At The Hairpin, Caitlin Doughty, mortician and author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, talks about death positivity, women in the funeral business, zombies, and why she thinks the recent move toward alternative burial practices is more than just a trend:
I don’t want to say it’s a trend because that makes it seem like it’s going to be a fad for a couple of years and then go away… like artisanal pickles or something . . . I think people — and I’ve found especially women, for some reason — are very, very interested in being closer with death and having more of an understanding of death. And the traditional methods we have now, which is take the body away immediately and bury it in the ground with lots of chemicals, is not really having an intimate relationship with death. It’s pretty much the opposite of that.
