Smoke Gets in Your Eyes review – a mortician’s dissection of death

Caitlin Doughty’s memoir chronicling her initiation into the death industry is fascinating and often very funny

Hannah Beckerman
Sunday 3 May 2015

Death, the saying goes, is bad for business. But not, it would seem, in publishing. Over the past year, the success of death-related books suggests that our engagement with mortality is booming, with Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, each exploring mortality from the perspective of surgeons who face death’s scythe every day, both becoming international bestsellers.

The latest addition to the genre is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium, Caitlin Doughty’s fascinating and often very funny memoir chronicling her initiation into the death industry, beginning as a 23-year-old crematorium operator, through to her current career, six years later, as a licensed funeral director and YouTube star hosting the series Ask a Mortician.

From the outset of the book, it’s clear that Doughty has no intention of shrouding the realities of mortuary life from the reader; the opening chapter details her inaugural day in the job, and the first corpse she shaves: “His eyes, staring up into the abyss, had gone flat like deflated balloons. If a lover’s eyes are a clear mountain lake, Byron’s were a stagnant pond. His mouth twisted open in a silent scream.”

Caitlin Doughty, who became a crematorium operator at the age of 23.

Doughty peppers the text with many grisly facts about our postmortem bodies, and the devil is very much in the detail: we learn that an adult body takes two to three hours to cremate and that the chest takes the longest to burn; that decomposition causes “desquamation”, or “skin slip”, where the top layer of skin loosens and slides away as though it wants “to abandon ship”; that decomposing skin can mutate into any colour of the rainbow, from pastels to neons.

Such a macabre level of detail might seem gratuitous in less erudite hands, but Doughty brings a lightness of touch to the text: on rearranging the bodies to access the first in line for cremation, she observes: “That meant stacking and restacking the cardboard boxes like a game of body-fridge Tetris.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is much more than a memoir, however. Doughty skilfully interweaves her personal journey with cultural history, anthropology, mythology, religion and philosophy. As such, we learn about the funereal cannibalism of the Wari’ tribe in Brazil, about Egyptian embalming techniques and about the Muslim practice of ghusl. She takes us from Christianity’s obsession with the early saints to the Parisian morgues of the 19th century, and through the 20th-century medicalisation of death. We discover the death rituals of Hindus, Buddists and Tibetan monks. Doughty is, quite clearly, a writer who knows a lot about her subject but it is her judicious use of these anecdotes – scattering them like ashes through the text at just the right moment to contextualise her own experiences – that makes for such an enriching read.

In the third century BC the Stoics taught us that learning to live well is learning to die well. Over 2,000 years later, Doughty is on a mission to end contemporary “death denial” and reclaim the processes surrounding what happens to us after we die. She points out that “there has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality” and makes an impassioned argument that people should “take care of their own dead like our ancestors used to. Washing the corpse themselves. Taking firm control of their fear.” If it’s true, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross argued in On Death and Dying, that “if denial is no longer possible, we can attempt to master death by challenging it”, then Doughty is indeed a passionate challenger.

In such a wide-ranging memoir, Doughty’s one omission is an engagement with the psychological and emotional reasons behind people’s “death denial”. In her author’s note at the beginning of the book, she proclaims: “Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings.” And yet nowhere does she explore the wealth of psychoanalytic literature regarding the death drive. There are, consequently, moments when her fervent views seem to cloud her judgment and she can appear lacking in compassion for others’ grief: most notably, a couple who arrange the cremation of their nine-year-old daughter via the internet, a situation she derides as “ignorant and shameful” when it seems clear to the reader they are probably in shock and suffering intense grief.

In spite of this, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a well-researched, beautifully observed book and Doughty is a convincing and impassioned advocate for changes in our cultural attitudes towards death. Whether or not you agree with her position, there’s much to enjoy in this thoughtful, unflinching and highly entertaining memoir.

Hannah Beckerman’s novel, The Dead Wife’s Handbook, is published by Penguin. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is published by Canongate (£12.99)

THE GUARDIAN