The corpses that changed my life | Caitlin Doughty | TEDxVienna

Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Jim Taylor Do you remember meeting your first corpse? Yes. I was 23 years old and had just started working in a crematorium. My position there would not only be to cremate the dead but also to prepare the bodies so that the grieving families could see them one last time. I won't say that my first encounter with a dead body, on the first day at this new job, went without a hitch. I walked into the sterile prep room and there he was: lying under a white sheet. I was a little terrified of him, to be honest, I slowly pulled the covers down to reveal his face, and he looked so dead.

But despite his glassy eyes, his gaping mouth, his sunken skin, even though he looked more dead than he had ever seen anything dead, the room still seemed to pulse with electrical energy. There was something so visceral, so powerful about being in the same room as a corpse, something that my society, and yours too, has systematically kept away from us our entire lives. I said it was the first time I had come across a dead body, as formally, but it wasn't the first time I had seen a dead body. When I was younger, probably in elementary school, I went to see a distant relative.

The funeral home had chemically embalmed him, meaning they drained his blood and put a mixture of formaldehyde and water into him. That procedure puffed up his skin and dyed it to make him look a little more like a wax figure. He was an older man, but he wore a full face of makeup, including pink lipstick, probably not the shade he would have chosen. (Laughs) Now, 15 years later, at the crematorium, I had finally met a corpse I liked better: no embalming, no makeup, no coffin, just the reality of death. Even better, I didn't have to go up to the coffin, look inside, and then run away scared.

In fact, he was going to be able to spend a lot of time with this corpse. In fact, what my boss wanted me to do was shave it. I've never met a corpse, I've certainly never shaved a corpse, but it turns out it's not that hard. Shaving a dead person's face is not that different from shaving my legs, for example. Use a lot of cream, short movements, be careful. This might be the moment when you start thinking about how you would feel in this situation, and maybe you're the kind of person who says, "You know what, this is no big deal.

It's just a dead body, it's my job." I can handle it," or you might be the kind of person who says, "Is that a corpse? (Laughs) Whatever case you're in now is completely fine. Since that first day at the crematorium I have been lucky enough to make death my

life

. I've been in the industry for nine years and traveled the world, and I can tell you that things we might consider transgressive (shaving a dead body, for example) don't even begin to cover intimacy with other people. cultures have with their dead. Last summer I visited South Sulawesi in Indonesia.

There are remote villages that keep the dead in their homes for years after their death. In fact, my interpreter lived with his mummified grandfather when he was a child, for seven years. Every morning they took him out of bed, propped him against the wall, put him in a new suit, and at night they put him back in bed, the same bed in which he and his brother also slept. The week I was there I slept in a house right next to one of these

corpses

. She had only been dead for a few weeks at this point, but with the preservation that had been done on her, she looked pretty good, to be honest.

They allowed me to bring him some snacks, which I did. For the people in these towns, none of this amounts to: "Ugh! You have your grandfather's body in your house. How strange!" For them, when you talk to the dead, they listen to you; When you offer them food, they thank you. This is not something out of the ordinary. These are your family members, they are members of your community and they deserve to be treated as such. In the West, we have never had such a close relationship with death, and I am not suggesting that bringing all the mummies into our homes is what we should do to fix our very broken relationship with death, but before the professionalization of death care death, before we started paying people to take care of our dead, we were actually much closer to them than we are now.

Over the last 100 years, we have outsourced our death. It's out of the reach of families and into the hands of professionals, and in that transition, there have been some pretty big myths associated with the corpse: scandalous and defamatory accusations, if you ask me. The first is that the body is not safe. It is. Unless her grandmother died of some wildly infectious disease like Ebola (which if she died in Kansas City, Tokyo, or Vienna, I can assure you she didn't), it's completely safe to be around her. The second is that families are not allowed to get involved, that a funeral director has to step in and take the body immediately backstage.

That's not true either. Death is not an emergency. You can take the time to sit with the person, hold their hand, tell them stories, and, if you feel comfortable and daring enough, even help wash and dress their body for burial or cremation. This type of empowerment and closer intimacy with the corpse is why I founded a funeral home in Los Angeles called "Under Taking LA." We are a non-profit organization, which means we can help people in Los Angeles and around the world feel like it is safe and legal to do this with their loved ones. About a month before opening this funeral home, I made a short video with the website BuzzFeed.

In it, I explained more or less what I just explained to you now: it is completely safe and completely legal to care for your own dead. I made it in front of a simple black background with some animations created by your staff. It was a fairly tame and uncontroversial video, or so I thought. We've been doing this, as I said, in the West for a while. What he was describing was nothing more than a simple home wake. In fact, what humans have been doing for thousands of years. In Jewish culture, it is the 'shemira': respectfully protecting the dead from the moment of their death until their burial.

In countries like Jamaica and Haiti, wakes are a much livelier affair: all-night vigils to support the family with singing, dancing, drumming, wailing and even games like limbo. In the United States, the wake also has a storied history, long before apple pie and baseball. In fact, before the rise of private funeral homes in the 20th century, all wakes were held at home, each conducted by his own family. And yet, less than a century later, here's a brief sampling of the top-rated comments in this BuzzFeed video. "I have a pretty open mind, but this is very strange." (Laughs) Okay, that's fair.

That's an opinion, okay. "This girl really scared me." (Laughs) And you know, I shouldn't have worn those snake contact lenses and those fangs and that cape in the video; That might have been too much. (Laughs) I could see why that would be so creepy. "So you throw a party and the corpse relaxes on the couch? What if everyone thinks she's some guy who's passed out and starts drawing dicks on her face?" (Laughter) (Applause) Oh, excuse me, "LOL." (Laughs) "I'd be crazy to play with a dead person like she was a doll. Seriously, that lady needs to see a psychiatrist." The shocking thing about these comments is not that people believe these things;

We've all been on the Internet enough times to know that people believe much worse things. The most shocking thing to me is how quickly culture changes, that in less than a century, our entire system of death can be so completely outsourced, erased, poof, gone. The wake, once such a fundamental ritual, is now seen as playing with a corpse as if it were a doll by someone who needs to see a psychiatrist: me; That would be me, in this case. (Laughs) Breaking these myths will not be easy. The death care industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and they are not interested in families regaining this type of control over death, but in the corpse I met that first day at the crematorium and the thousands of

corpses

I have lost. encounters I have met since then have

changed

my

life

.

They have brought me closer to my own mortality, as well as the mortality of everyone I love. When I was younger, my mother took care of me every day, and when she dies, you better believe I'll be the one taking care of her. Someday you will lose someone you love, whether it be your own mother, your partner or even a child, and the decision you make will be entirely yours, but I hope you will consider getting involved. The people for whom we have been able to create this situation feel empowered. Yes, they save a lot of money in a society where funeral costs are too high, but more importantly, it changes the tone of their grief.

There is a wonderful reality when you allow yourself to get closer to death. Our ancestors knew it and it is time for us to rediscover it. Thank you. (Applause)