Book Review: “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” & “Dying, A Memoir”
“We begin dying the day we are born, after all. But because of advances in medical science, the majority of Americans will spend the later years of their life actively dying.”
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
When I was growing up, my parents considered exercise risky (or mainly, didn’t consider it at all). But playing an instrument or reading books were deemed time VERY well spent. As a result, in childhood, I experienced great satisfaction every time I turned the final page of a thick tome.
These days, with so little adult-life time available for “pleasure” vs. pandemic reading, I look forward to the holidays as a chance to gift myself more books than I can usually finish in a given year (see stack above, along with my new favorite Sugar Skull mug!). Which is why I am SUPER excited to announce that I plowed through TWO WHOLE BOOKS about death and dying since Christmas!
Mind you, it may be because I am obsessed with the subject matter. At a recent offsite for my day job, I answered the ice breaker question “What new passion have you pursued during the pandemic?” by giddily announcing “DEATH!!” My speed-reading can also be credited to the authors: Caitlin Doughty, who single-handedly ushered in the Death Positive era, and Cory Taylor, who bravely documented her own dying.
Having dedicated a whole section of my site to Doughty’s content I was WAY overdue to dig into it. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is the first of her three books, and did not disappoint. Since I am starting UVM’s End-of-Life (Death) Doula course in March, all the pages I dog-eared and passages I underlined are partly me dusting off academic habits. Mainly, though, it’s because Doughty shares fascinating first-hand anecdotes of others’ after-life experiences.The bulk of the book —15 of 19 chapters — is dedicated to describing the intimate details of Caitlin’s first death job as a crematory operator at a place she calls “Westwind” (details that are utterly affirming and intriguing to me, but I will spare the uninitiated).
During her year at Westwind, we watch “Cat” and her coworkers Mike, Chris, and Bruce (their real names) develop a subtle, cynical, and very caring connection — with each other, and to their “clients,” both dead and alive. And we watch Doughty develop a sophisticated understanding of all things wrong with the un-”natural” American approach to death and “dealing” with dead bodies, and develop a personal plan to address it. (In the “sharing circle” for her first day at mortuary school she imagines herself yelling, “A new dawn is upon us, join me while you still can, fools!”)
Doughty revisits Westwind at the end, four years after leaving her post, to finish her research for the book developed from a “secret blog.” She must have really hit her stride with her second book, From Here to Eternity, given that it’s blurbed by Jill Lepore, the NY Times Book Review, and Paste. I look forward to that read, and my GOODness am I eager to learn the answer to the title of her third book, Will the Cat Eat My Eyeballs? …!
The quote at the top of the page (and the start of my last Irreverent Insight, and the end of my “Hot Tips from Howard” podcast) are where my eldercare obsession and Doughty’s death obsession connect. If we don’t acknowledge and address the drawn-out drama likely to befall so many of our elders — and ourselves — we can’t expect anything but a fate WORSE than death when they’re dying, and a super crappy experience for their corpse.
It feels a little funky to “review” a book about the most intimate detail of someone’s life, i.e. the end of it, while also knowing she is not around to correct any inaccuracies, or elaborate on her experience.
That said, I am glad to recommend Cory Taylor’s Dying, A Memoir as an unflinching account of facing death, while contemplating cheating it. The book opens, “About two years ago I bought a euthanasia drug online from China.” While I don’t know if Taylor chose to use it, I think we can all relate to the “sense of control” it gave her, a sixty year old woman who now “weighed less than her neighbor’s retriever” because she was dying from a melanoma-related brain cancer.
Taylor is an excellent writer (whose professional aspirations I can relate to), so I’m rooting for the post mortem success of her book. The cover is as beautiful as the writing, and the content is invaluable. At the start of the book she offers the answers to a dozen “unsurprising” questions posed on ABC Television’s “You Can’t Ask That,” including whether she had a bucket list, had become religious, had changed her life priorities. The last two thirds of the book are dedicated to Taylor’s personal and family history, past and present, but at the very end she comes full circle and echos Doughty’s same sentiments from above:
And all the while my Chinese drug offers an alternative way to go. I’m grateful to have it. It helps me to feel that my autonomy is still intact, that I might yet be able to influence my fate. Even if I never use the drug it will still have served to banish the feeling of utter helplessness that threatens so often to overwhelm me. I have heard it said that modern dying means dying more, dying over longer periods, enduring more uncertainty, subjecting ourselves and our families to more disappointments and despair. As we are enabled to live longer, we are also condemned to die longer.
2022 is off to an existential start.