Kathryn Hoss's Reviews > Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

I got this book mainly in the hopes that it would force me to deal with the reality of death, especially after the recent death of my grandpa. Well, mission accomplished. I haven't thought this much about my own mortality since the time I took that human osteology class in college and spent several sleepless nights thinking about how I had a human skeleton inside my body.


Look at them dancing, mocking me.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is super entertaining-- funny and disgusting in turns-- but it is also a manifesto. Doughty wrote the book mainly to argue that there is something fundamentally broken in the way our society deals with death. I've felt a nagging discomfort about this since childhood, when I watched the lid of a too-huge, too-fancy coffin close over my tiny frail great-grandmother, resembling a giant macabre birthday present. I felt it more recently when I walked into the funeral home to find my grandfather looking completely unlike himself, apelike after the semi-surgical things they did to his face to make it look 'natural.' But wires and spiked cups in the face are the least of what we pay a mortician to do to our loved ones.

"Perhaps the dirtiest secret," Doughty says, about the practice of modern embalming, is the evisceration of the body cavity. There is a scene where she watches her coworker Cliff carry out this part of the process, stabbing a skinny piece of metal called a trocar into a corpse's abdomen to destroy the internal organs. Doughty muses that there's no way she could do this to her own mother, and Cliff agrees.

"No way, no way. You think you could, till you see her layin' there dead on the table. You think you can slice your mom's neck and get to the vein? Think you can trocar her?... Your mom's stomach is where you lived for nine months... Now you're gonna trocar that? Stab her? Destroy where you came from?"

And yet we do. We pay others to deal with our dead-- transport them, hose them down, disembowel them, replace their blood with formaldehyde, sew them up, shave them, make them up, clothe them. We do it because we are terrified of death, to the point that we do not want to have to touch the dead bodies of our own family members. Most of us don't even know what a natural dead body looks like. The taboo is so strong in our culture that even corpses on TV look like they're sleeping, eyes and mouth peacefully closed. We see death as an inconvenient embarrassment, the details of which we must obscure even from ourselves.



Doughty points out that as our quasi-property, the fate of our deceased next-of-kin is ours to decide. Embalming is not a legal requirement. The traditional funeral process is not a legal requirement. Why not cut costs and have a home funeral? Why not wash and care for our own dead, "as humans have done for thousands of years?" Why try to preserve their bodies indefinitely instead of cremating them, or letting them decay naturally in the ground?

Doughty acknowledges that the fragmentation caused by death, physical and psychological, is what we truly fear. Towards the end of the book, she provides a list from a 1961 issue of The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology of the seven reasons humans fear death.

1. My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends.
2. All my plans and projects would come to an end.
3. The process of dying might be painful.
4. I could no longer have any experiences.
5. I would no longer be able to care for my dependents.
6. I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death.
7. I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.

The anxiety I felt was no longer caused by the fear of an afterlife, of pain, of a void of nothingness, or even a fear of my own decomposing corpse. All my plans and projects would come to an end. The last thing preventing me from accepting death was, ironically, my desire to help people accept death.

Fear of leaving projects unfinished is also something that keeps me up at night. So I'm going to share part of a poem by Austrian poet Rilke that helped me accept my mortality.

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one, but I give myself to it.

So much in life (and death) is out of our control. By surrendering to that fact, maybe we can find peace.