Caitlin Doughty, Memoir of a Mortician

By Jerry GorinOctober 29, 2014

Caitlin Doughty, Memoir of a Mortician


JERRY GORIN: What surprised you most in just your first few months working in a mortuary?


CAITLIN DOUGHTY: The biggest surprise for me is that I thought I was really comfortable with death, because I was interested in it academically and I'd been studying it for years, and I thought, “Actual dead bodies, I’m all over that!" But when I actually got into it, the dead bodies were so powerful, and being around them was just philosophically and emotionally more difficult than I thought it was going to be. And that's kind of what alerted me to the fact that we're really distant from dead bodies in this country and maybe we shouldn't be.


You write about your first time peeking into a crematorium. What is that sensation?


A lot of the crematoriums in America are now more industrial than you would think. There is really a kind of industrial environment in the sense that you walk into this room and it's almost a warehouse. Then there are these two huge metal machines and they're roaring a really deep roar. It's not a pleasant environment, not what you imagine when you think of a mortuary, which might be like your grandmother's living room with all pastels, flowers and very welcoming. But a lot of them aren’t like that. It's very intense and it's not some place you necessarily want your dead body to go


Can you talk about your childhood experience that led to your fascination with death?


When I was eight years old I saw a girl fall off the second floor balcony of a mall, and when I heard her body hit the ground it just changed my life, in the sense that it alerted me to the fact that death was very possible and death was always just a hair's breath away from happening to me or anybody that I knew. And at eight years old that was really like a pint-sized existential discovery. And I do that my whole life people have been saying, “Oh, she had a really tragic experience when she was young that's why she's weird, or that’s why she’s obsessed with death," and I don't think that's what's going on. I think that I just have a lot of natural morbidity. But there is something to be said for trying to engage with the problems of your childhood as an adult. I think we're all kind of doing a little bit in our adult lives.


You also write about these OCD-type struggles that you had after that incident.


I did have a lot of OCD tendencies when I was younger and I can’t help but wonder if a lot of the things that we think of as mental illness in children have something to do with very natural fears that get pathologized because they're not in the open. Whether it’s sexuality or mortality or these engrained human fears that we have, and when they are not allowed to express themselves in any way things get a little lopsided and that definitely happened to me. I was extremely worried all the time about death and I was constantly negotiating with the universe to make sure that it didn’t happen, like jumping over cracks and tapping my nose a certain amount of times, pretty traditional OCD behaviors. That definitely went away as I got older, I didn't struggle with that in high school or anything, but I for me it shifted into beating those fears by being really engaged with death, being really interested in an academic way, looking at death rituals and death culture, and morbid entertainment of all sorts. I wouldn’t say that I was goth. I’m from Hawaii, and though we still had a goth scene, I wasn’t necessarily a part of it.


Is there much of a goth scene in Hawaii?


Oh there was totally a goth scene in Hawaii growing up. There are two clubs, one is called Flesh and the other is called Dungeon, and we used to sneak out and go to them when I was like sixteen and sleep in the car by the side of the road. I think Florida has a really big goth scene, too. I think in cities where it's very sunny, where you wouldn't expect it, all of these creatures of the night emerge to counteract the constant beauty and sunshine.


Did you meet people similar to you in the death industry? Is there a pattern of who ends up there?


I don’t know if there is a pattern of people who want to be morticians, only in the sense that there's a pattern that you have to have something in you that allows you to be able to do it. I mean, there are old men and there are young women, people of all races and different personalities, there are people who would like to work in the back with the body and there are people who like to work in the front with the living, and sometimes people in the back with the dead are the most outgoing ridiculous people you've ever met and people in the front are kind of weirdoes that makes you think “should he really be working with families?” So nothing is what you'd expect.


You write a lot about the sterilization of the death industry.


It used to be that we were very comfortable being around death, actual physical corpses and dead bodies in the house, and we washed it, shrouded it, and kept it in our living room. Then what happened is that we started to become industrialized or sterilized, I guess in a lot of ways, like in the medical industry, or the burgeoning funeral industry. And death really got taken out of the home and away from people and put back into the hands of people who were “professionals.” You can understand that in a way because it is easier. Grief is hard and death is hard. If you can just pay somebody to take that body away from you, you can see the appeal in doing that, but I think we lose a lot of our connection to mortality and our connection to community and family.


Can you ever truly leave the mortuary? Does it follow you home? Can you have a normal life?


I don't know that I can have a normal outside the mortuary because death is pretty much my whole life, but I think morticians or death workers in general can have a normal life. It's possible to take the work home with you in the way that everyone takes their work home with them, whether they are a banker, or a florist or whatever they do, but you really have to have a healthy attitude about being mortician or you won't make it very long. You either have to have to completely repress, in kind of a negative unhealthy way, or you have to be completely open to engaging with it. But there's a huge turnover rate in the death industry because people go in thinking that it's going to be fascinating work but they end up just not being able to handle it. They take in way too much, like people's grief, people’s hatred, they take in all of these things. They feel dirty and over-involved, and they don't make it


And you seem to suggest that there's a way to help the industry find a balance between those two ends, repression and pain?


I think that if we can get families more involved so the family feels like they're getting more out of the death experience, that can be a really good thing. I'm not saying people are going to give up on funeral directors all together, that's never going to happen, it's my magical pipe dream but it's not going to happen. I think people are going to become more involved, but I don’t think funeral directors should feel threatened. I think they should find a way to work within this new paradigm and realize that they still have a place, but it's not going to be this whole “take the body away and hide it and no one shall speak its name.”


Have you encountered other rituals around the world that you have found fascinating or you think we can learn from?


Of course. There are places like Indonesia where they keep the body in the home for months after the person dies and are actively a part of the decomposition process, dealing with the body for months, if not years, after the person dies. I don't know if that‘s a model we should be looking to in America, but the American optimism that says “I'm so positive that death shall not enter my viewpoints at all” is not really working for us. I think that pretty soon Rome is going to burn and we’re not going to know what happened. OK, wow, that sounded way too ominous (laughs). 


Can you talk some of the more bizarre experiences that you had working at a mortuary. I am really curious about that Chinese family that used hired mourners!


After I'd been working at the crematorium for a couple of months we had what's called a witness cremation, which is when people come to watch the body get loaded into the cremation machine. People rarely did this, but we got one family that was a Chinese family, and we went to see the crematorium with them. All of a sudden they start wailing and falling to the ground and beating the ground. It is a practice in China to have a hired mourner, to jazz up the crowd like “Laker Girls” or something, but I don't know if they were actually hired mourners because I don't know where they would get those in Oakland, where I was working. But it was still really fascinating because that level of grief being demonstrated and that openness about grieving, whether you were a man, woman, or child, was something I have never seen before, certainly not in American death customs.


Where do you think that expression of grief goes in our society? Is it bubbling somewhere? 


I definitely think fears about death are bubbling in our subconscious, especially if we are secular. I don't think you need religion, but I do think you need ritual of some sort and you need to understand transitions and you need to have meaning around community and groups. If you don’t have that anymore strange things happen, in the sense that you don't really think about the larger implications of your actions, in what you're doing the planet, or what you're doing to your community or what you're doing to others and if you're really open with death, that's something that's possible.


¤

LARB Contributor

Jerry Gorin is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles.

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