Brief Bio:

Caitlin Doughty (born August 19, 1984, in Oʻahu, Hawaii) is a prominent American mortician, author, blogger, and YouTuber, widely recognized for her advocacy in death acceptance and reform of Western funeral practices.
Doughty pursued a unique academic path, earning a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in medieval history with a particular focus on death and culture. She furthered her education by obtaining an Associate of Science in Mortuary Science from Cypress College, providing her with both a theoretical and practical understanding of death and its cultural significance.
She rose to public prominence as the creator and host of the popular web series “Ask a Mortician,” where she addresses common questions and misconceptions about death, funerals, and the human body with candor and humor. Doughty is also the founder of The Order of the Good Death, a collective of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists dedicated to making death a less fear-inducing and more transparent process.
Central to Doughty’s philosophy is the belief that confronting the reality of death, rather than avoiding it, leads to healthier grieving and a more meaningful understanding of life. She advocates for greater family involvement in the death process, including practices like washing and dressing the body at home, and supports alternative funeral arrangements such as natural burial and alkaline hydrolysis. Her work consistently challenges the societal notion that “talking about death is deviant” and empowers individuals to exercise their legal rights over the disposition of their loved ones’ bodies.
Available Works in the Colorado Book Club Resource
The Book Club Resource has 8+ copies of the titles below available for 8+ weeks at a time to reading groups across the state. The descriptions below are from Amazon.
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Fine the Good Death (2017)| Discussion Questions

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry―especially chemical embalming―and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death (2019) | Discussion Questions

Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids. What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral?
In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Doughty blends her mortician’s knowledge of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five distinctive questions posed by her youngest fans. In her inimitable voice, Doughty details lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn colors during decomposition? And why do hair and nails appear longer after death? Readers will learn the best soil for mummifying your body, whether you can preserve your best friend’s skull as a keepsake, and what happens when you die on a plane.
Beautifully illustrated by Dianné Ruz, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? shows us that death is science and art, and only by asking questions can we begin to embrace it.
Quotations:
- “I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don’t admit it.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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!'”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “If we ignore our death, we end up just going around completely oblivious to why we do the things we do!”
- “Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it’s intimidating to think of adapting it for television.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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?”
- “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!'”
- “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.”
Notable Facts:
- Pioneer of the Death Positive Movement: She is widely credited with founding The Order of the Good Death in 2011, a non-profit organization that spearheaded the death positive movement. This movement advocates for more open, honest, and personal engagement with death and dying.
- YouTube Star: Doughty created and hosts the highly popular web series “Ask a Mortician,” where she answers viewer questions about death, decomposition, and funeral practices with a blend of macabre humor and straightforward education. The series has garnered over 290 million views and more than 2 million subscribers.
- Bestselling Author: All three of her books—Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory (2014), From Here to Eternity; Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2017), and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death (2019)—have been New York Times bestsellers.
- Licensed Mortician and Funeral Home Owner: Beyond her advocacy, Doughty is a certified mortician and founded Clarity Funerals and Cremation in Los Angeles (formerly Undertaking LA), a funeral home that aims to empower families to be more involved in the death care process.
- Advocate for Funeral Reform: She champions alternatives to traditional Western funeral practices, such as natural burial (green burial), human composting (terramation), and aquamation (alkaline hydrolysis), pushing for their legalization and wider acceptance across the United States.
- Academic Background: She holds a BA in medieval history from the University of Chicago, with a focus on death and culture, and an AS in Mortuary Science from Cypress College, providing a unique blend of historical and practical knowledge about death.
- Early Life Influence: A traumatic experience at age 8, witnessing a child’s death, significantly impacted her and led to her later fascination and advocacy for death acceptance, stemming from her belief that not confronting the reality of death hinders healthy grieving.
Videos/Interviews
- My Super Special Grave: An Interview with Caitlin Doughty | Last Podcast on the Left – Patreon (September 10, 2018)
- Caitlin Doughty: The Young Mortician | Ep.83 End of Life University (March 27, 2017)
- “Everything We Do Is Because We Die”, says Caitlin Doughty – Chicago Review of Books (October 31, 2017)
- “We pathologize the dead.” Mortician Caitlin Doughty on funeral rituals and why death is often hidden away – Summer Nights/KCRW (August 1, 2020)
- A Mortician Talks Openly About Death, And Wants You To, Too – NPR/Fresh Air (October 8, 2014)
Sources
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