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

by Caitlin Doughty

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.

“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.”

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.

The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or community to confirm our meaning in the world, so we seize a love partner instead, someone to distract us from the fact of our animal existence.

If decomposing bodies have disappeared from culture (which they have), but those same decomposing bodies are needed to alleviate the fear of death (which they are), what happens to a culture where all decomposition is removed? We don’t need to hypothesize: we live in just such a culture. A culture of death denial.

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.

Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives.

The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion”—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even those who identify as having strong religious beliefs often feel their once-strong death rituals have been commoditized and hold less meaning for them.

Ars Moriendi were instruction manuals that taught Christians how to die the good death, repenting mortal sins and allowing the soul to ascend to heaven. This view of death as an “art” or “practice,” rather than an emotionless biological process, can be tremendously empowering.

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death.

“Burial” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word birgan, “to conceal.” Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed.

“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”