![]() That means committing to staring down your death fears-whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, that pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. As Doughty writes on the website for the Order of the Good Death, her work is about “making death a part of your life. Nobody wants to die, but to die and to die terrified are vastly different experiences. She is also the creator and guiding voice of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and filmmakers whose work deals with embracing mortality. The 14 videos in the Ask a Mortician series, in which Doughty wryly answers viewer questions such as “Can a casket explode if it is totally sealed up?” (sometimes), “Do corpses soil themselves after death?” (sometimes), and “Are they going to take my 92-year-old mother’s body and dissolve it in acid?” (no), have been viewed almost 600,000 times. A recent YouTube commenter named her the “Bill Nye of Death.” Her forthcoming book from Norton, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (And Other Lessons from the Crematory), was the object of an eight-publisher bidding war. She writes, produces, and stars in the popular web series Ask a Mortician. We almost entirely ignore, repress, or euphemize our own death, but Doughty wants us to not only accept but also rejoice in death, our “most intimate relationship.”Īt 28, Doughty may very well be the world’s most famous practicing undertaker. Which is entirely in line with her professional and philosophical vision: she prompts strangers to confront, accept, and embrace the inevitable extinction of their personality and dissolution of their body. You had this engagement with the cemetery as a community place, which we don’t really have anymore.” This collision point between somber burial ground and riotous rock venue, a space that survived modern economic realities by resurrecting a medieval communal impulse, was a fitting setting when, on a quickly cooling Friday afternoon last November, Doughty taught me how to die. “In the Middle Ages, in the Victorian Period, … cemeteries were places where commerce took place, and lovers walked through the graves to meet at night. This “is how cemeteries used to be,” says Caitlin Doughty, AB’12 (Class of 2006). The rock band the Flaming Lips has played there. The cemetery hosts movie nights and a popular Día de los Muertos festival. Recently a dilapidated graveyard on the brink of closure, Hollywood Forever has become a vibrant public venue after changing hands in 1998. Punk titan Johnny Ramone is memorialized with an eight-foot bronze statue of the musician playing guitar. Peacocks amble around the graves of Fay Wray and Rudolph Valentino. Marble obelisks tower over squat tombstones of Armenian immigrants, the latter boasting detailed photographic etchings, as if someone managed to render ’70s-era wedding Polaroids into stone. Located on Santa Monica Boulevard and abutting Paramount Studios, Hollywood Forever is one of Los Angeles’s oldest, most idiosyncratic cemeteries.
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