Death Becomes Her
10/11/19 - "Dead bodies are not dangerous!" is a fitting manta for mortician, author and death positivity activist Caitlin Doughty. This week: how to die, the funeral-industrial complex, and why you need an advance directive.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Resources on green funerals and advance directives at Order of the Good Death
Ask a Mortician on YouTube
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
TRANSCRIPT: DEATH BECOMES HER
[Ads]
(0:15)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Ann Friedman.
Ann: And I'm -- oh. [Laughter]
Aminatou: Gotcha.
Ann: I'm Ann Friedman. You are Aminatou Sow. This is Call Your Girlfriend. On today's agenda: death.
[Theme Song]
(1:00)
Aminatou: You don't want to be me? What does that mean?
Ann: Listen, I don't want to be misleading. Next thing you know it'll be like ugh, like your great, brilliant comments will be credited to me. We have enough problem with that already, like looking at you Shine Theory people.
Aminatou: Wow.
Ann: I'm like let's just keep it very clear that you own your ideas.
Aminatou: Wow, wow, wow. Wow. I'm just trying to do Freaky Friday with you every Friday and you refuse.
Ann: Oh my god, okay, what age did you first watch Freaky Friday?
Aminatou: Are there two versions of Freaky Friday or just one?
Ann: Oh my god.
Aminatou: Okay, so I know Freaky Friday, the yogurt lady version.
Ann: Yes, the Jamie Lee Curtis 2003 version with Lindsey Lohan which is an incredible version. However there is also a 1976 version with young Jodie Foster.
Aminatou: What?
(1:50)
Ann: And I watched it frequently as a child. I loved it.
Aminatou: Barbara Harris, Jodie Foster, and John Astin?
Ann: Yes.
Aminatou: Patsy Kelly?
Ann: Yes.
Aminatou: What?
Ann: And young Jodie Foster is like a butch icon, like a baby butch icon in this movie. Like her fashion is so on-point, 1976. I believe there's a water skiing climactic scene if I remember correctly. The Barbara Harris mom vibe is very like Mrs. Robinson sunken living room. I watched it -- yeah.
Aminatou: You are blowing my mind right now. This is one of those like where on the millennial scale are you situations where the three years really come back to bite me in the butt. This is amazing.
Ann: I mean yeah, I think that's part of it. Also just like my family, we were allowed to watch only the Disney Family when it was free. My mom would tape everything from the Disney -- see, again, old millennial. Would VHS record everything on Disney for the week that it was free and Disney was not putting out their best stuff, right? They were like "You can have our '70s hits during the free trial week." Then when it went back to being a pay channel we went and only watched our VHS tapes including Freaky Friday which I've seen a million times.
Aminatou: Okay, well I know what I'm doing this Friday.
Ann: Okay. The point I was originally going to ask you though is when I watched this as a child I was like ugh, I don't want to switch bodies with my mom. Obviously not. But switching bodies in general for a day sounds amazing. How wonderful, like walk around in the world as someone else. This is why all I did was read books as a kid. Now I'm like that sounds like -- that sounds like a very challenging experience. But as a child I was like bring it on. [Laughs]
Aminatou: You know, I'll try anything twice then I'm done.
Ann: Are you trying to say you've already body swapped once? [Laughs]
Aminatou: Listen, I'm going to look into it.
Ann: Sorry, that is the most digressive beginning to a show ever.
Aminatou: I know. I know. Well we're heading out back on the road for a special event in Washington, D.C.
Ann: It'll be at the Benson Ball October 26th and you can go to callyourgirlfriend.com/tour to find a ticket link.
(4:00)
Aminatou: What are we talking about today Ann Friedman?
Ann: Okay, well it's not exactly body swapping so much as leaving your mortal physical self behind and not being around anymore, i.e. death. This is a death episode. I really have been wanting to do an episode about particularly feminist issues surrounding death for a while. A couple of years ago I went with friend-of-the-podcast Beth Pickens who's like a huge death head to see a mortician, activist, and writer named Caitlin Doughty speak. Are you familiar with her work?
Aminatou: No I'm not. Tell me all about it.
Ann: So her thing is she started off as someone who was basically just fascinated by death and then look a job at a crematory in her 20s and then from there has gone on to become basically an advocate for talking about death, de-stigmatizing the process of dying, demystifying it, removing some of the culturally-imposed fears that a lot of people have about even addressing the topic. So she refers to that as the death acceptance movement, death-positive movement, and she founded a collective called The Order of the Good Death in addition to writing lots of books and operating her own funeral home in Los Angeles.
And I think she has some really interesting things to say about not just the physical process of death but like really a lot of social and cultural things that surround it and in fact make things a lot harder on people as they are dying and on the people who love them because we are collectively not really talking with any kind of acceptance or straightforwardness about the fact that we're all going to die. She's also the author of her latest book Will the Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions From Tiny Mortals About Death.
(5:54)
Aminatou: You know, as a fellow death-head I'm very excited about this.
Ann: Yeah, so here I am with Caitlin Doughty. And I'll also say upfront we did this interview in her office and so you can kind of hear some office noises. It's not the sound of bodies being prepared or anything; it's literally just like doors closing and people walking around. So if you hear a little bit of that it's just because we did this interview in person.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: If someone is listening to the first two minutes of this show and they're like "Oh god, I don't know if I can hang in here not only because of existential dread but just because of pure squeamishness or this is my lunchbreak or whatever" how do you do the hand-holding for the squeamish?
Caitlin: When you're say eight years old you start to have the understanding that you are mortal. It's not just you're a cartoon character who's going to wake back up but that you are going to ultimately be out of existence as will your dog, as will your parents, as will all your little friends. It's a really existential, terrible realization for a child.
Ann: Right.
Caitlin: And I think that that's when you start to hear children say, you know, "Oh what does this mean? What is grandpa doing under the ground? What is this dead squirrel?" Someone told me recently that their son kept asking if he's going to poop after he dies. Just these questions that are more bodily than spiritual but they're a cry for engagement. They're a cry for please tell me more about death and what it is. And that's the kind of conversation I'm encouraging. I am not an expert on spirituality or what you should tell your children about the afterlife. That's not what I do. But I can tell you about corpse poop. I can tell you about bugs eating you. I can tell you about decomposition. I can tell you about all these physical things that I think -- truly believe the more you know about them the better you feel. The feedback is I'm scared. I feel depression. I feel anxiety around death. And I find that you having a sort of relentlessly, upbeat, positive I'm going to engage you whether you like it or not attitude works for some reason. Even if they can look at me and go "Oh, I'm never going to be like that person. I'm never going to be that interested. I'm never going to be that obsessed with death." That's fine. You don't have to be and you probably shouldn't be. You probably shouldn't aim to end up like me.
(8:05)
Ann: [Laughs] Let's not judge your life choices like that okay?
Caitlin: I'm very happy. I have a great life. But we give a lot of our public conversation to why it's important not to judge people for their sexual thoughts or thoughts they consider deviant. But we don't say it's totally okay to have thoughts that are morbid as hell.
Ann: I want to backtrack a little bit to your own story and ask how you kind of got from that spark of fear/interest as a kid to this is my profession and my livelihood and my passion. What were the steps in-between?
Caitlin: I was a medieval history major in college. I was very academic and so when I got a job at a crematory when I was 23 years old that was very different than anything I ever saw myself doing. But I had almost an anthropologist's interest in it. I wanted to see what was really going on with death behind-the-scenes.
And it's hard to describe this to people but within two or three weeks of working at the crematory it was like oh, this is what I'm going to be doing. And not just working in the funeral industry but translating what was happening behind-the-scenes to the public.
Ann: So for someone who's listening who is not familiar with your -- is it fair to call it a critique of the modern industry?
Caitlin: Sure, yeah.
Ann: So maybe describe the kind of funeral industrial complex as it exists now in America.
Caitlin: You could say it started in the Civil War where bodies needed to be taken from the south and brought back up north. And so embalmers, this new class of tradespeople, would follow the battles of the Civil War, battle-to-battle, setup tents almost like ambulance takers, prop up abandoned corpses that they had embalmed to show their work like a mannequin in the window.
Ann: Wow.
(9:55)
Caitlin: And they would embalm the bodies in a very primitive way with filling the body cavity with sawdust and turpentine and all these things then send the body -- arsenic, very deadly -- then send the body back up north. Which was a useful service at that time.
But then what you see happening is the Civil War ends and all those same men are like wait a second, that was our job. That was our racket. We need to go out across the country and convince people that embalming is something you need every death. It doesn't matter if they're transporting long-distance; we need to embalm everybody. And prior to that it was a community type of skill. It was a woman's job primarily to prepare the body in the home. The men would build a casket and the family would take care of the death from beginning to end.
The beginning of the 20th century is really this shift to these men convincing the country that it was not safe or it was not legal for the women in the family who had been taking care of the bodies to take care of the bodies and that you needed to hand them over to a professional to do everything. You needed to pay for this service now.
Ann: Ugh, these men. (TM)
Caitlin: Yeah, it's like tale as old as time right?
Ann: Yep.
Caitlin: But it's also about capitalism, industrialization, the rise of cities. And in many ways a funeral service does make sense. Especially when I look at it now I always get so insanely jealous of people who get to work in small towns in funeral service because you have "Oh, we just went down to the local registrar and hand-signed the death certificate then we took mom on a carriage through the streets." And then you get to Los Angeles and death is a bureaucratic landscape here. It's so hard to get the permits. It's so hard to get bodies from Echo Park to Santa Monica to where they need to go. It's just everything is so much harder in a city.
(11:54)
And it would be incredibly hard for a family to do everything themselves now. So many parts of funeral service do make sense. Embalming still makes sense if you're flying mom to Germany or you're flying mom to Mexico and there needs to be a viewing when she gets there. It's just the assumption that in every situation a body needs to be immediately handed over to a professional, embalmed, given a casket, given the whole nine yards that I really question and I think society needs to question.
Ann: Yeah. It's really interesting hearing you lay it out that way too. It's sort of like I can see very easily how fear plays into this, of ugh, the first thing we need to do is get an authority figure involved because I am so scared of what might happen if I'm alone with a body. Like I have not had to make this decision first-person in my own life but I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that too, about how this bureaucracy has kind of fed the fear part of it.
Caitlin: I think it's been devastating frankly for our relationship with death. If I had to sum up my job in one sentence it would be dead bodies are not dangerous. That's my prime -- I will never get tired of saying that.
Ann: [Laughs]
Caitlin: It's my deepest truth that I need to express to the universe which is that we need to redeem the image of the dead body. Because I see the dead body as an incredibly useful tool for grieving, for engaging with your own mortality, for engaging with mortality that you never got a chance to explore in your life because the bodies were hidden away from you. So when mom dies at home yeah there's absolutely a primal fear of just being alone with your own mother. That somehow she transmogrifies immediately upon her death into some creature that's actively decomposing and threatening you in some way and call a professional. It's an emergency. Get someone to get her out of here right now. Okay, and then we can chemically preserve her and then maybe she's safe to be around which is just absolutely untrue and a narrative that's been built up over the last 100 years to our absolute detriment as a culture.
Ann: Yeah.
(14:00)
Caitlin: Because it's completely safe and completely legal to just chill out with mom for a little while. And in fact I only ever hear pretty positive things about that experience, and sometimes very, very extreme positive things about how just settling into a moment with mom and seeing that she's no longer suffering, seeing that her breathing isn't labored, seeing that she's okay now. She's still. She's silent. Seeing the small changes that remind you that she is dead now, which is an important thing to know.
Ann: To synthesize, right.
Caitlin: Exactly. That's an important thing to take in and start your grieving process because it's not going to start and end in that room. It's going to be a long, long process. But kicking that off with I did some final things to care for my mother just like she cared for me growing up. I washed her face. I closed her mouth. I held her hand. I was present with her. I gave her that. I gave myself that. These are important things that the funeral industry has taken away from us in many ways and there are a lot of people in the funeral industry who do want to bring that back because they want absolutely what's best for the family. But there are people in the funeral industry who have so internalized that what they do as a "professional" is so vital and so important that they will continue pushing it on every family that comes through the door no matter whether it's good for them or not.
Ann: I had a question for you about all the ways death is a feminist issue. And I'm already starting to answer that question in my mind given the history that you laid out but I'm still curious about your answer.
Caitlin: It's a feminist issue and in the United States it's a very big intersectional feminist issue because you have immigrants who come to the country. You have different racial/cultural groups in the country that have very specific rich death traditions. And once they were funneled through the American death system it comes out this cookie cutter, specific, very expensive way of death. And the people who want to be served are not served properly. So you have places -- there's something I want to talk about called ready to embalm laws.
Ann: Okay.
(16:15)
Caitlin: Which are laws that exist I believe in 20 or so states which mean that you always have to be ready to embalm which means your funeral home has to be outfitted with all of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure to embalm a dead body even if you are a Muslim funeral home, a Jewish funeral home, a green funeral home like I have, a funeral home that just offers cremations. Even if you are not part of this funeral industrial complex you have to be ready to embalm which is such a high barrier to entry to anyone. There are some states where a Muslim has to go to school for embalming even though they would never, ever under any circumstance embalm a body. So this sort of one size fits all regulations that we've pushed and come up with are not at all reflecting the diversity of our country or what we need.
Ann: Right. I'm curious to hear you talk a bit more about on a policy side. What else is really preventing people from getting the kind of specific experience they want from a funeral home? Or what's preventing . . . what are sort of these enshrined in law barriers that are upholding this idea? These really old ideas of what people need post-death.
Caitlin: Interestingly beyond the ready to embalm laws a lot of the enshrining is done on the individual funeral home level. So for example I don't have a problem -- I mean I have a personal problem with it but technically I don't have a problem with somebody walking into a funeral home and the funeral director says "We will not have a viewing for your mom unless we embalm her and put her in this nice casket." They're a private business. That's the way things are run in the United States and so they're allowed to say we will not offer you this service unless you do this.
Ann: Right.
(18:05)
Caitlin: But what happens is not that. What happens so often is that they say it's actually unfortunately it is the law that she does need to be made safe to be viewed through the embalming process. So families are told explicitly that these extra thousand dollar service here, 4,500 dollar casket here, that these are necessary within the law. Public safety concerns about the dead body. Or she needs a sealed casket because that's protecting her from the ravages of what happens to her underground. Like oh, you mean decomposition? What the body is supposed to do? These narratives that the funeral industry will tell families, that's I think more detrimental than the laws that are in place right now.
For the most part there are laws in certain states that require you to use a funeral director which are wrong and should be changed. But for the most part it's what's happening on the individual family going into the individual funeral home level. And the knowledge that they just don't have and there's no reason they should. You know, it's not like you grow up with . . . it's not like dad sits you on the old knee and says "You should know that you have more power than you think when it comes to the corpse, my son." Like that's not what's usually said.
Ann: Okay, but have you done that with any children you know? [Laughs]
Caitlin: Yes, of course, yeah. Any child I can get is immediate indoctrination into death positivity as soon as I can. But yeah, it's more -- the laws are actually pretty good. The laws do say families have a ton of rights, more than they know. The law says that families can do most things for a funeral themselves. They say they can sit with the body as long as they want. They can keep it at home as long as they want. And by keeping it at home you're skipping over the high prices of the funeral industry.
(20:05)
And again I'm not against even you spending money on a funeral. If you want a funeral that's $25,000 and every part of it you're like oh yes, mother would've loved this, we're having such a good time, great. But what I hear so often is I paid $12,000 for this funeral. Mom looked embalmed. I didn't like it. It was creepy. She had makeup on. It was not how she looked at all. There was this weird, expensive casket that was kind of uncomfortable for me. The plot cost this much money. The hearse cost this much money. We were told we need these prayer cards but we're not even religious. Just these things that you because of the cookie cutter nature of the funeral industry get sold and you feel like you have no other choice but to purchase them because the professional is telling you you need them.
Ann: And you're incredibly vulnerable at that point.
Caitlin: You're so vulnerable, yeah. And that discourse has been going on for 40 years about the American funeral industry. Like this is not new discourse. And it has shown a huge rise in the cremation rate. Just 20 years ago the cremation rate was like 3% in the United States and now it just went over 50% because people are saying well just cremate them then. I don't want to deal with all this stuff at a funeral home. I'm just going to cremate the body and not see it and that's it. But that's also not maybe the best thing, you know, throwing out all ritual and all connection with the dead body is also not the best option.
Ann: I want to talk about your decision to open your own funeral home how many years ago was that?
Caitlin: Four years ago.
Ann: Four years ago, about what that process was like for you of being like oh, I actually want to be someone who's doing this differently. If a lot of this plays out at the level of the funeral home as you say.
(21:45)
Caitlin: There wasn't a funeral home like I wanted to see it in Los Angeles. There's not a lot in the country right now. There are more, we're working on it, but the idea was to have a funeral home that was women-owned, that was based on these principles of green funerals, natural barriers, low-impact viewings meaning no embalming or no expensive caskets, delayed removals meaning we don't have to come pick up your mom right away. She can stay there as long as makes you comfortable and we'll work with you to do that. These principles being -- a family coming in, being involved, witnessing the cremation, working with us to prepare the body. These are things that we really believed in, and by we I don't know who I'm talking about. Me and my eventual -- the people who worked with me really believed in these ideas.
Ann: Right.
Caitlin: And that's why we started and it's been very educational. Running a small business is very hard, especially in the funeral industry there are really low margins meaning you don't -- people think funeral home owners make a lot of money, and funeral home owners, huge, big, fancy funeral homes do make a lot of money. Funeral directors themselves do not make a lot of money. Small funeral home owners do not make a lot of money and it's an incredibly hard job.
Ann: Is that why the casket upsell is so common? Yeah.
Caitlin: Absolutely. It's a low-margin business. For example we're making maybe . . . if you come and have a cremation with us we're making maybe $200. But that's a huge amount of work that goes into everything to coordinate everything, to do all the paperwork, to work with the government, to do the follow-ups. This is a lot of things that go into it that is not maybe clear to the family. I guess that it's really helped me understand where funeral directors are coming from too because I want to make sure that I can translate -- and this is what I'm really, as I'm moving into . . . we're opening up a new funeral home right now called Clarity Funerals. And the reason that I really want to get this model right is because I want to prove to other funeral homes, other funeral directors around the country, other people considering starting this kind of business, other young women considering starting this business, that it can keep all of these principles. Clear, transparent pricing. A lot of compassion, a lot of family involvement. Green ideals. That you can keep all those things and also make a living. That you can also attract people and make money and not be afraid of technology. Like making it a lot easier for the family. It's just a real -- it's a hard tipping point to hit and I want to be there when we figure it out.
