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26 February, 2018<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_books_doughty_0.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
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Caitlin Doughty: Millennial mortician (\u00a9Mara Zehler)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nIf I ever thought about death before, I assumed, like Hamlet, that I would return to my constituent parts. (There is a nice Sanskrit idiom for dying which translates literally as \u201cgo to the five elements\u201d.) But many of the trappings of Western-style, and particularly US-style funerals (embalming, hardwood coffins, vaults) are designed to prevent this for as long as possible \u2014 hardly dust to dust. <\/p>\n
These, according to Caitlin Doughty, are symptoms of a culture which avoids thinking about death and is obsessed with concealing everything to do with it. Doughty (a licensed mortician) argues that our culture is \u201cdeath-phobic\u201d \u2014 we want to avoid thinking about death, and particularly about dead bodies. She wants us to be \u201cdeath-positive\u201d \u2014 not afraid. <\/p>\n
This a mindset which fits neatly with the values that the so-called millennial generation views as important: body positivity, bodily autonomy, bodily self-determination. Your (dead) body, your choice.<\/p>\n
Doughty, who is 33, runs a \u201cprogressive\u201d funeral home in Los Angeles, Undertaking LA, and hosts a web series on YouTube called Ask A Mortician, covering everything from the morbid (necrophilia, embalming) to the practical (what to say to a bereaved person, what happens to your titanium hip implant in the crematorium). Incidentally, she also wants to reclaim the word \u201cmorbid\u201d, since there\u2019s no word for a healthy interest in death. The website of the Order Of The Good Death, an organisation of alternative death professionals which she co-founded, explains: \u201cNot all deaths are created equal . . . A \u201cgood death\u201d is personal. A person defines it, a family defines it, a community defines it, a culture defines it.\u201d <\/p>\n
From Here To Eternity <\/em>is a sort of world tour of the alternatives, from a high-tech columbarium in Japan, lined with light-up Buddhas, to the Toraja people in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, who mummify relatives and keep them in their houses for several years before holding elaborate, expensive funerals. But reading about completely unfamiliar traditions takes out all the Freudianism: a death is just a death, the most normal thing in the world. Reading the book late at night, I found myself veering into hippie hypomania: wow, man, I\u2019m really, like, here, I\u2019m really in this thing.<\/p>\n
Doughty\u2019s obvious predecessor is Jessica Mitford, whose 1963 book The American Way of Death advocated reform of the US funeral industry. But Mitford\u2019s book was not about preparing for death: her focus was financial and her main target was exploitative practices by the funeral industry. She followed through on her beliefs: she asked for \u2014 and got \u2014 the cheapest funeral possible. It cost $533.31, of which $475 was the cost of cremation. <\/p>\n
Doughty, by contrast, thinks we should have rites, even long, elaborate ones, and that the avoidance of rituals, in the long run, does more harm than good. For her, Mitford is still someone who wanted to avoid thinking too much about corpses. Doughty thinks we don\u2019t allow enough time for grief: we should have the opportunity to mourn close to the corpse: to touch, wash and dress it if wanted, to see a corpse in its natural state. Families should be involved \u2014 or at least know it\u2019s possible to be involved \u2014 in the preparation of the body, as would have been done in the past. Helping a woman prepare her mother for a natural burial, she points out that this is hardly a new idea: \u201cIn the 19th century, no one would have questioned Josephine preparing her mother\u2019s body \u2014 it would have seemed strange if she didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Embalming emerges as a major villain \u2014 it\u2019s intrusive, expensive, and not necessary (according to Doughty). Embalming is compulsory in US mortician training, even for those who don\u2019t intend to offer it. (It\u2019s forbidden in both Islam and Judaism.) There\u2019s also the quest for a reasonable alternative to cremation: crematoria are relegated to industrial areas \u2014 hardly appealing places to mourn \u2014 and the environmental impact of cremations is significant. A single cremation uses as much electricity as one (living) person does a month; cremation is responsible for 16 per cent of the mercury pollution in this country. (Cremations account for 75 per cent of funerals in the UK.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0One model for a solution could be the Crestone End of Life Project, a community-run open-air funeral pyre in Colorado which uses significantly less fuel than traditional cremation, and sounds wonderful. Never have I wished more to be burned!\u00a0 Another is the Recompose project in North Carolina, which is working on a method of composting dead bodies, but the variables \u2014 size of person, water content, etc \u2014 make it tricky. Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recompose, says: \u201cHumans are so focused on preventing ageing and decay \u2014 it\u2019s become an obsession . . . So decomposition becomes a radical act. It\u2019s a way to say, \u2018I love and accept myself\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Doughty\u2019s own reaction is that what she wants in death is to vanish. \u201cIf I\u2019m lucky, I will disappear, swallowed by the ground.\u201d I have to confess I find this appealing. Other women have expressed similar ideas, such as Patti Smith in her song \u201cBeneath the Southern Cross\u201d, written in the aftermath of her husband\u2019s death: \u201cOh\/To be\/Not anyone\/Gone . . . To be\/ Not here\/ But here.\u201d Or Hito Steyerl\u2019s short film How Not To Be Seen, in which she paints herself in green-screen-toned face paint and melts into the background, or the artist Yayoi Kusama\u2019s \u201cInfinity Mirror Rooms\u201d: as soon as you step in you seem to vanish amid thousands of tiny points of light.<\/p>\n
Doughty\u2019s repeated concern is that families should feel they are in some way taking care of their loved ones, that they should feel they have been given something meaningful to do. A ritual, a sense of purpose, \u201cholds\u201d you. In traditional Japanese cremations, the family are given large chopsticks and have to pick the bone fragments out of the ashes, in a ritual called kotsuage, which sounds grisly, until you read that in the US system the bone fragments (so-called \u201ccremains\u201d) are ground up in a \u201cCremulator\u201d (its brand name) to a uniform dust before being returned to the family. The parents of Carita Ridgeway, an Australian woman who was murdered in Tokyo, were unexpectedly faced with this ritual, but didn\u2019t react with horror. They say it made them feel calmer \u2014 \u201cas if we were looking after Carita\u201d.<\/p>\n
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