Caitlin Doughty wants to talk about death. Seriously. Well, maybe not.
The mortician, a St. Andrew’s Priory graduate and former Kaneohe resident, has become a minor celebrity by "lifting the shroud" off death and the funeral industry.
Her recent book "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons From the Crematory" was a New York Times best-seller, and Doughty has appeared on national radio shows and in news publications. On her popular YouTube channel, "Ask a Mortician," she dispenses information on death and the funeral industry from an expert point of view.
Doughty’s humor and deadpan delivery allow her to bring an otherwise grim subject to a wide audience.
"Did you know that death kills more than 2.5 million Americans every year? Shockingly, around the world, that number is even higher. Despite recent advances in medical science, an estimated 100 percent will die from death alone," she says in one of her videos, eyes wide, her voice pitch-perfect in an earnest, concerned-citizen tone.
In an interview Thursday before an appearance at St. Andrew’s, Doughty called it a "‘spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down’ approach."
"If I said in a dark, Grim Reaper voice, ‘This is what goes on behind the dark curtain of the funeral industry,’ nobody wants to hear that."
The 30-year-old Doughty, who lives in Los Angeles, traces her fascination with death to a childhood experience in which she witnessed a young girl fall to her death.
"It was really pretty traumatic, and it really affected the way that I saw things," she said. "I know that I was really scared when I was young. So part of this is, how do you not make everyone else feel scared? How do we make it so we don’t have this environment where we have to be terrified at such a young age?"
After graduating from college with a degree in medieval history, she moved to San Francisco in search of a career, eventually realizing she could fulfill her fascination with death by working at a mortuary. Her first job in the business was as a crematory operator, a role she found disturbingly lonely, since friends or family of the deceased were rarely in attendance.
"It seemed a bit weird to me, because if they were part of the family, why would you just send them off with me, who doesn’t know them at all? Some random 23-year-old girl to be there for their final rites?"
At parties, however, her line of work was an instant ice breaker, and people would pepper her with questions about death.
"It made me realize how little access to that kind of information we have," she said. "And if we do have access, it’s mediated by a funeral industry that feels it’s better to keep things at a distance because ‘we don’t want the public to know too much.’ I thought I could be the person who lifts the shroud off of it."
Doughty started a group of like-minded individuals who work in the business called the Order of the Good Death (orderofthegooddeath.com) and started producing videos. She is now fully trained in mortuary services, from embalming to ordering flowers, and recently served as director of a funeral home in Los Angeles.
She is close to opening her own funeral home, Undertaking LA, to serve families who want to be more involved in their loved ones’ send-off.
"We would come to your house and help you take care of (the) dead body and have you much more intimately involved, as much as you want," she said. "For some people, they are ready to do that, and it’s what humans have been doing for thousands of years of human history, and it’s only in this modern industrialized world where everything has to be something you pay for."
Doughty believes her no-boundaries approach to death has helped families better deal with the subject.
"You would think that telling someone, ‘This is how your mother’s bones were ground up by a machine after a cremation,’ you would think that would make them feel much worse. But (it) actually makes them feel much better because what they’re own minds come up with is usually far more macabre and awful than actually knowing the truth."
Meanwhile, Doughty is enjoying her status as a "niche celebrity" in a fame-driven world, taking it all in with a bit of gallows humor.
"Being the world’s most famous mortician is like being the world’s most famous tax accountant," she said.
View Doughty’s videos at youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath
