- What is your favorite organ to handle in the human body?
- Oh, the brain, obviously.
- Really?
What happens when you go six feet under?
Well, I'm talking about that today,
while watching "Six Feet Under,"
with the special guest, Caitlin Doughty.
Let's do it. Ask a mortician.
Be-woo!
Tell me how you found yourself
in this very unique career position.
What drew you to this field?
- (laughs) I was always interested in death.
I went to college at the University of Chicago.
I was a medieval history major.
There was a lot of death in the Middle Ages,
and that was kind of my focus.
But I wanted to see what happened in real 20th century,
21st-century American death.
Got a job at a crematory,
and I've been doing this for 13 years now.
And have never left. - Wow.
Oftentimes, the subject of death is a very taboo subject.
How did you decide to start a YouTube channel on it
and also approach it with a respectful
yet lighthearted manner?
Which I do with medicine all the time.
It's very different
when you're talking about strictly death.
How did you find yourself here?
- Well, I think it's probably some of the same
struggles that you have,
which is knowing that a spoonful of sugar
helps the medicine go down.
You want to create a cone of safety
around what you're doing,
so when they're watching your channel, people go,
"Oh, wait a second. It's not weird to have these questions.
"It's not wrong to have these questions, or morbid,
"or hypochondriac to have these questions."
- Here we go. Our first scene.
(tray scraping)
(zip rasping)
- Well?
- Pretty good corpse, I have to say.
I have a lot of opinions about bad corpses
in television shows.
This one I would say the blood,
the kind of sallow skin, the sinking of the skin already,
I think it's looking pretty...
I don't know how many corpses you see?
- (laughs) That's so funny that you asked that
because I feel like I work on
preventing people from becoming corpses.
And then, unfortunately, once they become corpses,
I don't have much dealings with them.
So I have less experience.
And I'm gonna look for you to guide me
on what would be a realistic corpse.
- Oh, I am so here. I am here for you.
- [Announcer] Top morticians rely
on Living Splendor embalming fluid.
Living Splendor. - Wow.
- [Announcer] Only real life is better.
- (laughs) Is this an infomercial within the show?
- It's an infomercial within the show.
I think these infomercials within the show
are trying to explain the modern funeral industry,
a little bit, and this actually does a fantastic job.
There are embalming fluids and humectant fluids
called things like Living Splendor.
The way that they could sell embalming
and preservation to a family was by saying,
"It's not only gonna preserve them,
"it's gonna keep you safe,
"and it's gonna offer a lifelike appearance."
Which I happen to not agree with.
I think a dead body, you should look dead because, you know,
spoiler, that's what they are.
If you don't do anything to the body,
the body has eyes up, sort of like a....
Would be my demonstration of that. Like...
(tense music)
That's a trocar.
Do you know what that does? - No.
- In the embalming where you need to remove
all of the cavity and organ fluid,
you stab it in, down by the belly button,
and it has a sucking function.
So you're stabbing and it's sucking,
and out your fluid comes.
And then it's replaced with a strong preservative chemical.
- What is the strangest thing you've ever removed
from the inside of a patient's body?
- I can't think immediately of something
that I've pulled out from inside a body that was strange.
It's more after a cremation.
I would say that something that even that's sort of normal,
but it still gets me every time is titanium hips.
After they come out of a body, and a cremation,
they have this like beautiful bluish-green patina.
They almost look like glamorous sockeye glasses.
- What happens to the titanium hip?
- You can ask for it back.
That rarely happens,
but I love it when a family asks for it back.
I'm like, "Yes, you've come to the right place.
"We will do that for you."
Oftentimes, it's recycled. It goes to recycling.
Sometimes it's made into airplane parts.
It's made into street signs.
- [Rico] Nate!
What's up! - This is Rico.
Okay. Rico is fantastic.
Rico went to the same mortuary college that I did.
- Oh, wow. - He's they're young embalmer
and he's very enthusiastic
about being a restorative specialist.
There are certain embalmers
that have a real deep appreciation
for what are called hard cases.
Someone's been shot in the head.
Someone hasn't been found for five days.
And their job is through wax and through little gizmos
and gobits and potions and creams.
And not really make them look like themselves,
but can kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again
and bring them into some resemblance of themselves
so the family can see them.
- Ready?
One, two, three.
(both groaning) (body thuds)
- Whoa.
- Angel lust.
- Does that happened a lot?
- Yeah. Fair amount. (chuckles)
You can be dead, but you're never really dead.
- No.
No, no, no, no, no, no. - (laughs) You're like, "No!
"You can be really dead." - Yeah.
The idea of angel lust, which has a post-mortem erection,
is very specific to extremely rare traumatic deaths.
Like, you're suddenly shot in the head,
or you're suddenly strangled,
or you suddenly have some sort of traumatic death.
But I personally have never seen it in an older man
at a nursing home.
- So basically, it's like decapitation
in the midst of intercourse. - (laughs) Right.
Or maybe like autoerotic asphyxiation.
- What's that's smell?
It's like a... - Disinfectant, burnt coffee.
Embalming fluid.
