Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains graphic descriptions of dead bodies; the cremation, embalming, and decomposition processes; deaths, including violent deaths, of babies, children, and adults; and suicide.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a personal memoir about Caitlin Doughty’s experiences in the funeral industry. Her childhood was marked by a serious trauma when she witnessed the (likely) death of a fellow child. The incident caused her to become both fascinated and repulsed by death, unable to find a way to accept what she had witnessed. As a death worker, she is constantly confronted by reminders of her own mortality. Despite her outwardly cavalier attitude toward work that many people would find distasteful and challenging at best (and horrifying or traumatizing at worst), Doughty was still not prepared to accept death as an adult. 

Working with corpses helps Doughty better understand what happens after death, somewhat reducing her fear. She can see a corpse in its natural state as something beautiful, not something frightening. Facing death directly helps her realize that death denial only increases fear. She realizes that hiding the reality of death through elaborate funerals only perpetuates the problem.