Ask a Mortician - Caitlin Doughty #146

ReWild Yourself

Caitlin Doughty — mortician, author and death acceptance advocate — joins us for a candid and humorous exploration of our mortality. Caitlin is on a mission to help our death-phobic society overcome anxieties about death and make death a part of life. She sheds light on all areas of death and the dying process in her popular Youtube channel “Ask a Mortician” and New York Times best-selling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. She founded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death and co-founded Death Salon. She also runs Undertaking LA, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit progressive funeral home that empowers families to have a closer relationship with their loved one’s death.

In this episode, Caitlin guides us through our rights — post mortem — and encourages us to consider a question not many are prepared to face: How would you like to die? Throughout our human history, families were responsible for the care of their own dead; the practice of transferring death care to a funeral home is a relatively new custom. Caitlin illuminates the non-funeral home & natural death care options that are available to us — at-home funerals, embracing decay, death doulas, natural burials and conservation cemeteries. Empower yourself to embrace the natural process of death and meaningfully interact with the dying process.

Episode Breakdown:

• Show Introduction:
  • SurThrival Pine Pollen Sale, upcoming product teaser & I'd Rather Hunt + Gather t-Shirts
  • Hunt + Gather updates: Eating groundhog, roadkill deer and more!
  • Q&A: The sustainability of hunting for 7.5 billion people
• Introducing Caitlin Doughty
• How Caitlin become enamored with the post mortem aspect of anatomy
• Theory and practice
• What is the common response to humor about death?
• The civilizing of civilization — what’s contributed to our fear and avoidance of death
• Caitlin’s exploration into the death rituals of cultures around the world
• Conservation cemeteries
• Death doulas, the non-funeral home experience and death acceptance
• The legalities of handling a dead body
• Immaturity about death
• Elders vs orders
• How Caitlin would like to die
• Caitlin’s prognosis for the future of the human species