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A review by lpm100
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
5.0
Book Review
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Caitlin Doughty
5/5 stars
*****
Of the book:
-243 pages of prose over 19 chapters
-12.7 pages per chapter
-About 4 total hours of easy reading time
-No index
-Works great as a palate cleanser after an excessively heavy book
*****
The #1 thing that I learned from this book is WHY the Jewish way of burial is the best (Doughty doesn't mention the Jewish tradition one single time, but as a practicing Jew I'm quite familiar with it -- and especially in contradistinction to these stories here):
1. The convention of plain pine box with no metal in it means that there is no industry to grow up around selling people expensive caskets that are going to go right into the ground;
2. No embalming means that the body can return to the Earth naturally and it is understood that is only a shell. (Doughty acts like Earth burial is something new, when we have been doing it for thousands of years.)
3. No flowers and no viewing means that funerals maintain a religious character and don't turn into extended banalities. (Can you imagine visiting hours lasting for 5- 8 hours hearing the same phrase repeated "Oh, he looks so wonderful/natural / peaceful / like he's just sleeping"?)
4. The burial is done within 24 hours and the dirt is thrown by the actual mourners. And physical involvement creates a ritual with significance and forces people to face the finiteness of life.
5. Death is very clearly understood as being an ineluctable part of the life cycle (and ALL Jewish events, including birth/circumcision / bar mitzvah / marriage understood to be part of a "life cycle" that will ultimately terminate), so you might as well get ready for it.
*****
This is probably the 4th book that I have read related to death and dying (noted at the end of the review), and I have to say that it: The book is worth reading just on the strength of the quality of the prose.
Doughty comes across as a highly intelligent, introspective and well-read person that is aware of her surroundings and thinks about them deeply.
She also seems to walk on the borderline between high intelligence and insanity. (Those two things are linked enough for this to not be a surprise.)
*****
Brief chapter summary plus additional things learned per chapter:
1. Author's first day working at a crematory that serves a lot of low-income clients and has state contracts for disposal of indigents.
2. Introduction to characters at the crematory, as well as operations of the cremulator/"retort" (fancy word for cremation machine).
3. Author grew up in Hawaii, and it seems that watching a girl plunge to her death over an escalator set on her journey toward mortuary science. (Her mental problems were present even at 8 years old.)
4. A first home pick up. (People dying at home was the norm up until the beginning of the 19th century. 80-100 cremation ghats per day are burned on the Indian River Ganges, and some people who cannot afford cremation just dump the body directly into the river. Sometimes dogs eat the bodies and the Indian government releases thousands of flesh eating turtles to eat the bodies.)
5. Doughty handles a suicide by train and several witness cremations. (Cremations used to only be 5%, but now they are up to almost half.)
6. Discussion of methods of body disposal, well as of embalming and its history--from being a fringe work to being a specialized field. (Disgusting Wari Indians of Western Brazil just eat the body of deceased relatives. Never mind if they have to throw up a few times they will finish it right up. Tibetan sky burials are done where a body breaker slices the flesh off and grinds the bones with flour and yak butter and then lays it out to be eaten by vultures. )
7. Author is given the job of going to hospitals to pick up numbers of stillborns that need cremation.
8. Direct disposal is something that is so streamlined that you can get rid of a relative from start to finish with a simple phone call, which includes having the cremains sent to you in the mail. Much of the funeral industry these days is made to make it NOT seem like what it is. (Euphemisms galore!) Hubert Eaton the euphemizer in chief. Jessica Mitford, the famous and well read death industry deconstructor. ("The American Way of Death")
9. Techniques used in staging a body for viewing. Eye caps. Mouth formers. Mouth closing gun. Technical difficulties with cremating morbidly obese people.
10. There are actually people whose job it is to broker body parts from bodies donated for "science." (p.137. Golden Gate Bridge has a couple of suicides per month.)