Ann: Okay. We're going to take another quick break and then I'll be back with more with Caitlin Doughty.
[Ads]
(28:30)
Ann: It's interesting listening to you talk so much about families and working with families. You know, we talk a lot on this show about friendship and about chosen family and I'm curious about how you've seen that play out in the work that you do. Because often when we talk about say like a medical crisis, how difficult it is even if your primary people are essentially like platonic, how hard it can be to get them in the room and seen as important to your life. And I'm curious about not only how you kind of account for that in your business but whether me as someone who's listening to this who's like wow, when I think about who I want really taken care of when I die the answer is a lot of friends. Not just biological family.
Caitlin: It's the most boring logistical thing in the world but I cannot say it enough times: advance directives, advance directives, advance directives, advance directives.
Ann: And what is that?
Caitlin: An advance directive -- oh I'm going to tell you.
Ann: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Caitlin: You just Google whatever state you live in, or country frankly, Google "advance directive [your state]" and it will come up. In California where I work it's called the Advanced Healthcare Directive. And what that means is that you have the legal right to assign whoever you want control over your body. And usually it's also connected with your medical care. It might not be. Just do a little research in your state. But ideally it would connect your medical and end-of-life care with your post-death care. And that means if you are trans, if you are LGBT in any way, if you just hate your parents or hate your family because they don't support you or your lifestyle, if you love them but you know that you want your partner or your friends to take care of you instead, it cuts off the natural succession of parents because we have something called next of kin and that's how the law goes. So when we figure out who's going to decide who cremates the body, who's going to decide what the service is, we are legally required as a funeral home and you're legally required as a hospital or healthcare professional to go down it's called Section 7100 here down the list. Parents or partner, married partner, is first. Then your parents, or then your children, then your parents, then your brother or sister, niece, nephew. It goes down and down the list. And friend is really not anywhere on that list. Sometimes it can get there at the very, very end.
(30:50)
But if you pop that friend or that partner or that colleague or whoever it is you really trust to do what you want, if you pop them in that advanced directive, advanced healthcare directive, all of a sudden they bulldoze over everyone in line and go straight to the top. And you're going to make sure they do exactly what you want.
And so if you have someone in your life that you would trust to do that it's an incredible tool to make sure that happens. And when you hear stories about people being misgendered after death it's heartbreaking because that could be avoided with an advance directive.
Ann: Right. And so practical question, I Google that. I fill it out in a Word doc or whatever. Do I print it? Do I keep it? What do I do with that?
Caitlin: That's a great question. So some states will require some sort of notarization but most states it's just two witnesses. You sign it. You say who your first choice is, who your second choice is. You can also say other things like I want my organs donated or I don't. I want to be kept alive or I don't. You can answer those kinds of questions for yourself as well which is helpful for dealing with your mortality. And you print it out, make sure that probably two or three different people have access to it, make sure that it's in a very -- some people suggest putting it in your freezer because that's . . . no one's going to be confused about that.
Ann: Sure.
(32:10)
Caitlin: In a folder labeled death documents.
Ann: Death stuff.
Caitlin: Death stuff. But most importantly make sure the person who needs to -- who is your first choice and second choice, they have it. So if for some reason you die unexpectedly and your family swoops in and they know that you didn't want them they can just -- that's their trump card. They just roll in and they're like "Excuse me. Sorry to bother you but here's my advance directive. This is me now."
Ann: Right.
Caitlin: And all of a sudden if there's an advance directive as a funeral professional I can only work with that person. That's the only person I -- and sometimes it's heartbreaking where you know there's a partner or someone involved but the partner had no advance directive. They're not domestic partners. They're not . . . and I am not allowed to even -- if the family doesn't want me to talk to them I'm not even allowed to talk to them legally.
Ann: Important advice.
Caitlin: Important advice.
Ann: That's all I have to say about that.
Caitlin: Corpses aren't dangerous. Get your advance directive if you know nothing else from this.
Ann: Important things to know. Especially reading this latest book which really is so much about like weird shit and bodies. If I could really distill.
Caitlin: Sure.
Ann: And it made me wonder a lot about how . . . working in a way where you're so constantly confronting bodily realities how that has affected your relationship with your physical shell.
Caitlin: I think what further complicates it for me is I am also a public woman.
