On Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and My Struggle with Mortality

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Amazing! Fascinating. Thought Provoking. Moving. And so very Necessary. I think the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to even get up the courage and watch an Ask a Mortician Youtube video says a lot about how much I needed this book.

I vividly remember the very moment I realized that we are all gonna die some day and how I immediatly wished to unknow this again. Of course this is the kind of thing you can never unknow again. And thus I have been struggling with mortality ever since my kindergarten days - having panic attacks on a semi-regular basis. And I waited for a good day – a day I would be able to handle these videos without plunging into another panic attack. I need not have been so worried. In fact, I could have spared myself a lot of anguish had I just gotten up the courage to look sooner. Because as it turns out the only thing that really helps with the things that you can not unknow is to know more.

And yet the approach the western world in general and - as Caitlin Doughty illustrates - america in particular takes is quite the opposite. We do everything in our power to avoid any confrontation with death. We avoid talking about it as much as possible. We hide dead bodies off stage behind the curtain. We even try to find the “cure” for it. As a history student I am well aware how bizarre it is that I managed to be alive for almost 29 years without ever having seen a dead person – even though I have been to more funerals than weddings. But the thing is, in Germany, too, these things are more like memorials nowadays. There is no dead body at a funeral anymore – only a closed coffin or an urn. And nothing actually gets buried.

So death in effect has been reduced to the absence of a person in our lives as opposed to the absence of life in a body. Without this book it never would have occurred to me how much of a difference this little distinction makes. Now I see how grossly I have misinterpreted the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and how much we have become like the petty gods of the Iliad. I am serious. When you really think about it you'll have to admit that people in modern western societies have a lot more in common with the gods in that story than with the humans. That is because we seem to think ourselves at least potentially immortal. So deeply are we in denial about our own mortality. Yet we still die. And every time we do we experience it as essentially unnatural. Death is not part of our life. It is a glitch. We don't see it as something that needs to be accepted, but as something that needs to be fixed.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is the account of Caitlin Doughty's own journey towards an understanding of death and how contemporary America and by extension western societies chose to deal with it. She shows how flawed and unhealthy these attitudes really are, how they evolved alongside the rise of the funeral industry and our euphoria in face of the great advances in public health and medicine, and how we would profit from a more realistic understanding of and engagement with death. I very am glad that I got to vicariously experience this journey through the guidance of her kind and witty words. I laughed and I cried (did not have a panic attack) and I think it is fair to say that this book changed my life.



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Letter to Myself

Dear Ponderanza,

It's been entirely too long since you have written anything on here. It's not like you don't have anything to show for your absence. You somehow managed pass your ancient Greek course as well as your final exams and wrote a pretty good thesis. But it has been three months since you handed that in. Then what?

Well, once you were finally free from work and had reconnected with your life, you found yourself staring into the impenetrable void that is your life after university. The only certainty on the horizon right now is your eventual demise, which seems uncomfortably close with nothing to block your view. You told yourself you were prepared for that. But you were kidding yourself. No, you were not prepared for this view. You were not prepared for the anxiety creeping over every aspect of your life. And you were certainly not prepared for the self doubt and feelings of inadequacy.

So you froze. You did not pick up your pen. You let your fears guide you instead. You know that those self serving monsters advise you ill. They stifle all your creativity and they will destroy what you worked so hard to build, if you let them. So there is nothing for it. You just have to pick up your pen again and write something. Even if it is just a shabby little letter to yourself.

Love Ninette

     

On Grief

Grief is a somewhat curious process. It is definitely not this step by step process they say it is. It's not like you master one level and go on to the next. At least for me it is not. What really happens is more like flipping back and forth between the stages. Like you think you grasp this new reality now and you're mind is otherwise occupied for a while or you sleep, but then you look up and - wham - it hits you again and you are right back where you started.

Then you are back to asking yourself if this really is the new reality now? If this is a world now in which this person no longer exists? Or if it has all just been a bad dream? Which might sound like a horrible cliche, but it is how I feel - or at least the most fitting articulation of this feeling that I can think of. Or maybe I think of it, precisely because it is such a cliche and my mind is just so occupied processing the new reality and in no condition to come up with more original expressions.

However that may be, it is not the worst part of the experience. The worst part is not even the guilt about all the bad things you ever thought or said about them. That will go away pretty soon. No, the worst part is the self-deprecating question of whether or not you were close or invested enough to justify your pain – no matter how close or closely related you actually where, I might add. And I don't know if this is just me or if other people feel this as well, because this is the particular monster I never dare to touch upon in conversations. Funerals are the habitats it really thrives in - among all those other people and their pain and anecdotes about things you were hitherto totally oblivious about - there and then it gets its biggest growth spurt. And this monster stays with you even after the worst of the pain has passed. And its company makes the next of its kind thrive even better. Maybe that is one reason why I get so much more affected the older I get and the more people cease to be.

I remember my first funeral. It was a somewhat distant relative that I had seen a couple of times, but was never close to. My grandmother said it would be good for me to come for “practice.” So that it would not be as bad when it was someone that had mattered more. She could not have been more wrong. This is not the kind of thing you can practice. I know that now. I don't know if she does.

I have been to several funerals at this point and merely one wedding. What does that say about me? I study cultures from the past – their relationship with their dead and funeral rites among other things. And I have come to think that funerals are more for the living then they are for the dead. The question is for which of the living? Not me, evidently, because funerals do not give me closure or comfort like I know they do for some other people - on the contrary. My grieving and healing happens elsewhere in much more private venues and rituals.