“Holding the space is crucial, and exactly what we are missing. To hold the space is to create a ring of safety around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly,… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“Dead people look very, very dead. It is difficult to grasp what that means, since it’s unlikely that any of us will stumble across a roving pack of dead bodies in the wild. We live in a world where people rarely die in their homes, and if they do, they’re carted off to the funeral home the second after taking… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share
“The most salacious stories—bones ground in a metal blender or torture-spike eye caps—had the power to disrupt people’s polite complacency about death. Rather than… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system. The surgeon Atul Gawande wrote in a devastating New Yorker article on aging that “there have been… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share
“He explained that he talks about death "all the time" with his friends. They ask each other, "Hey, what you want when you die?"… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“Many children and grandchildren of immigrants, have, like Sarah, found themselves severed from their family’s cultural rituals. The funeral system in the United States… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on mathematics (e.g., 36.7 percent a "barbarous act"), but… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“Rather than let author and environmentalist Edward Abbey be buried in a traditional cemetery, his friends stole his body, wrapped it in a sleeping bag, and hauled it in the back of his pickup truck to the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Arizona. They drove down a long dirt road and dug a hole when they reached the end of it,… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share
“The ICU was not the thrill ride I had expected. Turns out, they never called the high school student in from the reception desk… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share Image
“Untreated, a dead person’s face looks horrific, at least by our very narrow cultural expectations. Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The color drains from their faces. These images reflect the normal biological processes of death, but they are not what a family wants to see. As… — Caitlin Doughty Copy Share
