Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Welcome to the crematorium

Farewell, my lovely

I read Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (And Other Lessons From the Crematory) in the large-print edition (I don’t know what’s gotten into my eyes) and found the front cover quite beautiful but the insides…well, deathly dull, frankly, considering the potential.

Doughty takes a job at a place she calls Westwind Cremation & Burial, a family-owned mortuary, or funeral home, in order to confront death head-on. She’s thrown into the trenches right off, assigned to operate (and clean out afterwards) the cremation machines, and to prepare the corpses for incineration. Scraping the remains of one party from the furnace, she finds that the skull is still warm. Everybody (or every body), she unboxes in order to consign to the flames is “a new adventure,” like opening presents on Christmas. “(Each) encounter,” she writes, “was an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.”

She sticks with it, despite constant misgivings, while frequently revising her attitudes toward death. In the beginning she had thought she’d like to have a place of her own, one that would put the “fun” into funerals; in the end, she still wants to run her own mortuary, but this one will be “both intimate and open, with floor-to-ceiling windows to let the sunshine in and keep the weirdo death stigma out.”

She does, in fact, start a website, The Order of the Good Death, designed to help people make death a part of their lives and overcome “death anxiety.”

The mission is admirable, even if the book is rather bland, given to clunky segues and off-key prose, with a rather pallid cast of characters. It’s worth reading, though, if only to learn what will happen to your mortal coil if you opt, as more than fifty percent of us do, to be cremated.


     

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