Ann: Wait, you mean you've been conditioned to think about your body as a woman? What? Huh.
Caitlin: Yeah, you've been conditioned to be commented on on the Internet? Huh, fascinating.
Ann: No way.
Caitlin: Yeah. So there's this place that I think I've tried to get to that's healthy because for a while I was like I have to be this exact weight that neither makes me too attractive nor able to be commented on negatively.
Ann: The Goldilocks seriousness?
Caitlin: The Goldilocks seriousness place where all of a sudden I'm like woman advocate who will not be commented on physically anyway and how do I get to that place?
Ann: Totally.
Caitlin: Where I'm so neutral that nobody gets to say anything about that and they're only engaging with my work which of course is a fool's errand.
Ann: An illusion.
Caitlin: An illusion, mirages. But I think that I'm trying to get to a place now where I just want to be healthy in my own way. I know that certain things like you don't see for example -- and I had to tell my father this, that you don't see many 75-year-olds or 80-year-olds or 85-year-olds who are dying at 300 pounds. They have already passed away earlier. And that's a controversial thing to say but it's what I see in front of me. Same thing with smoking. Same thing with different lifestyles. Same thing with riding a motorcycle. You know, I know firsthand what kills people.
Ann: You make different choices about your body because of the work that you do.
Caitlin: Because of the work that I do, yes. So when you see the evidence in front of you of what is killing people I do less of those things than I used to. I think I also, because I started out as such an intellectual person and we all spend so much time on the Internet and by intellectual person I just mean like trapped in my brain.
Ann: Sure.
Caitlin: And we spend so much time online now that you really do have to force yourself to be like remember I am a body. I'm a future corpse.
Ann: I have to force myself to remember that all the time!
Caitlin: Absolutely. And even if you're just kind of checking in with yourself throughout the day and you do some bends down to the floor and do some breaths this is basic advice but remembering you are mortal and your mortality is not just in your brain. I don't just have a brain in a jar. That I'm also in this physical flesh. I need to celebrate that more engage with that more.
(36:00)
Ann: Yes. You're not going to like upload your brain to the Internet and live forever.
Caitlin: No. And in fact I loathe that idea. I think it's not good for . . . especially since it's mostly a kind of outlandish privileged man who is into that idea.
Ann: Sure. It's like the worst Silicon Valley bros.
Caitlin: Yeah, it's the worst Silicon Valley bros and the worst tech people. And when they say they want to live forever they don't want everyone to live forever; they just want them to live forever.
Ann: Their precious brain. Their life.
Caitlin: Their precious brain. Like oh, thank god this specific -- you know, thank god Peter Thiel will exist forever, blessed be.
Ann: Yeah. But it's funny I ask that body question too even as much as I am someone who -- I would say I'm not the most squeamish in the world, like getting blood drawn or whatever is no big deal, but I had a big, gnarly blister this week and I was just like ugh, I'm kind of grossed out by my corporal self. [Laughs] And I was wondering, I'm like I wonder if Caitlin ever has that feeling.
Caitlin: Oh totally. It always blows my partner's mind that I don't like to watch either horror movies. I don't like to watch videos of operations. I don't like to watch gross things happening medically to a person.
Ann: Yep. Yeah.
Caitlin: For some reason I can make the distinction that when the person's dead I can say they're not in pain and so it doesn't gross me out that much. But when someone is being torn apart or anything like that and someone's obviously in pain I cannot handle it. I do not like it. Nope.
Ann: That's a living body, yeah.
Caitlin: That's a living body. It's a very different thing for me. And I think that there's a lot more in some ways advocacy around the dead bodies is easier for me. It doesn't make sense to me why people fear the dead body so much because the dead body to me is so much less threatening than the living body. The living body feels pain and mental pain and physical pain and has all this stuff wrapped around it. A dead body is just chilling. Like what happens beyond that is all fascinating, scientific stuff. The way it decomposes. The way it's eaten by animals. The way it turns colors. It puts it almost at a remove because once you've been around dead bodies you know that they've left the building. And whether you believe they've gone somewhere else is completely up to your own viewpoint of the world but the reality is they're not there anymore and you can truly sense that and tell that.
Ann: Yeah.
(38:28)
Caitlin: And so you want to be respectful to them and I am but I do not feel the same torture that I do about a dead body that I do pain or suffering in a living body.
Ann: Right. I notice that you've gone out of your way to kind of say anything that is about the kind of spiritual aspect of what happens to your soul when you die, that kind of thing, is the realm of other people's work. But I do find myself curious about whether your personal views on that have been shaped by people you've met or your 12 years in this industry of doing this work or whether you've had an evolution on that end of things.