11. Tomorrow is not promised and nothing is so predictable as who will survive and who won't.
12. Obese people decompose a lot faster, and especially after autopsies. More bulk equals more chances for decomposition, as we read about in the story of a 450 pounder that Doughty had to deal with. Embalming breaks the connection that people have with death and decomposition, and that may not be a good thing.
13. "Corpses keep the living tethered to reality."
14. She runs the crematory by herself for 2 weeks. (27 adults, 6 babies, 2 torsos.) And decides to resign to go to proper mortuary school.
15. "There is a thin line between a corpse and a carcass." /"The only thing that's certain is that nothing ever is."
16. Mortuary school, where she does not like embalming. But, with all of the tens of thousands of homeless people in LA there were plenty of people for students to practice on! You wouldn't think so, but it seems that getting the job in mortuary services is extremely competitive. (And this is not the first time I've heard that.)
17. Near death experience and driving 350 mi a day as a long distance corpse strucker. After another job fell through.
18. (p. 228) Author manages to get in some whining about "rich white men" and "systematic privilege" (and this is a book about aspects of the death industry, mind you) while sharing some thoughts about needing to be realistic about death, given the rapid aging of US/Western populations. Also appears to be familiar with Atul Gawande.
19. She returns right back to the job at which she started at the crematory.
*****
Secondary observations:
1. The author has some moderate mental problems, and a lot of her coworkers also seemed a bit........off --and who would be normal that worked in a crematory?-- but at least she was honest with us about it. (p.32) And again (p.194) "It was when I reached the bottom that I realized I had gone there to die."
2. Some people mentally bury people long before their actual death. (p.101)
3. My mother always told me that people who worked in the mortuary industry tended to turn into alcoholics. This book seconded that observation (p.189), as well as adding drug addiction.
*****
Vocabulary:
ghat (Indian cremation)
plastinated
trocar (embalming tool)
Tibetan sky burial (p. 82)
desquamation
Joel Peter Witkin
humectant base
*****
Other recommended books about the topic of death and dying:
Being Mortal (Gawande)
When Breath Becomes Air (Kalanithi)
Dying Well (Byock)
The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion)
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Caitlin Doughty
5/5 stars
*****
Of the book:
-243 pages of prose over 19 chapters
-12.7 pages per chapter
-About 4 total hours of easy reading time
-No index
-Works great as a palate cleanser after an excessively heavy book
*****
The #1 thing that I learned from this book is WHY the Jewish way of burial is the best (Doughty doesn't mention the Jewish tradition one single time, but as a practicing Jew I'm quite familiar with it -- and especially in contradistinction to these stories here):
1. The convention of plain pine box with no metal in it means that there is no industry to grow up around selling people expensive caskets that are going to go right into the ground;
2. No embalming means that the body can return to the Earth naturally and it is understood that is only a shell. (Doughty acts like Earth burial is something new, when we have been doing it for thousands of years.)
3. No flowers and no viewing means that funerals maintain a religious character and don't turn into extended banalities. (Can you imagine visiting hours lasting for 5- 8 hours hearing the same phrase repeated "Oh, he looks so wonderful/natural / peaceful / like he's just sleeping"?)
4. The burial is done within 24 hours and the dirt is thrown by the actual mourners. And physical involvement creates a ritual with significance and forces people to face the finiteness of life.
5. Death is very clearly understood as being an ineluctable part of the life cycle (and ALL Jewish events, including birth/circumcision / bar mitzvah / marriage understood to be part of a "life cycle" that will ultimately terminate), so you might as well get ready for it.
*****
This is probably the 4th book that I have read related to death and dying (noted at the end of the review), and I have to say that it: The book is worth reading just on the strength of the quality of the prose.
Doughty comes across as a highly intelligent, introspective and well-read person that is aware of her surroundings and thinks about them deeply.
She also seems to walk on the borderline between high intelligence and insanity. (Those two things are linked enough for this to not be a surprise.)
*****
Brief chapter summary plus additional things learned per chapter:
1. Author's first day working at a crematory that serves a lot of low-income clients and has state contracts for disposal of indigents.
