Smoke Gets In Your Eyes Analysis

Caitlin Doughty is an American mortician, YouTuber, and author who has worked in the death industry since she was 22. She shares her experiences and knowledge in her field on her Youtube channel, through her “Ask a Mortician” series. Her book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, covers her experience in the death industry and why she joined, the processes she has to partake in - whether it's cremation or embalming, and how America keeps death behind closed doors. She has gained many viewers and readers around the world who feel inspired by her views on death acceptance and find her career to be captivating although taboo.
Growing up, Doughty had an obstructed view of death, only witnessing the death of her pet goldfish. This would quickly change as one
The job tested and surprised her, as her first day included shaving a corpse. She would soon complete her first cremation, being a man named “Mr. Martinez,” who had died of a heart condition. Martinez had a pacemaker in him, and Doughty had to successfully remove it from his chest before he could be cremated. It’s a legend among cremation workers that pacemakers lithium batteries could explode in the cremation chamber, but no cases have been confirmed. During the cremation process, the body is first put into a cardboard box and loaded into the chamber. When the machine fires up, the box will be the first to immediately melt, leaving the body exposed. Since water makes up almost 80% of the human body, it evaporates very easily. The soft human tissue is what burns next, taking up most of the cremation time until the body is just dust and bones. Next, the bones would be put into a machine called "The Cremulator," a machine that will crush the remaining bones into what we know as ashes, and the cremation process is
In one culture, the Hindu Vedas saw cremation as a necessary process for their confined soul to be released from their bodies. They believed that when the skull is cracked open, the soul can be free and join the other deceased loved ones in the afterlife. In a more gruesome and controversial ritual of death, the Wari' people of western Brazil were described as mortuary cannibals, which is exactly what it sounds like. When one of their people died, the corpse was tended to immediately and the family began a series of chants and songs so other villagers nearby knew that a ritual was to be taking place. The ritual would start with the family going to each house in the village and taking a piece of wood that would be used essentially as a roasting rack. The ones who were to eat the deceased were not the family but the friends of the deceased, called the affines. These affines didn’t eat their dead because they were bloodthirsty cannibals hungry for human flesh, they ate their dead because for them it was a way to carry their soul within them forever as both an act of compassion and a way to express grief to the deceased. They believed that if left to rot, the deceased ones soul would be left to linger in their forests all alone. Since burying the dead upset them, removing the dead was the only way they saw to make their community whole