[Applause]
>>CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Hi!
[Applause]
Hello, Portland!
[Applause]
For those of you who have NO idea who I am, first of all, how dare you.
[Laughter]
Second of all, I have pulled this headline from Wired Magazine to give you a
clearer picture: “This mortician thinks YOU should spend more time with corpses.”
So now that we're all on the same page, [Laughter], I think it will sort of make more sense why
I have decided to title this talk: “Follow Your Dreams: Or, the Blessings and Curses
of a VERY Specific Advocacy.” [Laughter]
Now, to be honest, I don't consider my advocacy “extremely specific.”
Like, we're all kind of aware that we're in these decaying flesh bags that will eventually
die.
But that doesn't stop people from seeing my work and my advocacy as incredibly niche.
So, as I talk about this today, we’ll start by talking about where this incredibly specific
advocacy all started.
The first publication that ever wrote about me was The Huffington Post in 2012, and the
reporter actually interviewed my mother and this is what she said, "We came to find out
that she had been interested in death for quite some time and that we had somehow missed
the signs." [Laughter]
Which is very, like, 1990s anti-marijuana commercial.
“She was eating all those potato chips, but I didn't see the signs!”
And with all due respect to my mother, who is amazing and I love very much, there were
signs. [Laughter]
Starting way back in second grade, when I found this award, which I got a “Super
Duper Job to Caitlin Doughty” for, what?
“A good witch story.” [Laughter]
Wish I could find a copy of that.
What I DO have a copy of is my diary from third grade.
And "diary" is kind of an expansive term, because it was a Hello Kitty notebook that’s
completely empty except for one single entry, which is, “Dear diary, today is Halloween.
Finally, it’s come!”
[Applause] [Laughter]
Or, should I said, “finly” it’s come!
We’re working on the spelling, still working on the spelling.
Keep in mind that I grew up in Hawaii. [Laughter]
Born and raised my whole life.
So that means that I was really trapped between two worlds.
Here we have me in high school, clearly committing to the combat boots and leaning very moodily
against a chain link fence, but I believe this was school spirit day, so I'm also wearing
aloha print shorts and a Hawaiian surf t-shirt.
Keeping between two worlds continued, I would often (sorry again, mom) sneak out, starting
at 16 or 17, to go to these goth and fetish clubs downtown, of which we had two: Flesh
and The Dungeon. [Laughter]
And then I would sleep in my car and wake up the next morning to go to my weekend
activity, which was of course, my competitive outrigger canoe paddling team. [Laughter]
Because that's what you do in high school in Hawaii.
I also went to an incredibly conservative Episcopalian all-girls school, the uniforms,
chapel, the whole deal, and we had Christianity courses every year.
In 10th grade, we had to write a big final paper on a character from the Bible.
I, of course, chose Satan.
[Laughter] [Applause] [Cheering]
“The Prince of Darkness, and his role in the Christian
Bible,” on which I got an A+ because I researched the CRAP out of Satan.
I knew more about Satan than any Christian schoolgirl ever. [Laughter]
This carries on.
In 12th grade, I am made editor of the school yearbook.
And I was SO happy.
I loved, loved, loved doing this job.
And in the first of two "who let her do this?" examples we have today, I was allowed to theme
the entire yearbook around my, at that time, favorite goth-punk band, AFI.
[Laughter] [Applause]
Anyone?
Some AFI fans in the house!
Okay, great. [Laughter]
This is the opening page that I Photoshopped, which appears to be some of
my classmates writhing in pain of hell and damnation. [Laughter]
I pulled this out for this talk, and I don't like to look at it very often.
[Laughter] Because, every time I do, it reminds me of that Ira Glass quote, “For the first
couple of years that you're making stuff, what you're making is not very good.”
Nowhere is this more profoundly true than this yearbook.
So at last I graduate and I go to college on the mainland.
This is my big chance, I’m on the mainland now.
And in the second of “who let her do this?” examples, I was manager of the student-run
coffee shop at the University of Chicago.
And I was allowed to launch a school-wide renaming campaign of beloved “Uncle Joe's
Coffee Shop,” and choose the winner, which I deemed “Hallowed Grounds,” which is
the name to this day.
[Laughter] Because you can't rename it all the time, and I argue is a good name for a
coffee shop.
To graduate in medieval history, of which I was a medieval history major, to graduate
you need to do a thesis, a long, researched thesis.