2. Introduction to characters at the crematory, as well as operations of the cremulator/"retort" (fancy word for cremation machine).
3. Author grew up in Hawaii, and it seems that watching a girl plunge to her death over an escalator set on her journey toward mortuary science. (Her mental problems were present even at 8 years old.)
4. A first home pick up. (People dying at home was the norm up until the beginning of the 19th century. 80-100 cremation ghats per day are burned on the Indian River Ganges, and some people who cannot afford cremation just dump the body directly into the river. Sometimes dogs eat the bodies and the Indian government releases thousands of flesh eating turtles to eat the bodies.)
5. Doughty handles a suicide by train and several witness cremations. (Cremations used to only be 5%, but now they are up to almost half.)
6. Discussion of methods of body disposal, well as of embalming and its history--from being a fringe work to being a specialized field. (Disgusting Wari Indians of Western Brazil just eat the body of deceased relatives. Never mind if they have to throw up a few times they will finish it right up. Tibetan sky burials are done where a body breaker slices the flesh off and grinds the bones with flour and yak butter and then lays it out to be eaten by vultures. )
7. Author is given the job of going to hospitals to pick up numbers of stillborns that need cremation.
8. Direct disposal is something that is so streamlined that you can get rid of a relative from start to finish with a simple phone call, which includes having the cremains sent to you in the mail. Much of the funeral industry these days is made to make it NOT seem like what it is. (Euphemisms galore!) Hubert Eaton the euphemizer in chief. Jessica Mitford, the famous and well read death industry deconstructor. ("The American Way of Death")
9. Techniques used in staging a body for viewing. Eye caps. Mouth formers. Mouth closing gun. Technical difficulties with cremating morbidly obese people.
10. There are actually people whose job it is to broker body parts from bodies donated for "science." (p.137. Golden Gate Bridge has a couple of suicides per month.)
11. Tomorrow is not promised and nothing is so predictable as who will survive and who won't.
12. Obese people decompose a lot faster, and especially after autopsies. More bulk equals more chances for decomposition, as we read about in the story of a 450 pounder that Doughty had to deal with. Embalming breaks the connection that people have with death and decomposition, and that may not be a good thing.
13. "Corpses keep the living tethered to reality."
14. She runs the crematory by herself for 2 weeks. (27 adults, 6 babies, 2 torsos.) And decides to resign to go to proper mortuary school.
15. "There is a thin line between a corpse and a carcass." /"The only thing that's certain is that nothing ever is."
16. Mortuary school, where she does not like embalming. But, with all of the tens of thousands of homeless people in LA there were plenty of people for students to practice on! You wouldn't think so, but it seems that getting the job in mortuary services is extremely competitive. (And this is not the first time I've heard that.)
17. Near death experience and driving 350 mi a day as a long distance corpse strucker. After another job fell through.
18. (p. 228) Author manages to get in some whining about "rich white men" and "systematic privilege" (and this is a book about aspects of the death industry, mind you) while sharing some thoughts about needing to be realistic about death, given the rapid aging of US/Western populations. Also appears to be familiar with Atul Gawande.
19. She returns right back to the job at which she started at the crematory.
*****
Secondary observations:
1. The author has some moderate mental problems, and a lot of her coworkers also seemed a bit........off --and who would be normal that worked in a crematory?-- but at least she was honest with us about it. (p.32) And again (p.194) "It was when I reached the bottom that I realized I had gone there to die."
2. Some people mentally bury people long before their actual death. (p.101)
3. My mother always told me that people who worked in the mortuary industry tended to turn into alcoholics. This book seconded that observation (p.189), as well as adding drug addiction.
*****
Vocabulary:
ghat (Indian cremation)
plastinated
trocar (embalming tool)
Tibetan sky burial (p. 82)
desquamation
Joel Peter Witkin
humectant base
*****
Other recommended books about the topic of death and dying:
Being Mortal (Gawande)
When Breath Becomes Air (Kalanithi)
Dying Well (Byock)
The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion)