5 Minutes with Mortician Caitlin Doughty
Author and Los Angeles-based mortician Caitlin Doughty returns to Springfield Thursday, Nov. 1, to talk about her new book, "From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death."
We asked Caitlin to answer a few questions about the importance of talking about death in anticipation of her 7 p.m. presentation at Relics Event Center.
1. Why do you think it's important for people to talk about death?
It baffles me that people think conversations about death are quirky, niche, or morbid. Death conversations would be niche if death was optional. Death is the great human experience, the thing that will happen to us all. If we don't share death, what do we share? If we can't expect death, what can we expect?
2. Your new book, “From Here to Eternity,” explores death customs from around the world. How does exposing people to the ways other cultures handle death help them face their own mortality in the Western world?
Sometimes it's easier to examine deaths that you don't perceive to be your "own." You perhaps don't want to hear about the embalming procedure performed on your mother, but you are fascinated by the embalming performed in rural Indonesia, where the dead bodies continue to live in the house with the family for months or years after death. In some ways, having this conversation about death in other cultures can be a gateway drug to harder conversations about your mortality or the mortality of the people you love.
3. If you could change one thing about the American way of death, what would it be?
The wild misconceptions. That embalming is legally required (it's not). That dead bodies are dangerous (they're not). That you can't bury a body without a heavy concrete vault (you can.)
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