Caitlin Marie Doughty (born August 19, 1984)[3][1] is an American mortician, author, blogger, YouTuber, and advocate for death acceptance and the reform of Western funeral industry practices.

[1] She studied the European witch trials in the early modern period, and directed a play she had written based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and the Christina Rossetti poem "Goblin Market".

[9] Her supervisor and coworkers at Pacific Interment often tested her with hands-on assignments, as on her first day at work she had to shave a corpse, and Doughty accepted any task.

[5] She wanted to encourage death acceptance, and a return to such practices as memento mori, reminders of one's own mortality, resulting in healthier grieving, mourning, and closure after the inevitable deaths of people around us, as well as starting a movement to broaden the funeral industry to offer more funeral options, such as natural burial, sky burial, and alkaline hydrolysis (liquid cremation).

A century later, in the 1960s, Americans began to turn away from embalming and burial, as cremation became increasingly popular, so that today it is used in almost half of deaths in urban areas.

[12] Doughty seeks to build on Mitford's reforms but in a direction that embraces the reality of death and returns to funeral and mourning practices that include spending time with and having contact with the dead body itself.

Conversely, Doughty has heard from many who only briefly saw the body in a hospital, and later in an artificial, embalmed state, and they regret not having more time to grieve close to the corpse.

[14] Doughty's YouTube series Ask a Mortician began in 2011,[9] humorously explores morbid and sometimes taboo death topics such as decomposition and necrophilia.

[16] Doughty uses an irreverent, offbeat and surreal tone to attract the largest possible audience for a subject that is otherwise off-putting and depressing to many potential viewers.

These have varied from a series on funeral home malfeasance called “Cadaver Crimes” to stories about famous shipwrecks such as the disaster of the SS Eastland.

[18][19] Doughty's intention with the book was to combine "memoir, science, and manifesto" in an entertaining way that would attract a wide readership to the unpleasant topics of death, decay, and corpse handling, to challenge the reader to confront their own mortality.

[13] Doughty says readers have told her that they themselves are fascinated by the graphic descriptions of such things as "stomach-content removal" or the "bubblating" of human fat during a cremation, yet they are "not sure other people will be able to handle it.

"[13] The Washington Post noted that while Doughty's "endearingly anxious inner workings take up a large part" of the book, there are also portraits of her three eccentric coworkers at Pacific Interment, who each teach lessons she carries after leaving to attend mortuary school.

[11] "What holds Smoke Gets in Your Eyes together," the Post said, is Doughty's overarching goal to increase the reader's awareness of their own mortality and face their fear of death, and the book's effective use of humor keeps it from being too sorrowful or gruesome, in spite of its graphic descriptions.

"[20] The Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star said the book was engrossing and "fulfills all its pre-pub hype, jacket blurbs and positive advance reviews".

[9] Doughty's second book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, illustrated by Landis Blair, was published in October 2017.

It chronicles Doughty's travels to see first-hand death customs in Mexico, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Bolivia, as well as at home in the US, at an open air funeral pyre and a body farm.

[31] "If Doughty and the Order's death-care revolution is successful, Americans will be more comfortable contemplating mortality and dying— thus preparing for it, seriously considering alternatives such as green burial, composting, and using crematoria that have carbon-offset policies".