— Caitlin Doughty will be in Fargo to speak at Thursday’s Humanities North Dakota event, A Brave Conversation About Death.
By John Lamb
When she was eight years old, Caitlin Doughty saw a child fall to its death at a shopping mall and was immediately ushered away and encouraged not to talk or think about it.
“That was a pretty defining moment of my life. I was scared of death,” Doughty says. “We didn’t have the vocabulary for it, the safe area to hold fears. I just had to deal with it.”
She may have not had the means to express her questions and concerns as an 8 year-old, but 30 years later she’s written three books and created a popular YouTube series all about death.
The mortician, author and YouTuber is the guest of Humanities North Dakota for a sold-out event Thursday night at the Avalon Event Center.
So what is, as the event is called, a “Brave Conversation About Death”? Doughty says she will come warm up the crowd, plant some food for thought on the topic, then leave the stage to let the audience talk among itself about death. She’ll then return to the stage and follow-up with a discussion.
“If you grew up in America, we don’t have death literacy, a safe way to talk about death. We were never taught how to do it,” she says, though she adds that over the last decade, things have gotten better.
“With the internet, people are not comfortable not knowing something,” she says.
In the mid-2000s she wanted to learn more about the funeral industry and got a job in a crematory then attended school for a mortuary science program and graduated as a certified mortician.
Her real work had just begun. Doughty saw things in the funeral industry that could be changed and started The Order of the Good Death, which advocates for reforming attitudes and practices around death, funerals and mourning.
In 2012 she started the YouTube series “Ask a Mortician,” which features her addressing questions people may have about death and funerals in an often entertaining way. The show quickly attracted a following among the general public and now has 1.96 million subscribers, thanks to episodes like “Morbid Minute: Coffins vs. Caskets” and “ Preparing Severely Decomposed Bodies for a Viewing”.
Between the YouTube videos and her books, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory,” “From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death” and “Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death” Doughty has developed a following. She’s heard of people dressing like her for Halloween (“The hair is low hanging fruit,” she says, referring to her signature dark bangs) and even had a drag queen parody her in a video.
“I think I have such a specific advocacy that there’s not a cult of personality,” she says, adding that followers who share her stance on funeral reform are called “Deathlings”.
Still, the segments drew criticism from the old guard in the funeral industry.
“There was discomfort and anger that I’m doing it in this medium and talking about a different future for the industry,” Doughty says. “Most funeral directors believe that the way they provide for the families is the right way.”
But Doughty says changing some practices can help us have a better experience with death and mourning. In particular, she feels the family should have the option to be more involved, mostly by spending time with the deceased.
“For so long we’ve been trained to call the funeral home as soon as someone dies so they can take the body away,” Doughty says. “In reality, death is not an emergency. Your mom is dead now and will still be dead in two days. You’re allowed to take the time you need to process. Being present with a dead body is the simplest and scariest thing to do, but without fail people have an incredible experience.”
She adds that with the exception of an extremely rare case like someone dying of Ebola, “it’s perfectly safe to be around the dead.”
People may wonder what those in the funeral industry were like as kids and Doughty says she wasn’t so different from others her age, though she was a bit of a goth kid.
“A lot of funeral directors held funerals for their pets. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t morbid. I wasn’t Wednesday Adams,” she says. “I was always interested in death as a cultural thing. I see the world through corpse-colored glasses.”
So what does someone who spends all of their time talking about death have planned for her own funeral? While she’s made some plans, she’s still undecided about what will happen to her body. For years she’d wanted a simple, green, or natural burial, to be wrapped in a sheet and buried in a hole in the ground to allow for easier decomposition. After learning more about the practice of human composting, she’s becoming more interested in that.
“I definitely want people to spend time with my dead body in my own house,” she says. “Put flowers on my body, have something to eat or drink and just hang out with me.”
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