Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Doughty begins mortuary school at Cypress College of Mortuary Sciences. She hopes that she will find others who also want to change the funeral industry the way she does, but she is disappointed to find this is not the case. Most of her professors and classmates are similarly old-fashioned in their approach to death. In their class on embalming, Doughty is distressed that students use the bodies of unhoused people for practice. There is a vast gulf, she realizes, between the treatment of the corpses of celebrities versus the bodies of unhoused people. 

Embalming class requires the students to use various chemicals and creams to make corpses look more “natural” after embalming. There are specific techniques used for the bodies of babies. Mortuary school takes a toll on Doughty: The stress often makes her physically ill. Throughout her experience at school, she becomes more and more sure that she wants to open a funeral home that would help families “reclaim the process of dying, washing, dressing, and attending to the body as humans had done for thousands of years” (173). She is frustrated that she and her classmates are being taught that dead bodies are unsanitary, when she knows that in reality, a dead body generally poses little risk to living people.

As she approaches the end of her time at mortuary school, Doughty is unsure where her future will take her. She is told that it is unlikely she will get a job at a crematorium in Southern California, as most hire immigrants to do the labor-intensive work of body removal and cremation. She briefly considers moving to Japan, where embalming is a comparatively new but increasingly popular practice, before deciding to apply for jobs in Los Angeles. She lands two interviews and decides to go to both.

The first place Doughty interviews at is a fancy, traditional cemetery and funeral home, not unlike Forest Lawn. During the interview, the funeral director tells her she can handle all arrangements except for the arrangements for celebrities. He tells her that she is hired at the end of the interview, but then a month passes with no word from the funeral home, and Doughty eventually receives an email telling her they decided to hire internally. 

Her second interview is at a gigantic crematorium. She gets a job there, not working as a crematory operator but as a body-transport driver, collecting bodies to bring to the crematorium. She drives for many hours a day and thinks often about death and death values. Although belief is an important part of death for many people, death culture in America is disconnected from culture, obligation, and belief. There are post-mortem norms, like cremation or embalming and burial, but culture and religious beliefs do not influence these norms. Doughty begins to write essays and manifestos that she publishes on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death” (180). Through this, and her YouTube series Ask a Mortician, Doughty connects with people all over the world who also want to change society’s relationship to mortality and death.

One day, while Doughty drives her own car (not the body van), the car’s back tire explodes, causing the wheel to spin off the axle. The car spins out of control across four lanes of oncoming highway traffic. Doughty thinks she is going to die, but miraculously, the car makes it to the other side without being hit. Doughty is relieved to still be alive and proud of herself for feeling calm in the face of death.

Doughty discusses the Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying), Christian instruction manuals about how to die a “good death.” She notes the lack of instruction manuals for dying in modern American society and decides to write her own, not just for religious people, but also for “the growing number of atheists, agnostics, and vaguely ‘spiritual’ among us” (186). She describes her idea of a good death but says that everyone must decide for themselves what their own good death would look like. 

Doughty meets a doctor on a flight, and they discuss the shortage of doctors and care workers for an aging population. Doughty reflects that because of modern medicine, many people now spend years at the end of their lives actively dying, kept alive much longer than they would have been in previous centuries. The cost of keeping people alive for so long can be severe: Her own grandmother sustained a traumatic brain injury when she was 88. For the last four years of her life, until she was 92, she experienced increasing neurological problems, though her body lived on. Despite saying that she did not want to live in such a state before the accident, she was kept alive by modern medicine. 

Doughty reflects that her grandmother was relatively lucky: She got to live her last years in comfort with a devoted caretaker. Many elderly people do not get such a luxury, and many linger in overcrowded nursing homes or are otherwise neglected during their final years. This can result in agonizing medical complications like decubitus ulcers, also known as bed sores. Doughty encourages people to talk about death and end-of-life plans so that people will not be “robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence” (191). She also examines the growing industry looking to extend peoples lifespans, even to the point of pursuing immortality and points out how often it is rich, white men who take part in this pursuit. She points out the irony of attempting to gain immortality, as mortality is the very thing that inspires people to achieve greatness. 

One day, Doughty receives news of her grandmother’s death. She makes all of the arrangements with the funeral home in Hawai’i and flies home that afternoon. At the viewing of her grandmother’s body, Doughty is disappointed that she let the funeral home wire her mouth shut and put makeup on her that she never would have worn. She is upset that she let her “own grandmother’s body fall victim to the postmortem tortures [she] was fighting against” (194) and that she did not insist on keeping her body at home for longer. She encourages readers to start thinking about their own death and the deaths of their loved ones and to make plans and talk about death together. She returns to her desire to open her own crematorium, an intimate space where families can take part in cremating their loved ones. She expresses a desire for better municipal, state, and federal laws surrounding burial so that more natural burials are allowed, as well as open-air pyres, and “grounds where bodies can be laid out in the open and consumed by nature” (196). She closes the final chapter by encouraging people to talk more about death instead of hiding from it.

Four years after leaving Westwind, Doughty returns. She is greeted by Mike, who gets her to help him fingerprint a body. The fingerprints are going to be turned into a laser-etched memorial necklace. He asks her if she would like to accompany Chris on a body retrieval, and she agrees. Chris is happy to see her again and they go to collect the body together. As Doughty leaves San Francisco and drives back to Los Angeles, she is seized by anxiety. She realizes that she is not anxious about the “afterlife, of pain, of a void of nothingness, or even a fear of [her] own decomposing corpse” (202), but rather that when she dies, all the projects of her life will come to an end. This fear is her final obstacle in completely accepting death. 

She stops that night at the Cambria Cemetery. She walks among the graves and mist and sees an enormous buck. The creature appears to be a spiritual messenger to Doughty, and she tries to follow it, but it slips away into the mist. She sits in the dark in the graveyard and makes the decision that when she dies, she will die content, believing the silence of death to be a “reward for a life well lived” (203).