I dined at Cambria’s one Thai restaurant and walked back to the boarding house. The streets were quiet and empty. Through the thick fog, I could barely make out a sign above the road: cemetery, 1 mile. I strode up the hill, walking straight down the center of the road with big, bold steps—bigger and bolder than my cardiovascular health should have allowed for. The full moon peeked out from the clouds, lighting up the pine trees and causing the fog to glow an eerie white.
The road came to an abrupt end at the Cambria Cemetery, est. 1870. Stepping over the small metal chain, a rather ineffectual deterrent against trespassers, I walked down through the rows of graves. To my left the leaves crunched, breaking the silence. Standing on the path in front of me was an enormous buck, its antlers framed in the mist. We stood looking at each other for several moments.
The comedian Louis C.K. talks about how “mysterious and beautiful” deer seem until you live in the country and deer are shitting in your yard and causing highway accidents. But this night, framed majestically in the fog, you had better believe that damn deer appeared like a spiritual messenger.
The buck slipped past the headstones and back into the trees. I was exhausted. No matter how bold my steps had been in the climb up to the cemetery, it was adrenaline that could not be sustained. I almost fell to the ground, mercifully covered in soft pine needles, and leaned against a tree between Howard J. Flannery (1903–1963) and a grave marked only with a small metal sign reading A SOARING SPIRIT, A PEACEFUL HEART.
I sat next to Howard J. Flannery for so long that the fog lifted. The full moon stood out crisp and white and thousands of stars appeared against the black sky.
It was complete, silver silence. Not a cricket, not a breath of wind, just the moon and the old headstones. I thought of the things that culture teaches us to fear about a being in a cemetery at night. A floating specter appearing, its demon red eyes aglow. A zombie pushing its bloated, decaying hand out of a nearby grave. Organ music swelling, owls hooting, gates creaking. They seemed like cheap gimmicks; any one of them would have shattered the stillness and perfection of death. Maybe we create the gimmicks precisely for that reason, because the stillness itself is too difficult to contemplate.
At the moment I was alive with blood coursing through my veins, floating above the putrefaction below, many potential tomorrows on my mind. Yes, my projects could lie fragmented and unfinished after my death. Unable to choose how I would die physically, I could only choose how I would die mentally. Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.
Acknowledgments
It takes a village to raise a death book. Is this a thing people say? It should be. If you’ll indulge me, there are people to whom tremendous credit is due.
The wonderful team at W. W. Norton, so good at their jobs it makes me uncomfortable. Ryan Harrington, Steve Colca, Erin Sinesky-Lovett, Elisabeth Kerr, and countless others.
Special thanks to Tom Mayer, my editor, who never coddled me and took stern issue with my adverbs. Bless you and your children’s children, Tom Mayer.
The Ross Yoon Agency, especially Anna Sproul-Latimer, who did coddle me, holding my hand like a wee babe in the woods through all parts of this process.
My parents John & Stephanie Doughty, upstanding folk who love and support their daughter even when she’s chosen a life-in-death. Mom, I’m probably not going to win that Oscar . . . so this is it.
I’m loath to think of the poor-sad-no-good-pathetic thing I would be without David Forrest and Mara Zehler.
I realize this book makes it seem like I have no friends. I do, uh . . . promise. They are brilliant, thoughtful people all over the world who went, “You’re going to be a mortician? Yeah, that makes sense.”
Some of those friends were the keen eyes that read and reread this bloated beast through years of drafts: Will C White, Will Slocombe, Sarah Fornace, Alex Frankel, and Usha Herold Jenkins.
Bianca Daalder-van Iersel and Jillien Kahn, both of whom did great things to keep my brain intact and functioning. Paola Caceres, who provided the same service in mortuary school.
Lawyer-extraordinaire Evan Hess, for keeping me out of real bad things.
The members of the Order of the Good Death and the alternative death community at large, who inspire me daily to do better work.
Dodai Stewart at Jezebel, a big reason people care.
