Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Caitlin Doughty is an author, mortician, and death acceptance advocate. She was born in 1984 and raised on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i. When she was eight years old, she saw a young girl fall to her death in a mall. The experience induced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress, for which she did not receive therapy. As a teenager, Doughty was fascinated by death. She volunteered at a hospital where she particularly enjoyed transporting corpses to the morgue. She and her friends would sneak out at night to attend gothic and sadomasochism clubs, since Doughty was “a teenager with morbid proclivities” (120). In college, Doughty majored in medieval history and wrote a thesis entitled “In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory” (77). 

Though she found medieval history fascinating, Doughty realized that she wanted more practical experience with death. She started working in the funeral industry when she was 23 years old. She soon realized that mainstream death culture focuses too much on death denial for her tastes. To come to terms with death, Doughty believes it is necessary to face it directly. To that end, Doughty has spent much of her career working to increase public awareness of and support for death positivity and death acceptance.