health to fly on an airplane than it is to be in the same room as a corpse.

Embalmers embalm because they think it makes the corpse look better, because they’ve been told it’s what’s “right” and “decent,” and because it makes it easier to control the viewing.

A corpse doesn’t need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn’t need anything anymore—it’s more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life.