Finally, the men who ushered me into the death industry and taught me how to be an ethical, hard-working funeral director: Michael Tom, Chris Reynolds, Bruce Williams, and Jason Bruce. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was out in the cold, harsh death world that I realized just how good I had it at the safe, professional, and well-run funeral home I’ve called Westwind.
Notes on Sources
The Caribbean American writer Audre Lorde wrote, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Writing this book was a six-year exercise in taking ideas from philosophers and historians, mixing them with my own experience working in death, and attempting to make them, somehow, felt.
Many of the texts that had a huge influence are only cited briefly in the final book. Please visit the original texts, especially those of Ernest Becker, Philippe Ariès, Joseph Campbell, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Viktor Frankl. It will do wonders to advance your relationship with death and mortality.
While working at the crematory I kept a secret blog called Salon of Souls, which caught me as I was in 2008, and didn’t allow me to revise history.
I was fortunate in having the full support of my coworkers at the crematory: Michael, Chris, and Bruce. Not only did they allow me to use their real names, they agreed to sit down for interviews and multiple follow-ups as the book was written. I hope my tremendous respect for these men and what they do comes across as you read.
Through the Order of the Good Death, I am lucky to know the best death academics and funeral professionals working today. Their access to resource libraries, real-world experience, and large pools of arcane and morbid knowledge has been invaluable.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.
Wales, Henry G. “Death Comes to Mata Hari.” International News Service, October 19, 1917.
SHAVING BYRON
Tennyson, Lord Alfred. In Memoriam: An Authoritative Text. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
PUPPY SURPRISE
Ball, Katharine. “Death Benefits.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 15, 1993.
Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter 5, no. 4 (1955): 49–52.
Iserson, Kenneth V. Death to Dust? What Happens to Dead Bodies. Galen Press, 1994.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Annabel Lee.” In The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Random House, 2012.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Suzuki, Hikaru. The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
THE THUD
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Doughty, Caitlin. “Children & Death.” Fortnight (2011), fortnightjournal.com/caitlin-doughty/262-children-death.html.
Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
May, Trevor. The Victorian Undertaker. Oxford, UK: Shire Publications Ltd, 1996.
TOOTHPICKS IN JELL-O
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Connolly, Ceci. “A Grisly but Essential Issue.” The Washington Post, June 9, 2006.
Dante. The Inferno. Translated by Robert Hollander and Jean
Hollander. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
Orent, Wendy. Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Stackhouse, John. “India’s Turtles Clean Up the Ganges.” Seattle Times, October 1, 1992.
PUSH THE BUTTON
Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “The Chronology of the Middle Paleolithic of the Levant.” In Neandertals and Modern Humans in Western Asia. New York: Plenum Press, 1998.
Chrisafis, Angelique. “French Judge Closes Body Worlds–style Exhibition of Corpses.” The Guardian, April 21, 2009.
Cioran, Emil. A Short History of Decay. Arcade Publishing, 1975.
Grainger, Hilary J. Death Redesigned: British Crematoria History, Architecture and Landscape. Spire Books, 2005.
Newberg, Andrew, and Eugene D’Aquili. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Random House, 2008.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Prothero, Stephen R. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
PINK COCKTAIL
Aoki, Shinmon. Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician. Buddhist Education Center, 2004.
Ash, Niema. Flight of the Wind Horse: A Journal into Tibet. London: Rider, 1992.
Beane Freeman, Laura, et al. “Mortality from lymphohematopoietic malignancies among workers in formaldehyde industries: The National Cancer Institute Cohort.” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101, no. 10(2009): 751–61.
Conklin, Beth A. Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. University of Texas Press, 2001.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Gilpin Faust, Drew. The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2009.
Habenstein, Robert W., and William M. Lamers. The History of American Funeral Directing. National Funeral Directors Association of the United States, 2007.
Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
O’Neill, John. Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.
Taylor, John. Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
DEMON BABIES
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du mal]. Translated by Christopher Thompson. iUniverse, 2000.
Cohan, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers. Courier Dover Publications, 2012.
Paré, Ambroise. Des monstres et prodiges. Librairie Droz, 2003.
Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Sanger, Carol. “‘The Birth of Death’: Stillborn Birth Certificates and the Problem for Law.” California Law Review 100, no. 269 (2012): 269–312.
DIRECT DISPOSAL
Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter 5, no. 4 (1955): 49–52.
Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death: Revisited. New York: Random House, 2011.
———. Interview with Christopher Hitchens. The New York Public Library, 1988.
Prothero, Stephen R. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Time. “The Necropolis: First Step Up to Heaven” Time, September 30, 1966.
Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2012.
UNNATURAL NATURAL
Snyder Sachs, Jessica. Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death. Da Capo Press, 2002.
ALAS, POOR YORICK
Asma, Stephen T. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Friend, Tad. “Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” The New Yorker, October 13, 2003.
Harrison, Ann Tukey, editor. The Danse Macabre of Women: Ms. Fr. 995 of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Akron, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
EROS AND THANATOS
Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Mermaid. Translated by H. B. Paull. Planet, 2012.
Brothers Grimm. The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Translated by Maria Tatar. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Doughty, Caitlin. “The Old & the Lonely.” Fortnight (2011), fortnightjournal.com/caitlin-doughty/276-the-old-the-lonely.html.
Lang, Andrew. The Red True Story Book. Longmans, Green, and Company, 1900.
Rank, Otto. Beyond Psychology. Courier Dover Publications, 2012.
Sachs, Adam. “Stranger than Paradise.” The New York Times Style Magazine, May 10, 2013.
BUBBLATING
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Campobasso, Carlo Pietro, Giancarlo Di Vella, and Francesco Introna. “Factors affecting decomposition and Diptera colonization.” Forensic Science International 120 nos. 1–2 (2001): 18–27.
Dickey, Colin. Afterlives of the Saints. Unbridled Books, 2012.
Eberwine, Donna. “Disaster Myths that Just Won’t Die.” Perspectives in Health —The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization 10, no. 1 (2005).
Geertz, Clifford. The Religion of Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Kanda, Fusae. “Behind the Sensationalism: Images of a Decaying Corpse in Japanese Buddhist Art.” Art Bulletin 87, no. 1 (2005).
Lindsay, Suzanne G. Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870. Ashgate Publishing, 2012.
Mirbeau, Octave. Torture Garden. Translated by Alvah Bessie. powerHouse Books, 2000.
Miller, William Ian The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Mongillo, John F., and Bibi Booth. Environmental Activists. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.
Noble, Thomas F. X., and Thomas Head. Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2010.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
GHUSL
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. Zone Books, 1991.
Metcalf, Peter, and Richard Huntington. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Nelson, Walter. Buddha: His Life and His Teachings. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Quigley, Christine. The Corpse: A History. MacFarland, 2005.
THE REDWOODS
Frankl, Viktor Emil. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Heinrich, Bernd. Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Walther, Ingo F. Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903: The Primitive Sophisticate. Taschen, 1999.
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Wilson, Horace Hayman. The Vishu Puráa: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition. J. Murray, 1840.
DETH SKOOL
Collison, Tim. “Cosmetic Considerations for the Infant Death.” Dodge Magazine, Winter 2009.
Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
THE ART OF DYING
Atkinson, David William. The English Ars Moriendi. Lang, 1992.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Colman, Penny. Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial. Boston: Macmillan, 1997.
Gawande, Atul. “The Way We Age Now.” The New Yorker, April 30, 2007.
Gollner, Adam Leith. “The Immortality Financiers: The Billionaires Who Want to Live Forever.” The Daily Beast, August 20, 2013.
Hanson, Rick. Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. New Harbinger Publications, 2009.
Jacoby, Susan. Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. New York: Random House, 2012.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. “Archetypal Experiences Surrounding Death.” Lecture, Panarion Conference, C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, 1978.
PRODIGAL DAUGHTER: AN EPILOGUE OF SORTS
Diggory, James C., and Doreen Z. Rothman. “Values Destroyed by Death.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63, no. 1(1961): 205–10.
Louis C.K. Chewed Up. Filmed at the Berklee Performance Center, Boston, October 2008.
Copyright © 2014 by Caitlin Doughty
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory Page 21
