I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author.

The first book by Caitlin Doughty I read was Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, answering children’s questions about death. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is also filled with her black humour. And you will soon understand why there is a need for it as you discover how a twenty something year old started working in the funeral industry.

Caitlin Doughty is fascinating. I didn’t know that she wrote a Bachelor’s thesis entitled “In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory”. But the chapter related to her thesis was the saddest one in the entire book. And although this was the part were I felt that the humour is too much, even for me, it is also the part when I understood it is necessary to be able to work with the dead.

This book is not for the faint of heart. There are descriptions of corpses or the process of embalming and cremation. The author touches on suicide. And there is also a chapter about babies. I have no words to explain the compassion that can be found in those precious sentences. The importance, or perhaps more often the need, to distance oneself, like doctors do, to be able to do their job with love, but without being devastated.

Throughout the chapters you learn about death traditions of other cultures. Some of them are still practiced, others are buried in the past.

The author takes you on a journey through her life and lessons in the death care industry. From ideas about unique funeral experiences to the decision to honestly educate people. You learn about the state of palliative care and the possibilities of sky burial (being eaten by birds and other animals). How death became a business. And how Caitlin Doughty wants to remind people that it’s a natural part of life. The care for the dead was an essential part of the community and family and can still be today.

Caitlin Doughty’s  website http://caitlindoughty.com/

IG https://www.instagram.com/thegooddeath/

And YT channel https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath