Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory is a 2014 memoir by American author Caitlin Doughty. The memoir, which was Doughty’s debut book, was a bestseller that received critical acclaim. Doughty is a practicing mortician and death positivity advocate. This book chronicles her first six years working in the funeral industry, starting shortly after her college graduation. It examines the prevailing attitudes toward death in North America, which Doughty believes are too focused on avoidance and denial instead of acceptance. The memoir also follows Doughty’s personal journey of death acceptance and her changing attitudes toward death work and the funeral industry.

This guide references the 2014 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. e-book edition of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

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

Summary

Caitlin Doughty describes her first job in the funeral industry: She was a crematory operator in San Francisco, starting when she was 23 years old. On her first day at work, Doughty must shave the face of a recently deceased older man named Byron. Doughty overcomes her initial discomfort, gradually getting used to her daily routine in the crematory. She finds that she enjoys encountering each new corpse, even when the body is decomposing.

Doughty describes an incident that happened when she was eight years old, growing up in Hawai’i: She saw a young girl fall to her (presumed) death from a mall balcony. The incident traumatized Doughty, but her parents refused to speak about it. Part of her motivation for working in a crematory is to push past her fear of death by encountering it head-on. 

As part of her job, Doughty has to help retrieve the bodies of people who have died at home. When she was a teenager, she volunteered at a hospital and also had to perform corpse transfers to the morgue. She considers how invisible corpses are to most people in contemporary North America: The momentary glimpse that passersby have of a corpse being loaded into the removal van is a rare exception. Some of the corpses that she cremates have no family visiting them, while others have an extended family to bear witness to the cremation. The latter seems more cathartic to Doughty.

Another part of Doughty’s job is cremating dead infants. This part of her job can be particularly emotional. In other cases, she encounters family members who want a hands-off approach to funerals. The funeral home Doughty works for offers the option to pay for a cremation online and have the ashes shipped home, the entire process requiring no human interaction at all. One family chooses this option after the death of their nine-year-old daughter, shocking Doughty and her coworkers.

The author notes that cultures around the world have wildly varying funerary customs. Some cultures, like the Wari’ people of Brazil, historically practiced mortuary cannibalism. While this practice unsettles many North Americans who learn about it, the practice of burying a body whole was equally upsetting for Wari’ people. Doughty learns about the history of embalming, which gained popularity during the American Civil War. While embalming is now standard practice, it is neither pleasant nor necessary, and it carries a high cancer risk for embalmers.

Doughty explores some existing funeral options. Some cemeteries, like California’s Forest Lawn, focus on death denial. They use euphemisms to refer to the dead, embalm all corpses, and use flat grave markers so as not to disrupt the landscape. Jessica Mitford, an English writer, wrote The American Way of Death, railing against elaborate and expensive funerals and instead advocating for something more like the online cremation orders Doughty finds so impersonal. Neither option seems ideal to Doughty: Instead, she thinks people should learn to accept death instead of looking the other way.

As part of her job, Doughty prepares corpses before family visits. This means removing the most obvious signs of death using tools like superglue, plastic wrap, and metal wire. Most people do not know about these practices. Other things can also go wrong in the crematory: One corpse’s body fat liquefies and spills out of the cremation retort in a particularly gruesome scene. Doughty cremates the heads of people whose bodies were donated to science alongside the bodies of people who died by suicide, an infant who only lived a few hours, and a woman who lived to be 102. Though their lives were different, their ashes all look the same. 

One dead body greatly resembles one of Doughty’s friends, Luke. Suddenly keenly aware of Luke’s mortality, Doughty resolves to confess her romantic feelings for him when the time is right. On a more prosaic note, Doughty handles some severely decomposed bodies and considers how in medieval Europe, Christian communities had a much closer relationship to decomposing bodies than is common today. Although decomposition can produce a visceral disgust response, it is also natural. Doughty decides that when she dies, she would like a natural burial, where her body is placed directly into the ground without a casket or embalming. She has decided to embrace decomposition even though she finds it somewhat frightening.

Doughty repeatedly finds that people’s relationship to death improves when they understand it better. She answers people’s questions about the funeral industry as honestly as she can, resolving not to hide the realities of death and cremation. Despite her misgivings about embalming, Doughty chooses to attend mortuary school to advance her career. She moves to Los Angeles, where Luke lives. She confesses her feelings for him, but he rejects her. Despondent, Doughty briefly contemplates suicide but ultimately decides she wants to live. She completes mortuary school, though she feels more strongly than ever that the standard embalming and burial route is not the way to go. 

After mortuary school, Doughty starts publishing a YouTube series called Ask a Mortician. She connects with other people who have similar ideas about death culture. At last, she truly comes to terms with the fact that she will one day die, which brings her a greater sense of peace. She recognizes that there is still a lot of work to do to change North America’s death culture, but she can now see a way toward death acceptance. In an Epilogue, she visits her old workplace and finds that there is already a cultural shift away from death denial.