BY TRISTA EDWARDS
CW—Death
Two years ago I had the tremendous honor to interview Caitlin Doughty for Luna Luna Magazine when her last book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, made its debut into the world. Although, of course, Doughty was quite well-known at the time of the book’s 2017 release having already published her bestselling memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, in 2014 and through her YouTube series, Ask a Mortician. This was all in addition to the tremendous work she had been doing as an advocated for the death positive movement and as a mortician and owner/operator of her west coast nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA, which allows families to reclaim rightful control of the dying process and the care of the dead body with home funerals, bathing and shrouding the dead, and natural burials.
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Image from author Cailtin Doughty’s Twitter
Throughout our phone interview, which seemed delightfully to last for hours, Doughty and I chatted about her new book, the feminist aspects of decomposition, witchcraft, and mourning. In one of my concluding questions, I asked Doughty about any future and upcoming projects:
TE: So, you have two books under your belt in addition to your amazing Ask a Mortician series but like all creative types you probably already have other creative projects stewing in your mind. Is there another space you want to explore in the future on the death positive movement through writing or in another medium?
CD: Oh wow, I have too many things floating around to count. I have all sorts of dreams that myself and others are working our way towards. We would love to expand the funeral home I have here in Los Angeles. We would love a bigger physical space that could hold local events and educational workshops for the community to be involved in death care in a more meaningful way. They are still working on a television show of my first book. We’ll see if that ever pans out. We’re wanting to write more books and make longer documentary-style videos about the death positive movement. There’s so much I want to do to keep this effort growing.
Well, this fall brought about the release of her third book, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death. Over the past several years as Doughty, has continued to travel the world to give talks and educate folks on the wonders of death, she found that her favorite part of these talks came in the Q&A portion. It was not just the opportunity to get to hear what she calls “people’s deep fascination with decaying bodies, head wounds, bones, embalming, funeral pyres—the works”—that the most direct and provocative questions about death came from young children.
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As Doughty notes with her trademark humor and wit in the introduction:
“Young people were braver and often more perceptive than the adults. And they weren’t shy about guts and gore. They wondered about their dead parakeet’s everlasting soul, but really they wanted to know how fast the parakeet was putrefying in the shoebox under the maple tree. That’s why all the questions in this book come from 100 percent ethically sourced, free-range, organic children.”
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? features over thirty questions, direct from kids, that range from the serious to the comical but all informative and further working to dispel the mysteries of death. Some of my personal favorite questions include:
If I died making a stupid face, would it be stuck like that forever?
What would happen if you died on a plane?
What happens when you want to bury someone but the ground is too frozen?
Can I be buried in the same grave as my hamster?
On the surface, these fascinating yet childlike questions may seem slightly silly, however, Doughty often takes care to answer these questions, often for several pages, in-depth ranging from concerns of history, biology, legalities, and standard protocol with each inquiry.
And, like her last book, each question is accompanied by a stunning artistic rendering of each query, this time by illustrator and graphic designer, Dianné Ruz.
So as we descend on Halloween and perhaps find ourselves in the midst of haunted house movie marathon or if you are in the process of buying that 100-year-old American colonial home you’ve been dreaming about for years and you’re really, like REALLY, wondering if the realtor has to tell you if someone died there then I suggest you run out at snag a copy of Doughty’s latest book and flip to page 83 where all your concerns will be addressed!
Trista Edwards is a contributing writer at Luna Luna Magazine. She is also the curator and editor of the anthology, Till The Tide: An Anthology of Mermaid Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2015). Her first collection of poetry, Spectral Evidence, is forthcomming from April Gloaming Press in 2020. You can read her poems at 32 Poems, Quail Bell Magazine, Moonchild Magazine, The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Queen Mob's Tea House, Bad Pony, Occulum, and more. She creates magickal candles at her company, Marvel + Moon.