Caitlin: I don't know that I've had much of an evolution. I think I've had an evolution in accepting and celebrating what I started out believing which is that death is the end. A lot of people are very scared of the void, of the idea of going into blackness and nothingness. I have come to a place where I celebrate the idea of the void. When I think of dying I really do think of it like before I was born. It's nothingness but it's not a nothingness I'm conscious of. I'm floating in a nothing void? Great. God, that sounds fun. That sounds like a vacation. If I could turn my brain off now I would sign up for it, you know? I try the meditation apps. I do all of that. It's hard to not be constantly churning around in your own mind. And the idea of freeing myself from that actually seems like my heaven really, you know? And the idea . . .
(39:58)
I once had a woman say to me "You know it's going to be so amazing when you die. I know you don't believe in heaven but I do and what that means is you're going to arrive in heaven and all of the people that you've helped in the funeral industry are going to be there to greet you."
Ann: Okay.
Caitlin: And I was like oh, that makes me very uncomfortable. I don't know these people so that means I have to like . . .
Ann: A room of strangers. [Laughs]
Caitlin: Exactly. So my introvert self has to show up and work with all these corpses that I worked with?
Ann: She's describing hell. She thinks you're going to hell.
Caitlin: I know. I was like are you damning me to this fate? And she did not. She truly thought she was giving me this gift, bless her, but that is not what I wanted. The idea of continued consciousness in some other realm doesn't appeal to me. And I think that wasn't a natural fit. It was really scary to think about the void or the fact of Nabokov says we're all just like a cradle hanging in the darkness with lights on either side. That is scary to complicate but I have come to a place where I do celebrate that and feel like whatever you can do to make yourself feel more comfortable and more positive about eternity.
Ann: Right. And I think sometimes too make better choices in your time on Earth, right? I want to go back to the book real quick and then I'm going to ask you like a lightning round last few questions.
Caitlin: Oh, okay.
Ann: But I have to start this with a personal story because I could not get it out of my head while reading which is so when I was in junior high, probably seventh grade, we took a field trip to a medical teaching hospital in Madison, Wisconsin where I saw my first corpse. And first like skinned, except for the lips if I remember it, corpse. Maybe I just have a weird -- maybe this is my child brain but it was very traumatic for me. It's part of the reason I don't eat now. Anyway, it was a very I would say not positive confrontation with some of the physical realities of death that you write about. I went home and begged my parents to change their donating their bodies to science designation because I pictured school kids pawing at my dead parents. It was very hard for me. So I'm curious about be they adults or children if there is a too much, too soon when it comes to this stuff and how you kind of find that balance for yourself or maybe for a little person that you're helping to learn about these things.
(42:25)
Caitlin: Yeah, I think that it's all -- from parents especially -- really go with your child's questions and interests. Really go with their level because I am not as concerned about parents coming to children and saying "Here are all the physical dark realities of a dead body, child. Here's a whiteboard and we're going to list them all with a PowerPoint presentation." That does not happen for the most part.
Ann: Sure.
Caitlin: That much more likely scenario is a child having all of these questions and getting shut down by the parents and made to feel like it's not safe to have those questions. It's not safe to ask those things. And so I am much more interested in that child being made to feel safe and like there's an open dialogue but I think that there's also a way to keep things more lighthearted. And yes if the child is asking "I am terrified about grandma dying" of course you can have a serious, loving conversation. But if the child is asking about more wild, interesting, bodily things the conversation can be more open and more lighthearted. And I am not suggesting that when you did that -- which is really surprising they did that with kids so young. That's surprising.
Ann: It was one of two death field trips I had as a child.
Caitlin: I mean I love a death field trip but I . . .
Ann: I mean Catholic school. [Laughs]
Caitlin: I can see why that would be too much. They need to give you a lot of context for that.
Ann: Sure.
(43:52)
Caitlin: Like a lot more context than it sounds like they did.
Ann: Yeah.
Caitlin: You know, and a lot more Q&A, a lot more here's exactly why we're doing this, here's exactly what's happening. This is why it's helpful. This is why this person is doing a great thing for humanity. Here's all the ways your body is fascinating and interesting after you die. Here's all these things you can learn.
Ann: Right.
Caitlin: You know, it sounds like if they did say it it got buried by your experience with the physicality of the body.
Ann: Right, right.
Caitlin: So I think you really need to, if you're going to confront a child with something like that, you really need to give them a lot of context.
Ann: Right.
Caitlin: You know, it's kind of like just throwing kids into hardcore bondage porn as the first thing they see. That's maybe not the -- I mean yeah, go bondage porn, A plus, but that's maybe not the first thing a 13-year-old should see that shapes their brain.
Ann: Sure.
