“I was worried that people would think it was weird or inaccessible,” Doughty says about the series and her other work on death. Though bodies are viewed in many societies’ funeral practices, “The idea of the open casket is pretty specifically American,” Doughty says. Send me exclusive offers, unique gift ideas, and personalized tips for shopping and selling on Etsy. Hi, thanks for stopping by. Her experiences in the crematory and mortuary school forced her to confront her own mortality. Where Do Gold Teeth & Blood Go After Death? Mortality + Culture. There are any number of immediate objections to this plan. “I’m never going to say that you’re not going to have grief, but I feel like when somebody I’m very close to dies, I’m going to be grieving for them,” Doughty says. This article was reprinted from The University of Chicago Magazine. “The ecstasy of decay is ... kind of like the idea of the sublime, in the sense that if you are really engaging with your mortality ... it opens you up to a broader emotional spectrum than you normally have,” she explains. So I decided that if I had a funeral home, that’s kind of the ultimate macabre spectacle.” And with that Doughty decided that she needed to become a mortician. Doughty reasserts many of Mitford’s 50-year-old claims; both the sentimentality of love and misguidance of morticians prompt mourners to spend too much on rituals they aren’t invested in or on unnecessary burial preparations. “Ideally at Undertaking LA,” she says, “the people that I’m working with are going to be people who I start the process with before they die. Workers haul bodies and smash bones. Etsy may send you communications; you may change your preferences in your account settings. Modern American funeral practices began taking hold during the Civil War when families demanded the return of their fallen loved ones. You need to have cookies enabled to sign in. In order to give you the best experience, we use cookies and similar technologies for performance, analytics, personalization, advertising, and to help our site function. For today’s readers Mitford’s death professionals resemble characters in Glengarry Glen Ross more than caring minders of one’s final passage. Michel de Montaigne famously wrote, “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” The American cast of mind isn’t notably philosophical, and Doughty argues that we have the most corrosive relationship with death, and that this failure deamplifies the beauty of our transient lives. … It’s almost like, ‘oh, you’ve been dealing with this since you were a child.’ I think that all children are pretty comfortable with death, until they’re terrified of death.”, Which means that most people live on a short continuum of comfort and terror. “So if we don’t have those, we’re kind of free to create our own. The global marketplace for vintage and handmade items. I can’t imagine a better scenario.”. This is going to be something where that sort of openness is incredibly valued. Mortician in Los Angeles. Your confirmation will be sent to %email%. With her pale complexion and her Bettie Page hair, it’s easy to think of Doughty as Wednesday Addams all grown up. Direct cremation, routine embalming, corporate funeral homes, $10,000 “waterproof” caskets, and make-up—these practices, far from traditional, have become standard operating procedure for many Americans. What Doughty stresses is clear thinking. The most popular color? Mitford’s funeral industry employs only jaundiced hacks who fleece the vulnerable. Doughty’s response to the crematory work was a radical version of how most of us confront death. These were her guiding texts during her period of “tangible weeping and gnashing of teeth and rending of my clothes.”, As she learned embalming during the day and read during the night, Doughty began making connections. Yes! The cemetery hosts movie nights and a popular Día de los Muertos festival. Etsy sellers promote their items through our paid advertising platform. Sign in with your online account. Beyond this, Doughty exhumes the deeper history and importance of funeral practices. When pressed to explain why she could love life yet appreciate death, she said “If I live out the normal course of my life. “Yeah,” she says, “I think the idea of being laid out on a beautiful plot of land and my body becoming a glorious burst of decomposition. But as Doughty stresses, there are few things you can’t choose to have done with your remains. She also did a bit of theater at UChicago, an experience that informed her professional and personal goals. Doughty works along the fault lines of natural repulsion and cultural taboo, which demands deft navigation. She knows how to file death certificates and obtain burial permits. It leaves us, if not scared to death, then very much scared of death. If you find a way to come to terms with death that comforts you, by all means sign yourself up. “In the Middle Ages, in the Victorian Period, ... cemeteries were places where commerce took place, and lovers walked through the graves to meet at night. So that’s when it started to become, we’re going to create this ‘memory picture’ with this beautiful embalmed body and then put it in its casket and then present it to you.”