And my thesis was, “In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Birth Accusations in Late Medieval
Witchcraft Theory.”
Which means that, many years later, I was awarded my thesis, my degree in medieval history,
for a good witch story. [Applause]
And I ended up eventually just a year or so ago doing a video on it, which
I called, “Demonic Babies: A Guide for New Parents.”
[Laughter] And, just really quickly because I know some of you are interested.
There was a medieval theologian named Thomas Aquinas, and he proposed that you could have
a human male and a female demon, a succubus, would have sex with the human male, and take
his semen and transmogrify into a male demon, or an incubus, and impregnate a human woman
with that semen and thus a demonically-inspired baby could be born.
That’s neither here nor there, I just wanted to make sure we are all clear.
[Laughter] So this is all to say, that by the time I was 23, I graduated from college
and living in the Bay Area, it was not a massive shock or surprise when I took a job at a crematory,
and I was the crematory operator, which means I was the one who was there behind the scenes,
doing the cremation of the bodies.
It sounds bizarre to say this, but within two weeks of doing this job, I knew that that
is what I was going to do with my life.
I don't just mean working in the funeral industry.
I mean doing exactly what I'm doing right now, translating what was going on behind
the scenes in the funeral industry to the general public.
Because I was seeing things every day that were blowing my mind.
For example, this is a cremulator.
How many of you know what a cremulator is?
[Solitary Woo!]
Some cremulator fans in the audience.
[Laughter] When you put a body in a cremation machine, the heat is so high that it takes
all the organic material away from the body and what you’re left with is big bone fragments
that are inorganic material, so they’re very brittle.
So you take them over to this machine, the cremulator, kind of a cross between a Crock-Pot
and a blender, it whirs for 20 seconds and that’s where we get the ashes, the smooth
sandy ashes, or cremated remains that you’ve probably seen.
So things like that, I was like, why don't people know this?!
People need to know this!
This is gonna make them feel more empowered and aware of their own mortality.
So really, I started right then.
And over the next 12 years, this is essentially what I have been doing with my life.
And over that time, my advocacy has expanded to include green and natural options for death
care, new technology, family-involved death care, encouraging people to, as the headline
said, hang out with corpses and not be afraid, and low-income families and how to help them
get better service around death care.
We all, as advocates or activists or artists or whatever you in this room are, we have
a lens through which we look at the world, or understand the world, a paradigm.
And mine just happens to look like this.
[Laughter] I look at the world through death-colored glasses, you could say.
This is my boss, death, and I always have to be checking in and seeing if I am doing
the best thing for death awareness in our society.
Now that we know how we got here, briefly, I’ll talk about the things I learned to
be the blessings and curses of having this very specific public advocacy.
A pro is that there is no competition!
[Laughter] Which works incredibly well for me, because in this job, being the world's
most famous mortician is like being the world's most famous accountant.
Nobody else wants this job.
There are incredible advocates who are doing work on the ground, but they don't necessarily
want to do it publicly, which I completely understand.
And for me, I'm not a very competitive person.
I live in Los Angeles, where I see people fighting to get their screenplay made or to
be seen in some way, and that seems genuinely exhausting and genuinely very hard.
I remember I was on the basketball team in high school, not because I was any good, but
because I was tall and they made me.
[Laughter] And I didn't have any of that “Eye of the Tiger” drive.
I just wanted to trot off the court and keep running and read my book under the bleachers.
That's all I wanted to do.
But with that lack of competition, the con is that doesn't stop me from comparing myself
to people all the time, even though no one is doing what I'm doing, it’s very easy
to -- your brain will still find something at which you are failing at.
For example, I write books and I'm very proud of these books that I have written.
But I have friends and colleagues who I consider REAL writers, like WRITERS writers, whereas
I’m just like, “Will my cat eat my eyeballs?”
I also make videos.
There are people who are making videos and webseries who are filmmakers, and we still
edit on, I’m not kidding you, iMovie.
That's how these are made.
But I think the worst one is that I run a funeral home in Los Angeles, and there's this
real narrative of, like, I'm a badass female entrepreneur.
[Laughter] Whereas my actual lived reality is like, LA City Use Seller's Permit, I don't
understand!
It’s just a nightmare of small taxes that I have forgotten to pay.
[Laughter] And I'm like, what is this bill for $232?
I have no idea what it’s for or where it came from.
Another pro is that it is easy to see value in what I do immediately, in the sense that
cultural change around death is incredibly difficult because people don't want to face
it or talk about it.
