Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? (Caitlin Doughty)
OVERVIEW
America’s favourite mortician is back, answering 35 of her younger audience’s most pressing questions about dead bodies. In “Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?” Caitlin Doughty tackles queries like can I keep my parents’ skulls? (no), do conjoined twins die at the same time? (pretty much), and can a corpse donate blood? (yes, but only within the first 6 hours). This book is lots of fun and is dedicated to future corpses of all ages.
Of all the questions/answers, my personal faves were:
· Will my cat eat my eyeballs? Yes, but not right away. They’ll go for soft, fleshy bits like your lips and eyelids first.
· Why don’t bugs eat bones? Insects don’t really need calcium.
· Will I poop when I die? Probably.
· Can we eat dead people? Yes, cannibalism is legal in the US (but desecrating a corpse is not, and Creutzfeldt jakob disease is pretty unappealing… so actually No).
· What do dead bodies smell like? Like your Grandma’s cloying perfume sprayed over rotting fish that’s been baking in the sun for a few days.
· Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral? Like setting her out to sea with a flaming arrow? Actually, Vikings never did that! And it wouldn’t really work… you’d end up with a half-charred corpse bobbing in the ocean.
· What would happen if you swallowed a bunch of popcorn kernels before you died and then were cremated? Nothing. Kernels need to be dry and pop best at 365F (cremators burn at about 1,700F).
Fun fact though, a pacemaker will explode. So if you have died, make sure to bring this to your mortician’s attention right before they slide you in.
I love Doughty’s writing style and this was a great follow up to her “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons From The Crematory.” Doughty’s approach to death is that it needn’t be taboo, and that talking frankly about death and decay is key to breaking the taboo.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Get comfortable with dead stuff
It seems only right to steal one of the “to dos” from my review of Doughty’s “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” Removing the terror of death and decay through education is a key piece to removing the terror of mortality. The more I read and learn, the less scary the concept of death becomes (it’s still terrifying, let’s get that right, but maybe just a little better).
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes (although there’s a chapter on the “white light” people see nearing death – and while Doughty offers the scientific explanation, she does allow that religious folks may have other interpretations).
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? Questions about death answered by a funny mortician.
Who should read this book? Tiny (up to interpretation) mortals who have questions about dead bodies.