Caitlin Doughty Quotes & Sayings

I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don't admit it. — Caitlin Doughty

I had lived my entire life up until I began working at Westwind relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them - stacked in the crematory freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those I loved. No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses. — Caitlin Doughty

Going around not fully believing that you're going to die is really problematic because it affects how you think about the future of the planet, about the future of your own life, about the decisions you're making. — Caitlin Doughty

Unfortunately, not every dead body goes to what might be considered "noble ends." There is a slim possibility that your donated head will be the head, the head that holds the key to the mysteries of the twenty-first century's great disease epidemics. But it is equally possible your body will end up being used to train a new crop of Beverly Hills plastic surgeons in the art of the facelift. Or dumped out of a plane to test parachute technology. Your body is donated to science in a very . . . general way. Where your parts go is not up to you. — Caitlin Doughty

The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert. — Caitlin Doughty

Death in its natural state can be very beautiful. When you think about a body that's died of natural causes - family taking care of it - all of that is very beautiful. — Caitlin Doughty

Good afternoon, here I am in your multimillion-dollar home covered in people dust and smelling vaguely of rot. Please pay me a large sum of money to mold the impressionable mind of your teenager. — Caitlin Doughty

Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is "red in tooth and claw," demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created. — Caitlin Doughty

A corpse doesn't need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn't need anything anymore-it's more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom. — Caitlin Doughty

If we ignore our death, we end up just going around completely oblivious to why we do the things we do! — Caitlin Doughty

I am a mortician who tells you that you don't necessarily need a mortician. — Caitlin Doughty

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television. — Caitlin Doughty

In many ways, women are death's natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women "give birth astride of a grave." Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop. — Caitlin Doughty

It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely. — Caitlin Doughty

Death drives every creative and destructive impulse we have as human beings. The closer we come to understanding it, the closer we come to understanding ourselves. This — Caitlin Doughty

In America, burial means an embalmed body in a heavy-duty casket with a vault built over it, so that the ground doesn't settle. That body is encased in many layers of denial. — Caitlin Doughty

Though you may have never attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. If this is too abstract, consider this number: 2.5 million. The 2.5 million people who die in the United States every year. — Caitlin Doughty

No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you've seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi's face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination. — Caitlin Doughty

Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a roundtable discussion on nonexistence. — Caitlin Doughty

A cult leader alone in his beliefs is just a crazy dude with a beard. — Caitlin Doughty

Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause. — Caitlin Doughty

The definition of 'morbid' is an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Unfortunately, there's no word to mean the perfectly healthy preoccupation with death, which is what I have. — Caitlin Doughty

Though you may never have attended a funeral, two of the world's humans die every second. Eight in the time it took you to read that sentence. Now we're at fourteen. The dead space this process out nicely so that the living hardly even notice they're undergoing the transformation. Unless — Caitlin Doughty

There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. "I'll love you forever, darling," and "Will it be a diamond this year?" are two fine examples. But young lovers take note: above all else, the phrase every girl truly wants to hear is "Hi, this is Amy from Science Support; I'm dropping off some heads. — Caitlin Doughty

Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation. — Caitlin Doughty

The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived. — Caitlin Doughty

pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, / Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before. — Caitlin Doughty

The Cremulator" sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot. I — Caitlin Doughty

For me, the good death includes being prepared to die, with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware; it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain. The good death means accepting death as inevitable, and not fighting it when the time comes. This is my good death, but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said, "It won't help to hear what I think about death." Your relationship to mortality is your own. — Caitlin Doughty

Vaults and caskets are not the law; they are the policy of individual cemeteries. Vaults prevent the settling of the dirt around the body, thus making landscaping more uniform and cost effective. As an added bonus, vaults can be customized and sold at a markup. Faux marble? Bronze? Take your pick, family. — Caitlin Doughty

They say you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. The same holds true for a dead body. Put lipstick on a corpse and you've played dress-up with a corpse. — Caitlin Doughty

I think about death most of the day, every day. We can't escape death, and choosing to ignore it only makes it more scary. — Caitlin Doughty

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death. Overcoming our fears and wild misconceptions about death will be no small task, but we shouldn't forget how quickly other cultural prejudices--racism, sexism, homophobia--have begun to topple in the recent past. It is high time death had its own moment of truth. — Caitlin Doughty

Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all. — Caitlin Doughty

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me. — Caitlin Doughty

...it would be a lie to describe the experience as anything less than exhilarating, the repulsive going hand in hand with the wondrous. — Caitlin Doughty

