Caitlin Doughty
Photo by Juliette Bates
LA-based queen of the alternative funeral scene and founder of The Order of the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty, is a much admired, much respected, and much loved figure in thanatological circles. Her sometimes amusing, often shocking lessons from the crematorium - published as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - may not carry the philosophical weight of Heidegger's reflections on Dasein's angst-ridden confrontation with the void of non-being, but they are, in a way, just as crucial.
For they ultimately form part of the same wider project: A radical rethinking of our mortality and the practices surrounding our deaths; reclaiming the latter from those who would deny us access to the truth of being and the opportunity to ontologically grasp our own finitude by making death into something stereotyped and sentimental, rather than a thing of authentic joy and fundamental source of freedom (a liberating line of flight and inhuman becoming, rather than a judgement which condemns).
Death is not the opposite or the end of life, so much as a violent reconciliation with the material world; a return to the actual as Nietzsche writes. And Doughty, to her great credit, is insistent that we face up to this fact and admit that, sooner or later, we are all going to die and the atoms that compose us chaotically disperse back into the universe. More than this, she encourages us to refamiliarise ourselves directly with the corpse. Perhaps not with the same degree of intimacy as she has experienced, but certainly to be on far better terms than we are presently in a world in which dead bodies are kept on ice behind stainless-steel doors and chemically embalmed so as to be made at least semi-presentable and semi-acceptable (not too gross looking, not too foul-smelling).
There's certainly nothing glamourous about corpses. Despite what certain poets and necrophiles might think, dead people "look very, very dead" [115] - i.e., horrific. But surely we needn't stigmatize them, or turn them into the stuff of nightmares and subject to taboo. When we become mad with fear and allow our revulsion to become irrational terror (zombie hysteria), then it's always a waste of sane human consciousness, as D. H. Lawrence says.
Thanks, however, to the medicalization and Disneyfication of death this is precisely what has happened. If, in the past, when death was a common daily occurrence and corpses were regularly viewed in public spaces, people became somewhat desensitized to suffering and bad odours, today we are overly-squeamish and can no longer tolerate the nauseating spectacle of mortality; the screams, the smells, the soiled sheets, etc. We want what Doughty terms direct disposal in which everything is taken care of online, with no fuss. Doughty challenges this - and I respect her for it. And I second her call for an active "interaction with death" [114] in the belief that corpses "keep the living tethered to reality" [168].
Now, let's be clear: I'm not advocating the re-opening of the city morgues and the re-staging of death-as-spectacle which, as Doughty reminds us, was immensely popular in Paris in the late 19th century. Nor do I think we should cook and eat our dead relatives, like members of the Wari' people. Neither morbid voyeurism nor mortuary cannibalism are the answer. But, somehow, we need to get back in touch with one another and with our dead. As a culture, we need to embrace death and be proud (rather than slightly sad, slightly bored, slightly embarrassed) witnesses of that moment when our loved ones take their leave and miraculously burst like Bernard Shaw's mother, "'into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame'" [64].
An atheist at heart, Doughty nevertheless realises the importance of ceremony and ritual even within a secular culture. If the old ways, historically tied to religious beliefs, have become untenable, she's all for creating new methods of body disposal that are relevant to the way we live (and die) today and "inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition" [216] via the composition of their very own Ars Moriendi, written with "bold, fearless strokes" [234].
All of this is excellent, I think, and I fully support Doughty in her efforts. Indeed, my only criticism of Doughty's book is similar to my criticism of Mary Roach's Stiff (2003); the writing style is just a little too folksy and upbeat for my tastes. I appreciate she's American and therefore culturally predisposed to this kind of thing, but to see the great European thinker and essayist Emil Cioran flippantly dismissed as a Negative Nancy is more than a little irritating. In wanting to revalue our thinking on death, Doughty seems willing at times to strip it of all darkness and negativity (of its tragic pessimism, of its obscenity, of its monstrous character). The book could do with just a little more nihilism and a little less homespun sappiness.
Having said that, it's encouraging that she openly regrets her youthful ambition of putting the fun back into funerals and recognises that holding celebration of life ceremonies sans corpse or any act of mourning - just the deceased's favourite records playing while everyone sips fruit punch - seems akin to "putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one" [64].
Doughty, we can conclude, is both a smart cookie and a good egg. And she's doing sterling work; torpedoing the ark of the corporate funeral industry and teaching people that death becomes us all if we learn to affirm it. May she live a good and happy life and succeed in all her undertakings. And then may the animals of the forest devour her body with relish ...
See: Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016). All page numbers in the above text refer to this paperback edition.
Visit: The Order of the Good Death web page: click here.
