Tales from the crematorium

Amid the gory tales comes a plea for death without fakery, says Helen Rumbelow.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a deathchanging book. This memoir by Caitlin Doughty, a 30-year-old mortician who has spent her youth tending corpses, has a difficult and deep message for anyone who thinks they may end up dying. But let’s admit it: the reason it has been quite so popular – it’s on The New York Times bestseller list and she’s had more than 2.5 million views on her YouTube channel – is that it delivers on the gory stuff.

In a society so keen to abolish old taboos, death is the only one to rise in power. Hell, we’re not even allowed to age these days, let alone kick the bucket. Well, after finishing the book in one gross-out binge, one is under no illusion. Something, perhaps, to do with Doughty’s cheerful description of using a pestle to grind down baby bones by hand, because the regular cremation dust grinder is too large. Or perhaps you will find a little memento mori in the section on funeral director tricks to prepare a body for viewings: closing the ‘‘stagnant pools’’ of eyes or jamming shut the mouth, which typically lolls open in a macabre rictus grin (hint: they use wire, spikes and a lot of superglue).

No, for me, the stand-out anecdote in this book was the day when Doughty, a few months into her job as a mortician at a funeral home and crematorium in San Francisco, was faced with a faulty furnace. Her job was to load bodies in all day, watching their features flambe. While barbecuing a particularly ample old lady, the furnace started gushing pints of melted flesh. Doughty rushed with buckets ‘‘like bailing out a leaky boat’’, and when the crisis was under control, ‘‘looked down to find my dress stained with warm human fat. I was sweaty, defeated and drenched with lard, but I felt alive . . . rather than denying the truth, it was a revelation to embrace it, however disgusting it might sometimes be.’’

I started this book suspecting Doughty. She approached the whole thing a little too cutely: her opening line, ‘‘A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.’’ Had she perhaps got this gig just for the juicy publishing deal? Yet beneath the jolly topsoil lies radical passion. It is impossible not to be inspired by Doughty’s commitment to her cause and the broad anthropological and literary references she deploys to support it: who knew, for example, that the American fashion for embalming began with the need to preserve victims of the Civil War on hot train journeys home? She’s an evangelist, not for everlasting life, as the preachers and the plastic surgeons promise, but for death without fakery.