Overview
Caitlyn Doughty is a "mortician, author, blogger, and YouTube personality," the YouTube channel being Ask A Mortician, here. Her YouTube channel has 850,000 subscribers. Find her at Wikipedia here and her personal website here. She also co-founded a "death acceptance" organization called Order of the Good Death that runs a website and conferences - see also Wiki here.
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Born in 1984, Doughy grew up in Hawaii, where her father was a high school teacher, and went to college at University of Chicago.
After her degree in medieval studies, she migrated to Oakland (like you do) and worked in a low-level job in a crematory while, well, finding herself. She later went to mortuary school and migrated to LA, where she runs (ran) a small funeral service with several partners and specialized in both home funerals and green burials. She recently announced the funeral home Undertaking LA, was closing but may reorganize.
Live On Stage
On September 9, 2019, she did a book reading, book signing, extended Q&A at the funky old Regent Theater (built 1914; now a nightclub) at 4th and Main in the old LA banking district. The reading was sponsored by Skylight Books, one of LA's best independent booksellers, on North Vermont (Vermont and Hollywood Blvd). Caitlyn was a lively and natural on-stage presence, joie-de-vivre instead of joie-de-mort.
Books x 3
Her three books are "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," a coming-of-age memoir, and "From Here to Eternity," subtitled, "Traveling the world to find the good death."
And newly, "Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?" - in the format of Q&A about unusual death situations for, ah, "young readers."** All are available with author-read audiobooks. See a video where she talks about her career path, here.
Further Thoughts
Jessica Mitford
I went to med school and became a pathologist, but my encounters with Death Theory precede and follow.
Long ago, in high school in rural Iowa, our library had a copy of The American Way of Death (1963) by Jessica Mitford, a fascinating book that I couldn't put down as a 16 or 17 year old circa 1975. The book is an expose of the American funeral home industry and its sales methods.
In addition to the morbid curiosity and the business strategy value, it occurred to me this week that the book may have been formative in another way, because it revealed an elaborate web of drivers, levers, and machinations going on behind the surface of something as simple-seeming as a funeral home in a small town. It was a trigger to think about everything (How does this bus system work? Why is it this way?) to which I owe a lot.
Thomas Lynch
Later, in the 2000s, I ran across the essays (and a PBS video) about Michigan mortician and wonderful essayist Thomas Lynch. See his essay books "The Undertaking" and "Bodies in Motion and At Rest" and "Booking Passage" (most circa 1995-2005). I saw him on stage downtown at the LA Public Library in 2005 (paired with Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball) - here. I drew on Lynch's writings as I went through the experience when my mother died in 2011.
Caitlyn Doughty
And that brings up to today, where in the past year or two I've found the works and videos of Caitlyn Doughty both enlightening and meaningful. That, and bike rides now and then through the fabulous Hollywood Forever Cemetery, just a mile from my home, where on the last pass through I ran across both the 93rd annual Valentino Memorial underway (August 26) and the crypt of Mickey Rooney.
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* Other women with serious/eclectic YouTube channels include Cari with Easy German (460,000 subscribers), an entertaining and education intermediate-German series - here. And Anja, who runs the similar-but-different eponymous Learn German With ANJA! channel - here. 450,000 subscribers.
** For another woman's book on cats and death, see "Waiting For My Cats to Die" by New Yorker Stacy Horn, here. Though not related to cats, another woman writing on the death topic is Mary Roach with "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers."
