Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

I first heard about Caitlin Doughty while listening to an interview with her on NPR years ago. I then found her website The Order of the Good Death and also saw a few of her YouTube videos which you can find under Ask a Mortician. I have had her book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, on my To-Read list for years. I am fascinated by alternate burial practices and this book gives a lot of insight into both the traditional ways of laying a loved one (or yourself) to rest, as well as offering some information on other options. 

Here are just a few interesting things I learned from Ms. Doughty:

1. She leaves work each day at the crematory covered in a fine layer of human dust.

2. The funeral industry goes to extraordinary lengths to make a corpse look "natural". Doughty explains some of these processes in...detail.

3. The cremation process uses as much energy as a five-hundred-mile car trip for a single body.

Alternate options include having Dad's cremated ashes...sent into space, or tamped into bullets and shot out of a gun, or turned into a wearable diamond. One could also donate their remains to science, though what that actually means can vary significantly. Or one could be suited up in an "Infinity Burial Suit" which is embedded with mushroom spores that will remove toxins from the body and assist in its decomposition.

Author and environmentalist Edward Abbey said, "If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture- that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." As a result, his friends stole his body from the morgue and buried him out in the desert exactly as he wanted.

This book was written in 2014, so it doesn't contain anything about my current favorite method of laying human remains to rest- natural organic reduction. Basically, it's composting for people, a process that has been in place for livestock for years. Each body is turned into one cubic yard of nutrient-rich soil that can then be used to enrich conservation land, forests, or gardens. You can read more about it here. It is a compelling option when you consider the environmental benefits and the natural returning to the earth.

This was a short book that certainly kept my attention. It may not be "cheery reading", but it was extremely interesting and thought-provoking.