- Yum. - The smell that I
always remember from when I was
in my anatomy cadaver lab was formaldehyde.
Is that something you guys use a lot?
- It is.
But actually, the formulant that they use
in anatomy cadaver labs is actually even more intense
than what we use in an average funeral home.
That really-
- Potent. - Has to have a high index.
- I really appreciated being able to study the human bodies.
That's what got me into science.
But what I will say was not the easiest,
was Friday before a Monday exam
I would be in the cadaver lab by myself at midnight.
Nighttime, sounds of happening, things moving,
maybe my imagination playing tricks.
Scary, scary stuff,
but I managed to get through it and do well on the test.
- That was probably the first time
you had any meaningful interaction with a dead body.
I mean, this is kind of the American condition,
in some ways, is that we go our whole lives
until all of a sudden our mom dies.
Most of us, if you're not a mortician or doctor,
all of a sudden you're faced with this corpse
and you have to figure out what that means to you.
In an existential way. Is it spiritual?
Is it a ghost? What is it?
And you're having all these reckonings with what it is
at the worst time of your life.
- You know, it's interesting
because I, unfortunately, did lose my mom
right in the middle of med school,
when I was in the cadaver labs.
I will say it's a very different experience
looking at a body of someone who you don't know
versus someone who is close to you.
You expect to feel certain things
when you're looking at the body of a family member
that may not come because it looks different.
Like, you know the person based on their facial features,
their structure, their little intricacies
of how they react to the way you speak.
And when that's not there, it almost feels unfamiliar.
Have you ever seen that happen with family members
or perhaps, yourself? - Absolutely.
That to me is actually the most important reason
to be with the body.
It can actually be healthy to look at the body and go,
"That's not Mom anymore. That's a shell of her.
"And I see that she's not suffering anymore
"'cause she's not all grimaced up in pain,"
and that can be comforting for some people.
And then for other people, that may say,
"Wait, she looks exactly like she did in life.
"She just looks like she's sleeping
"and that's comforting to me."
I sort of encourage people to just sit there
and let what happens happen,
and not put too much pressure on yourself
to feel a certain way when you're with a dead body
because you're grieving.
And what you really want
is just to make sure that the only way out is through.
- "For the velvety look and feel of actual living tissue."
No way. (laughs)
- You do not even wanna know.
They have these plastic, like, screws, only bigger,
that they, like, stick into people's orifices
so stuff won't spill out.
- Tell me about the screws. (Caitlin laughing)
- I was like, "Are you gonna let me get away
"without responding to that?"
They're called A-V plugs,
and the A and the V stand for anal-vaginal.
They do kind of look like butt plugs.
A plastic kind of swirly butt plug.
After a embalming,
because there's such pressure in the body,
there's always a chance
that the body will purge a little bit or leak a little bit
out of whatever open orifices there are.
So you basically get something like a butt plug
after you die.
- What is your favorite organ to handle in the human body?
- Oh, the brain, obviously.
- Really? Okay. - Yeah.
- Why the brain? - Because it feels like
you are holding the seat of the soul.
Because you're really like holding who the person was
and their personality and the seat of their intellect.
- Wow. - Even if it's just
while you're transferring it
to sow up the head properly or whatever you're doing.
It just feels like a real privilege to me.
- Hepatitis', syphilis.
Ooh, positive for gonorrhea.
- What?
- Have you ever gone, "Ooh,"
before giving someone a test result?
Have you ever gone, "Good, good, good!
"Ooh." - Ooh.
I don't and for this one reason.
I don't let anything surprise me in the room.
I review things before I speak to the patient,
or I review them before I called the patient.
'Cause a lot of results are given by phone.
If I'm gonna be giving a result
that's life-changing in a way,
I will usually ask the patient to come in to discuss it.
- How do you psych yourself up to make that call?
If I knew I had to deliver potentially
life-changing difficult medical news,
I would just put that off till the end of the day.
- I don't like to put it off to the end of the day
'cause it becomes harder.
I like to do it as quickly as possible, meeting as early on,
and as forthcoming.
The more you sort of bounce around the point,
the more it causes tension between you and the patient.
So I try to be a straight shooter, if you will.
Layout all the facts, get them to ask questions,
say the news back to me so they understand
exactly what's going on, then offer just comfort.
So sometimes that could be silence.
Sometimes that could be answering questions.
It really depends on the news you're breaking
and an individual's personality that's hearing the news.
- Oh, I want you to give me my terminal diagnosis
when the time comes.
- Tell us where my viewers can learn more about
the things you're involved in.
- You can just Google Caitlin mortician
or Caitlin Doughty and find me.
I have a YouTube channel, Instagram, Twitter.
All the usual things.
And if you need a funeral, Clarity Funerals & Cremation,
in Los Angeles, California. - Oh, links down below!
Hashtag not sponsored. - No, we're not.
Yeah, not sponsored by my very small funeral home.
- Does chocolate cause acne or pimples?
Click here to find out.
Or see what happens when you hold your pee for a long time.
Right here or right here.
And as always, stay happy and healthy.
(upbeat music)