One of the many lessons to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is that Americans are not accustomed to seeing unattended bodies on the streets of a major city." Understatement of the century, Doctor. — Caitlin Doughty

Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends." Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. — Caitlin Doughty

Such was the case with dead bodies. Every time you opened the box you could find anything from a ninety-five-year-old woman who died peacefully under home hospice care to a thirty-year-old man they found in a dumpster behind a Home Depot after eight days of putrefaction. Each person was a new adventure. — Caitlin Doughty

Treat your online affairs as part of your affairs that need to be in order - your bank, your Internet bill - you need to have people who know what you want. — Caitlin Doughty

The biggest problem is the funerals that don't exist. People call the funeral home, they pick up the body, they mail the ashes to you, no grief, no happiness, no remembrance, no nothing. That happens more often than it doesn't in the United States. — Caitlin Doughty

Because we've never encountered a decomposing body, we can only assume they are out to get us. It is no wonder there is a cultural fascination with zombies. — Caitlin Doughty

Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late 19th century, dying at a hospital was reserved for people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. — Caitlin Doughty

Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. — Caitlin Doughty

Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return. — Caitlin Doughty

The great triumph (or horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth. — Caitlin Doughty

He had been a criminal, but he was also beautiful. I wasn't there to judge, only to make him clean and dressed him in his powder-blue polyester suit with the ruffled tuxedo shirt. Holding up his arm to wash it, I paused: I was comfortable. I wanted other people to know that they could do this too. The washing, the comfort. This confident, stable feeling was available to anyone, if society could overcome the burden of superstition. — Caitlin Doughty

I want a natural burial. Just straight into the ground in a shroud. — Caitlin Doughty

A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves. — Caitlin Doughty

Death should be KNOWN. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is. — Caitlin Doughty

All the body wants to do biologically is decompose. Once you die, it's, 'Let me out here! I'm ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!' — Caitlin Doughty

I understood that I had been given my atoms, the ones that made up my heart and toenails and kidneys and brain, on a kind of universal loan program. The time would come when I would have to give the atoms back, and I didn't want to attempt to hold on to them through the chemical preservation of my future corpse. There — Caitlin Doughty

One of the things that was most shocking to me about starting to work in the funeral industry is just how industrial the environment is. — Caitlin Doughty

There is not much to enjoy in a layer of inorganic human bone dusted behind one's ear or gathered underneath a fingernail, — Caitlin Doughty

Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind. — Caitlin Doughty

This isn't for other people," he explained. "This is for me. I'm terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don't want to die. I want to live forever. — Caitlin Doughty

The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us. — Caitlin Doughty

For thousands of years, we did have death surrounding us, and we did have people die in the home. You would take care of your own end. You would do ritual processes, and you would be involved in it, and that's been taken away in the Western world. — Caitlin Doughty

As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends. — Caitlin Doughty

Looking mortality straight in the eyeis n easy feat. To avoid the exercise, we choose to stay blindfolded, in the dark as to the realities of death and dying. But ignorance is not bliss, only a deeper kind of terror. — Caitlin Doughty

The home funeral - caring for the dead ourselves - changes our relationship to grieving. If you have been married to someone for 50 years, why would you let someone take them away the moment they die? — Caitlin Doughty

Buddhist say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientist confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you've been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn't set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating mental circuits. — Caitlin Doughty

As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of "dignity." Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening's performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion. — Caitlin Doughty

The girl kept up at night by fear, crouched under the covers, believing if death couldn't see her, then he couldn't take her. — Caitlin Doughty

I work with a group called Compassion & Choices in California. It's attempting to get death with dignity legalised in California, the idea being that so goes California, so goes the rest of the U.S., at least. — Caitlin Doughty

If people really knew what they were getting into with their third chemotherapy treatment, or getting a pacemaker when they're 92, if they really knew what that was going to mean, they might say no, and we should give them that information. — Caitlin Doughty

Unable to choose how I would die physically, I could only choose how I would die mentally. Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a rewards for a life well lived. — Caitlin Doughty

Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families. — Caitlin Doughty

Not only is natural burial by far the most ecologically sound way to perish, it doubles down on the fear of fragmentation and loss of control. Making the choice to be naturally buried says, 'Not only am I aware that I'm a helpless, fragmented mass of organic matter, I celebrate it. Vive la decay!' — Caitlin Doughty

The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m. — Caitlin Doughty

Accepting your own mortality is like eating your vegetables: You may not want to do it, but it's good for you. — Caitlin Doughty