Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? - Big Questions From Tiny Mortals About Death, written by mortician Caitlin Doughty, is the book to answer all those questions about death you've been too embarressed to ask. When faced with the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, very few kids would answer “undertaker”. Caitlin Doughty, perhaps most famous for her YouTube channel Ask a Mortician, certainly wouldn’t have. “I never had any sense of the funeral industry as anything other than this dark, archaic hole with a man in a suit putting electric green fluid through a tube into a corpse. It never even occurred to me that I could be a part of it,” she says. Oh, hey. It’s me, Caitlin. You know, the mortician from the internet. Or that death expert from NPR. Or the weird aunt who gave you a box of Froot Loops and a framed photo of Prince for your birthday. I’m many things to many people.

The second novel by the co-writer and star of Gavin & Stacey follows three female friends over the course of four decades. Each woman faces challenges that test the limits of their friendship, from addiction and infidelity to toxic relationships, grief and betrayal. Throughout, Jones’s trademark warmth and humour suffuse the novel with comedy and pathos, making for a heart-warming, entertaining and, at times, deeply moving story. Men Who Hate Women Death is terrifying, she admits. But if a loved one dies, she suggests forgoing the cakey makeup and the chemical preservations. Facing death directly, especially at a traditional wake, Doughty says, can be a positive step toward navigating your new reality. What happens if you die on an airplane?

There can't be another human on earth who can load a body in The Cremulator with great respect and care, write genuinely informative and laugh-out-loud books about death, and vlog about such delightful (for me anyway) and at times scandalous subjects, all with compassion, humor and charm, and make them seem not at all morbid. Those who have read Caitlin Doughty's previous books know her talent for taking the usually bleak and depressing subject of death and turning it into something entertaining. A bit on the gross side perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless. What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral? Listen, sometimes people just don't fit inside a casket. And funeral directors have to do something about it. It's our job. The family is counting on us. If we are left with no other options, we will have to amputate their legs below the knees to make them fit.

That's a very difficult question. In America, they're called something like quasi property and what that means is that nobody truly owns a dead body. The person who is the next of kin, meaning the wife or the son or whoever is closest to the dead person, can make all the decisions for the dead body, but nobody truly owns it. And it's in the public interest to, or allegedly in the public interest, to bury a body in a respectful manner [and/or] cremate a body in a respectful manner.” Do people actually request to taxidermy or deflesh their loved ones?

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That's actually one of our biggest questions that we ask on our cremation forum is did mom have a pacemaker? Because if it's not removed, the batteries that are inside of it contains so much compressed energy that once they're met with the 1,800-degree flames of the cremation machine, they do explode. And as a former crematory operator, I would open the door of the cremation machine to watch the cremation process as it was happening, maybe move the body around to make it more efficient. And if I happened to be doing that and there's a pacemaker in there that we didn't catch, that could explode and potentially be very harmful for me or just the inside of the machine.” Do Viking funerals work? Not really. Doughty says many of the Viking funerals you see on TV — cue “Game of Thrones” — aren’t the real deal. Not everyone feels the same. Some people find comfort in denial. Doughty’s humorous and transparent approach can be controversial, with some of her viewers and readers criticising her for not discussing grief enough. But she’s anything but insensitive, and knows better than anyone about the impact of losing someone: “You’re never going to be the same again. But how can we turn this into something healthy as opposed to something else? Turning grief into healthy grief is not a disservice to the person who died, even if it was someone incredibly close to you. It’s not a disservice to mourn them in a healthy, open way. You’re never going to get over it, no matter what, but you remember the experience with a sort of melancholic, whimsical engagement. You can really do the work, or you can just remember it as a source of deep trauma. You’re going to remember it one way or the other – so what is that going to look like?”

First, put the body into a very large instapot (euphemistically called a 'pressurised stainless steel cremation chamber'. cover with water and alkali. Heat to 350°F and raise the pressure. 'Cook' for 4 to 6 hours. Finish by draining off the greenish-brownish liquid of amino acids, peptides, sugars and salts, (don't drink this soup, it's not edible and not because it has too much sugar and salt) what you have left are soft bones ready for hand-crushing. Best selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from children about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. All death questions are good death questions, but the most direct and most provocative questions come from kids. (Parents: take note.) Before I started holding death Q & As, I imagined kids would have innocent questions, saintly and pure. First off, full confession: A Book Olive did not personally recommend this book to me. I watched her youtube video about this book and I consider it a recommendation because I never would have read this book otherwise. I also like to give credit where credit is due. So, thank you, Olive! You can watch her review here Here’s the deal: It’s normal to be curious about death. But as people grow up, they internalize this idea that wondering about death is “morbid” or “weird.” They grow scared, and criticize other people’s interest in the topic to keep from having to confront death themselves.

Caitlin Doughty

Best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. As a child, Doughty learned about death violently when she saw another child fall in a shopping mall (“a complete aberration”). Afterwards, she developed OCD symptoms including tapping and compulsive spitting. “My brain was being invaded with the knowledge of death and the fact that people could be taken away from me at any moment and I couldn’t control it. All I could control were these little rituals.” This is a more refined method than one of the traditional ways murderers attempt to cover up their crime - put the body in a barrel with a lot of lye.