But because I work with so many amazing people who are so smart and so willing to give their
lives over to death in this way, we’ve been able to make change.
In Seattle, in Washington, they just legalized human composting.
[Applause] Which is a radical, fascinating, eco-friendly new way to dispose of a dead
body, and my close colleague Katrina Spade led that charge and created this method.
We really thought it was going to be years before it was legalized, and here we are,
you know, in the year of our lord 2019 and it is legal in Washington and hopefully more
places soon.
In California, what I'm fighting for on the legal front is usually playing catch-up to
what Oregon has already done, especially in death with dignity lies, and alkaline hydrolysis,
or water cremation laws, which we both legalized in California as well.
It’s a lot of being able to see real legislative value in what you’ve been able to do.
But if you put yourself out there, in any way, you're not someone who is an advocate,
you are an attention-seeking harlot.
And you’d be surprised, or maybe no, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, at the men in my
industry and the things they have to say about me, especially the more traditional funeral
directors.
Everything from she's a starlet looking for her 15 minutes of fame.
And I always want to tell them, if I was really looking for my 15 minutes of fame, funeral
industry reform is not what I would have gone with.
[Laughter] Surely I could -- I consider myself a relatively intelligent person.
I could have come up with something a little snappier than that.
But it’s especially hurtful when it comes from within your own community.
This is a letter, or an email, that I got five or six years ago when was starting to
become a more public advocate.
This is what it said, “You are doing in the U.S.A. more or less what I'm doing in
[her country], but in a much bigger, louder, more entertaining way!
For me too, it is a calling and I love my work, but unlike you I’m not great at attracting
publicity and not naturally attention-seeking.”
I mean, I guess there's a more charitable way to read this, which is that she is saying
something nice, but I didn't see it that way, especially when I was first starting out.
And nowadays, I wouldn't have responded to this, but I did at the time.
This is what I said, “I'm naturally an introvert.
But at a certain point, what I believed and what I advocated for became more important
than the desire for privacy and the fear of being judged.”
[Applause] Which I think is something that most activists or advocates go through, not
that everyone’s an introvert, but the idea of, man, if I'm putting myself out there and
I feel any pride at all in what I've done, does that mean I'm all in it for myself?
This is only for me, just because I'm proud of what I do?
And the answer is no, of course.
Final pro: I do get to, now at this point, make money for doing something that I care
incredibly deeply about.
And I'm not advocating for that for everyone.
I think it’s equally valid to have a 9-to-5 job, come home and be community engaged, and
have hobbies and a rich life outside of your job.
For me, it’s really nice to be able to do that.
I was just in Moscow speaking at the Moscow Urban Forum, and then I got to spend the day
with the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin, which is something I’ve wanted to do.
Talk about top of my bucket list.
[Laughter] One of the most iconic corpses of all time.
I got to just go and visit him, and then sit, which I highly—TripAdvisor, 5 Stars, major.
Sit across Red Square, eat my cherry blintz and drink my cappuccino and go visit Lenin.
It was incredible that this was my job, and one of those moments where you’re like,
my god, I get to do this.
At the same time, when you work in a non-profit like I do, or you start a non-profit, or you
work as an advocate or an activist, you really have to excavate whether or not you have very
negative money narratives that tell you that if you earn any money at all, a living wage
at all, you are a bad person.
Because I definitely had that.
And it has only been recently that I’m like, wait a second, I can do more of this work
if I'm not terrified about money all the time.
And so really figuring out what those narratives are that are running your life and running
your financial life, and saying, actually, we need to be paying our activists and our
advocates a living wage.
[Applause] I was going to make this whole talk about money, [laughter], but they wouldn't
let me.
Can I put 401K data up there?
No.
Fine, okay, I get it.
So I wanted to leave you with a final thought that was going to be incredibly profound and
wrap this all up together, but then my boss stepped in and told me this was the first
talk that I have ever done in my adult life where I have talked about primarily myself
instead of what I do and getting across to you.
So I’m just going to leave you with one piece—if you take nothing else from this
talk, I need you to know that dead bodies aren't dangerous.
And the reason you should know that is because they are actually safer than living bodies,
because living bodies are still sneezing, coughing, and excreting, where dead bodies
are not doing that anymore.
After a body dies, most viruses and bacteria and diseases will die within several days,
and you’re legally empowered to hang out with a dead body.
I just wanted to get that in.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]