Caitlin Doughty

Doughty's second book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, illustrated by Landis Blair, chronicles her travels to see first hand death customs in Mexico, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Bolivia, and, in the US, an open air funeral pyre and a body farm. Published in October, 2017, the book reached #7 on the LA Times Bestseller list and #9 on the New York Times list.

In September 2014, Doughty's first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory was published by W. W. Norton & Company. It is a memoir of her experiences that serves as a manifesto of her goals. The book is named for the 20th-century pop song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", in reference to both the literal smoke of cremation and the associated emotions. W. W. Norton's Tom Mayer outbid seven other publishers for the worldwide rights to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in 2012. The book debuted at #14 on The New York Times and at #10 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller lists of hardcover nonfiction for the week ending October 5, 2014.

Since writing the book, Doughty began working to launch Undertaking LA, a funeral service alternative to the mainstream funeral options. It started as a seminar series meant to educate the public on their death options under California law. As of 2014, the service consisted of "two licensed morticians telling the public, 'you don't need us!'", instead advocating DIY funerals.

Doughty is the founder of "The Order of the Good Death" an inclusive community of funeral industry professionals, academics, as well as artists who advocate for and make possible, a more death informed society. "The Order of the Good Death" is presented to the public as a website that shares articles and information by prominent figures in the death industry that make individuals more informed about the inevitable conclusion of one's life. In previous years the public had an engagement with the cemetery as a community place, which people do not have anymore. The Order of the Good Death is Doughty's way of creating a community while teaching individuals to accept death. Doughty's work has a strong focus on ways of "making death a part of one's life". "If Doughty and the Order's death-care revolution is successful, Americans will be more comfortable contemplating mortality and dying— thus preparing for it, seriously considering alternatives such as green burial, composting, and using crematoria that have carbon-offset policies".

Doughty's YouTube series "Ask a Mortician", began in 2011, humorously explores morbid and sometimes taboo death topics such as decomposition and necrophilia. By 2012, after 12 episodes, "Ask a Mortician" had 434,000 views, and by October 2018 the channel had 186 clips with a total of 57,000,000 views. Doughty uses an irreverent, offbeat and surreal tone to attract the largest possible audience for a subject that is otherwise off-putting and depressing to many potential viewers. Doughty said, "I take my job and this whole movement incredibly seriously. I do [the videos] with a sense of humor, but it's my life, and it's really important to me that a positive death message gets across."

After graduation and moving to San Francisco in 2006, at age 22, she sought hands-on exposure to modern death practices in funeral homes, and after seeking employment for six months, was hired in the crematory of Pacific Interment (called Westwind Cremation & Burial in her book) despite her lack of any experience in the funeral industry. Pacific Interment could be called "the anti-Forest Lawn", referring to what Doughty sees as the theme-park-like, kitschy corporate funeral behemoth that much of modern American funeral practice is modeled on. She picked up corpses from homes and hospitals in a van, prepared them for viewings, cremated them, and delivered the cremains to the families. Dealing with bureaucracy, such as acquiring death certificates or obtaining the release of a body from the coroner, occupied much of her work. Her boss and coworkers at Pacific Interment often tested her with very hands-on assignments, as on her first day at work she had to shave a corpse, and Doughty unflappably accepted any task, a willing jack-of-all-trades, eager to prove her mettle.

Caitlin Marie Doughty (born August 19, 1984) is an American mortician, author, blogger, and YouTube personality known for advocating death acceptance and the reform of Western funeral industry practices. She is the owner of Clarity Funerals and Cremation of Los Angeles, creator of the Web series "Ask a Mortician", founder of The Order of the Good Death, and author of three bestselling books, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory in 2014, and From Here to Eternity; Traveling the World to Find the Good Death in 2017, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death in 2019, both published by W.W. Norton and Company.

Doughty's main inspiration for her advocacy work was the frequent absence of the decedents' families in the process, which she attributed to the Western death anxiety and death phobia. She wanted to encourage death acceptance, and a return to such practices as memento mori, reminders of one's own mortality, resulting in healthier grieving, mourning, and closure after the inevitable deaths of people around us, as well as starting a movement to broaden the funeral industry to offer more funeral options, such as natural burial, sky burial, alkaline hydrolysis (liquid cremation), or promession. Embalming began to dominate in the US after the Civil War. A century later, in the 1960s, Americans began to turn away from embalming and burial, as cremation became increasingly popular, so that today it is used in almost half of deaths in urban areas. Cremation is seen as a threat to the traditional funeral industry, but has a reputation as the more environmentally friendly option. This change can be traced to the lifting of the ban on cremation by Pope Paul VI in 1963, and to the publication in the same year of The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford, documenting abuses in the funeral industry and criticizing the excessive cost of funerals. Mitford's book, and the movement it started, was one of Doughty's inspirations, but Doughty feels that while Mitford had the right target, the profit-driven funeral industry, Mitford erred in sharing the industry's, and the public's, unhealthy desire to push out of sight and avoid thinking about the corpse itself. Doughty seeks to build on Mitford's reforms but in a direction that embraces the reality of death and returns to funeral and mourning practices that include spending time with and having contact with the dead body itself.