Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

This is a fascinating book and I absolutely loved it! The author, who is a mortician, tells the story of how she started working in a mortuary and then went to « death school » to learn how to embalm dead people. This sounds gloomy and depressing, but she talks with much humour and honesty about different people she gets to « meet » in the mortuary, the different families, the babies, the hospitals, the fights between mortuaries, the business-like approach of many mortuary homes, how detach we’ve become to our dead, the ugly, the funny, the sad, the gross, the ironic, the tragic, the history, and overall, what she thinks about our society’s perception of and attitudes towards death. In short, she thinks we should « reclaim » our dead and stop being so afraid of death.

I wish I had read this book before my mom died last month! And I think everyone should read it. Although maybe eating lunch while listening to the section on body decomposition might not be the best idea…

If you do a search with her name, you’ll find many interesting videos about her fights to get « composting » legal in many American states, as well as aquamation, which I had never heard of. Fascinating woman!