. Talking to Your Parents About Death - Duration: 5:22. Uh oh! Etsy uses cookies and similar technologies to give you a better experience, enabling things like: Detailed information can be found in Etsy’s Cookies & Similar Technologies Policy and our Privacy Policy. Dissecting cats and frogs is enough to repulse many kids, so the prospect of having them endure exposure therapy with human corpses—her vision taken to its most extreme—lodges in the throat. Her “Ask a Mortician” character is one part Dan Savage and one part Vincent Price. You’re not really seeing a dead person—you’re seeing an idea of a dead person, a metaphor for a dead person. Repulsion and fear will always accompany the idea of personal extinction to some degree, but the lifelessness of the death rituals prescribed by what Doughty terms “corpse capitalism” have made death appear more chilling and clinical than natural. I don’t want to think about any of the processes that the body would actually go through in a natural way.’ ... People in Western society were like, ‘Woo! It’s earlier on the same light-blinding day and Doughty sits in a bright café in LA’s Mid-City, eating granola with a side of bacon, cheerfully chatting about how a renegade mortician comes to be in the 21st century. There are 23 ask a mortician for sale on Etsy, and they cost €75.63 on average. Doughty belongs to the tradition best represented by muckraker Jessica Mitford. “But people are ravenous for information because it’s not readily available. Sail away, sail away, sail away. This “is how cemeteries used to be,” says Caitlin Doughty. During the time I spent with Doughty she proved reliably frank and honest, only once hesitating with a question. Recently a dilapidated graveyard on the brink of closure, Hollywood Forever has become a vibrant public venue after changing hands in 1998. Saying no will not stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make them less relevant or more repetitive. account? Already a Member? Why you should spend time with a dead body | @Ask A Mortician's Caitlin Doughty - Duration: 11:40. “The family should get the feeling that they are the driving force behind actually taking care of the body and making that experience happen.” Rather than submission to the hidden procedures of the embalming room, Undertaking LA will offer a transparent, collaborative alternative for her clients’ grave concerns. We've sent you an email to confirm your subscription. Like to read more content, Join the Utne Community Today! But I didn’t really have too many people to talk to about this. Rather than building a brick-and-mortar business, Doughty is transforming herself into a freelance funeral arranger. These technologies are used for things like: We do this with social media, marketing, and analytics partners (who may have their own information they’ve collected). ... And we’re not really using that because we’re really scared about what that means to cultural propriety. Functional Medicine for Autoimmune Diseases, Your Revolution at Home: Radical Fossil Fuel Divestment. Want to know more? Not that cryogenics is intrinsically wrong. “Here are people I’m cremating that may have had large families, but none of that family is there. Realizing the profit potential of the service, undertakers professionalized themselves. She writes, produces, and stars in the popular web series “Ask a Mortician.” A recent YouTube commenter named her the “Bill Nye of Death.” Her forthcoming book from Norton, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (And Other Lessons from the Crematory) , was the object of an eight-publisher bidding war. What she gleaned from her religious schooling was a set of affirming cultural assumptions, morbid fantasies notwithstanding: that good things happen to good people, that if you live a good life you die at peace, surrounded by people you love. Professors taught the technical skills to prepare a cadaver for presentation or incineration, but the curriculum lacked any psychological preparation for dealing with a career managing a ceaseless flow of death, much of it ugly. Doughty’s technical knowledge is encyclopedic—she improvises tableside “Ask a Mortician” monologues effortlessly—but she’s not merely a compendium of macabre curiosities. Ask A Mortician 286,344 views. “Here are all of these indigent dead. Read our Cookie Policy. But Doughty is herself a professional mortician—after leaving Chicago she spent a year as a crematory operator before obtaining a mortuary science degree from the Cypress College of Mortuary Science near Los Angeles—and this gives her sympathy toward her colleagues that Mitford lacked. This thoughtlessness estranges us from mortality. You guessed it: black. If people understood practices like embalming, they wouldn’t be so keen to have their blood replaced with formaldehyde. 5:14. Take full advantage of our site features by enabling JavaScript. It’s a practice she’s spent much of her career engaged in. Mitford’s 1963 book The American Way of Death galvanized the first major backlash against the American funeral industry. Mortality + Culture. ... Don’t let it rot at all. “An embalmed body, … it is not an actual dead body in a way. It’s just what one does. Modern crematory furnaces burn between 1,600 and 1,800°F. You've already signed up for some newsletters, but you haven't confirmed your address. Both registration and sign in support using google and facebook accounts. She is also the creator and guiding voice of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and filmmakers whose work deals with embracing mortality. “Most of us are kind of living in this middle world, in a very small range of emotions.”, Or, as she said later, embracing the brute facts of death is painful, but once you do, the sunsets are beautiful. “My main problem [with Jessica Mitford] is that she really brought on the direct cremation revolution,” Doughty says, referring to the practice of taking a body from its place of death directly to the crematory. She can close eyes and mouths.