Caitlin: So working up to that kind of context. And I hope that you've been slowly able to work through that fear. Yeah.
Ann: I'm coming back. [Laughs]
Caitlin: You know, a body for medical sciences is great. That's a great thing to do with your body.
Ann: Sure. And what about adults though? Because I think that there is -- the resistance is a little bit different if you're thinking about a 37-year-old woman who doesn't want to think about the realities of death as opposed to a seven-year-old.
Caitlin: Well I think there is a difference but there's not that much of a difference. Like this book is also speaking to adults who never got to have that conversation.
Ann: I did read the Justin Timberlake reference. I know you're speaking to adults and not children. [Laughter]
Caitlin: Yes, yes, definitely there's -- and I think that precocious . . . I think the precocious 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds will enjoy it but it really is for adults who want to talk to kids about this or just never -- their inner child has never had anyone tell them about corpse pooping. Their inner child has never had anyone tell them about can you or can you not have a Viking funeral for grandma? These are questions that you maybe have or would make you feel a little more comfortable with death but nobody's given you that opportunity in all your 37 years.
Ann: Right.
(46:00)
Caitlin: And so, you know, let me talk to the eight-year-old within you.
Ann: Right. It's a permission slip to ask all your weird questions.
Caitlin: Exactly. Exactly.
Ann: Okay. So my lightning round questions for you.
Caitlin: Oh mean, I don't know if I can do lightning round.
Ann: I know you can do it. I know you can do it.
Caitlin: Okay. Deep breaths. Exist within my body.
Ann: So one thing we always ask everybody is about like who the friends are who shape your day-to-day in a real way and I'm just wondering if you want to shout out someone specific in terms of someone who's really supported your work or you or your core people.
Caitlin: Oh, that's fantastic. My core people are the people that I work with and they're also young women. I'm going to shout out Sara Chavez, Louis Hung, and Suzanna Alba. Also Amber Carvley. I'm going to shout out everyone I work with.
Ann: Shout out everyone you work with.
Caitlin: All the women I work with?
Ann: Yes.
Caitlin: They are so fantastic at their job. They are so devoted to the mission that we have at our non-profit at the funeral home. They make working every day fun because they're so good at their job. Like there's nothing better than being surrounded by competent women. Very fantastic, smart team of women.
Ann: Right. Okay, what is a book that you find yourself recommending again and again? It can be on the topic of death or whatever.
Caitlin: Hmm, there are so many books I recommend again and again.
Ann: I mean you can just list them all too, yeah.
Caitlin: Elif Batuman's The Idiot. I love it so much. I just read Fleishman is in Trouble which I absolutely loved.
Ann: Taffy Akner.
Caitlin: Yeah, she's great. As far as death books The Denial of Death by Earnest Becker I recommend as a sort of fundamental text for me that really exposed why we fear death as a culture. And it doesn't say a lot about what you can do about it but it does help you be aware of it.
Ann: [Laughs]
Caitlin: Yeah, those are my three.
(47:50)
Ann: Okay, favorite snack?
Caitlin: Lately it's been almonds because I've been trying to get more protein. Honestly getting an almond milk iced latte every day with a little honey is one of the profound joys of my life.
Ann: I always say my first sip of coffee in the morning is honestly one of my peaks every day.
Caitlin: It really is. I live around every day, I'm at what point will my almond milk latte become mine? And then I have to go. I have to leave my house. I have to leave my job. I have to leave whatever I'm doing to go get it then when I get it it's just such a joy.
Ann: And finally where can our listeners find your work, find like all of -- I know you are so good about putting all this info online so they can fill out the forms they need to fill out and find out what's going on in their part of the world.
Caitlin: So if you have any questions about the bigger topics we've talked about, green death care, advance directives, orderofthegooddeath.com. We have a really robust resource section that me and my colleagues have put together that will answer pretty much any question that you have. If you want to find me Ask a Mortician on YouTube is a good place. The Good Death is my handle everywhere. Just Google mortician and my annoying face will pop up.
Ann: [Laughs] That is amazing actually. You've made it. You've made it that you are the top page of Google results for mortician. Caitlin thanks so much for the work you do and thanks for being on the show.
Caitlin: Thank you for coming by.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: How lovely. I think everyone should think about death so much more than they do.
Ann: Yes, we should 100% think about death. Maybe not all the time, maybe not as much as Caitlin does.
Aminatou: All the time Ann. All the time. It will bring you so much joy.
Ann: I also love the fact that she has tons of resources that she mentioned, like if you don't have an advance directive or if you're looking for a little bit of support and guidance as you timidly tread into thinking about these issues for the first time she has lots of resources on her website that we will link to in the show notes.
Aminatou: See you on the Internet boo-boo.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.