Houston Southard

Caitlin Doughty - Smoke gets in your eyes

The loom of death is what gives life urgency, and so if urgency is what fodders creativity, the curse of life isn't death, it's wishing for the absence of death.

In another classic memoir, Caitlin Doughty - Hawaiian by birth, medieval historian by education, mortician by trade - takes readers on a journey of death culture through time explaining how we arrived to today. Death happens to everyone, but in a culture that sweeps it under the rug or sacralizes it in a bastardized game of dress-up, our fear of dying negatively warps society.

The funeral industrial complex has prettified death through cosmetic excess that cheats the grieving out paychecks and proper send-offs. Only recently have hospitals replaced the home as places where our loved ones breathed their last. The contemporary, institutionalized death has lobotomized mortality from public consciousness, so all of what we'd now consider death's indignities can happen behind a curtain so as not to offend the living.

By systematically insulating ourselves from death’s physical manifestations, Americans have become deprived emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and financially in ways our ancestors would have raised their eyebrows at.

Doughty is both an activist commendably trying to topple the Big Mortuary's commodification of death and an educator removing our blindfolds to this manufactured mental macabre, showing us better ways to accept and deal with death.

It's good to remember that a life lost is not a relationship lost, because the departed live on in our memories of them. Here's to remembering.