46 pages • 1 hour read
Caitlin DoughtySmoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Caitlin Doughty
Caitlin Doughty is an author, mortician, and death acceptance advocate. She was born in 1984 and raised on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i. When she was eight years old, she saw a young girl fall to her death in a mall. The experience induced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress, for which she did not receive therapy. As a teenager, Doughty was fascinated by death. She volunteered at a hospital where she particularly enjoyed transporting corpses to the morgue. She and her friends would sneak out at night to attend gothic and sadomasochism clubs, since Doughty was “a teenager with morbid proclivities” (120). In college, Doughty majored in medieval history and wrote a thesis entitled “In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory” (77).
Though she found medieval history fascinating, Doughty realized that she wanted more practical experience with death. She started working in the funeral industry when she was 23 years old. She soon realized that mainstream death culture focuses too much on death denial for her tastes. To come to terms with death, Doughty believes it is necessary to face it directly. To that end, Doughty has spent much of her career working to increase public awareness of and support for death positivity and death acceptance. She opened a small funeral home in Los Angeles that focuses on natural burials before moving to upstate New York. She has now published three books, all of which are nonfiction texts about death. She still runs the Ask A Mortician YouTube series and helms The Order of the Good Death, a death acceptance advocacy organization.
Philosophical Context: Death Positivity
Death positivity, or death acceptance, is the philosophical framework of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. It stands in contrast to what Doughty calls “death denial.” Death denial refers to anything that tries to minimize or hide from death. Euphemisms like “passed on” or “at rest” are a way to avoid talking about the realities of death. Hiding the realities of decomposition through embalming—which does nothing to improve public safety in the vast majority of cases—or through burial in a sealed casket are other kinds of death denial. Most of the modern North American funeral industry is built around these forms of denial, to the point where many North American adults have never even seen a dead body, let alone a decomposing one. Doughty believes that this way of dealing with death is antithetical to actual healing, coping with grief, and mitigating widespread fears surrounding death.
Death acceptance and death positivity take a more realistic approach to death. They acknowledge that everyone is going to die and that is okay and natural. Some of the ways that people can practice death acceptance include making their own death plans, talking openly about death and dying, and choosing natural burial options that eschew embalming and other environmentally damaging practices. Doughty encourages people to spend time with the corpses of loved ones, including washing the body after death and fully acknowledging the realities of death, even when they are painful. She believes that death acceptance can have a profound and positive effect on people’s lives. Many cultures around the world and throughout history have had a much closer relationship to death than most contemporary North Americans have. While there is widespread resistance to death positivity, Doughty and others like her believe that change is possible.
