With nearly 250 million views on YouTube and three successful books, millennial mortician Caitlin Doughty has launched what she calls a “death positive” movement through her series, "Ask a Mortician."
She uses humor to educate people on death and normalize conversations surrounding it. With videos such as “Can I Keep My Parents’ Skulls and Tattoos” and “Morbid Minute: Coffins vs. Caskets," Doughty hopes to help people understand that death is a part of life and we should be comfortable talking about it.
“Death is one of the best ways to check in with how comfortable you are with yourself as a person,” she said. “And at the end of the day, this is stuff that people need to know.”
On a special episode of "LA Stories," host Giselle Fernandez revisits her conversation with Doughty, who makes sure people are aware there are options when it comes to handling the death of a loved one outside of the usual burial or cremation.
Doughty says that embalming or cremating a body is bad for the environment, and she encourages people to consider more environmentally friendly options. She is an advocate for aquamation, a process similar to cremation but is done with water instead of flames, and the recently signed-into-law human composting, a method in which human remains naturally decompose.
“The most striking difference between natural burial and a more conventional burial is the impact on the environment,” she said. “I think that a natural dead body that's not embalmed is more realistic and a more beautiful aesthetic experience for the family.”
Through her LA-based funeral home called Clarity Funerals, Doughty hopes to help people rediscover family-led deathcare and environmental death options.
In 2011, she founded the Order of the Good Death to create a national dialogue around the funeral industry and the financial and emotional burden many funerals put on families. Through the nonprofit, she provides financial support to other nonprofits and individuals in order to make the process more equitable and affordable.
“Death in America right now is an incredibly high cost, and it leaves out the family from being involved in the process,” she said. “And that's where we want to come in and help those families out.”
Watch "LA Stories with Giselle Fernandez" at 9 p.m. every Monday on Spectrum News 1.