“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.”
Author detail
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, activist, and funeral industry rabble-rouser. In 2011 she founded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death, which has spawned the death positive movement. Her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was a New York Times best-seller. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA. Born on a balmy August evening on the decidedly un-morbid shores of O’ahu, Hawai’i, Caitlin was an even-tempered, bookish child. Her parents had little reason to believe that she would ultimately seek a life tiptoeing the line between the living and the dead. It was only when she began to ask the pertinent questions that her parents suspected a proclivity toward the macabre. (Example: "Mommy, if I was on the edge of that cliff and I fell off and on the way down screamed, 'Mommy, Mommy, I need you Mommy why won't you help me,' and then smashed my body on the rocks, would you be sad? Yes or no, Mommy?") After high school, she fled east to the University of Chicago, where she graduated in medieval history. Her thesis, entitled "In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory," is the summer must-read for all lovers of demon sex and the late medieval church. After graduation, Caitlin moved to California, where she has worked as a crematory operator, funeral director, a body-van transport driver, and returned to Cypress College for her second degree, in mortuary science. Unhappy with the state and offerings of the American funeral industry, in 2015 she opened her own alternative funeral home, Undertaking LA, to help people help themselves (handle a corpse). Caitlin's webseries "Ask a Mortician" and her work to change the death industry have led to features on National Public Radio, BBC, The New Yorker, Vice, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Forbes. She frequently gives talks on the history of death culture, rituals, and the funeral industry, presenting for groups as diverse as the TED, SXSW, The Upright Citizen’s Brigade, and universities and libraries all over the world. ([source][1]) [1]: http://caitlindoughty.com/about
Quotes
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“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.”
“The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.”
“A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other...”
“Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body...”
“The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or commun...”
“All the body wants to do biologically is decompose. Once you die, it's, 'Let me out here! I'm ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!'”
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“In America, burial means an embalmed body in a heavy-duty casket with a vault built over it, so that the ground doesn't settle. That body is encased in many layers of denial.”
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“I want a natural burial. Just straight into the ground in a shroud.”
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“Not only is natural burial by far the most ecologically sound way to perish, it doubles down on the fear of fragmentation and loss of control. Making the choice to be naturally buried says,...”
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“Vaults and caskets are not the law; they are the policy of individual cemeteries. Vaults prevent the settling of the dirt around the body, thus making landscaping more uniform and cost effec...”
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“If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might...”
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“The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and...”
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“The definition of 'morbid' is an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Unfortunately, there's no word to mean the perfectly healthy preoccupation with death, which is what I have.”
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“Death in its natural state can be very beautiful. When you think about a body that's died of natural causes - family taking care of it - all of that is very beautiful.”
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“If we ignore our death, we end up just going around completely oblivious to why we do the things we do!”
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“Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late 19th century, dying at a hospital was reserved for people who had nothing and no one. Given the choic...”
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