Caitlin Doughty Quotes

For thousands of years, we did have death surrounding us, and we did have people die in the home. You would take care of your own end. You would do ritual processes, and you would be involved in it, and that's been taken away in the Western world.

Openness about death has led to greater care about all aspects of dying.

For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.

It amazes me that the most Christian funerals are the most barbaric funeral rites of passage that are celebrated anywhere in the world.

I never go to funerals. To me a person is dead when he breathes for the last time. After that, your memories should be personal.

Virtually every civilized society today holds sacred the right to peaceably bury their dead.

We've enshrined the purity, sanctity, value, and importance of bringing children into the world, yet we don't discuss death. There used to be an enshrined period where mourning was a necessary part of going through the process of grieving; death wasn't considered morbid or antisocial. But that's totally gone.

I've always said I would want to be a funeral director if I wasn't an actor.

The biggest problem is the funerals that don't exist. People call the funeral home, they pick up the body, they mail the ashes to you, no grief, no happiness, no remembrance, no nothing. That happens more often than it doesn't in the United States.

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.

The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.

The universal practice of closing the eyes of the dead may be thought to have originated in the desire that he might be prevented from seeing his way.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

Death is something we really understand extremely well.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

Some widowers are bereaved -- others, relieved.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

The hardest obstacle I've ever had to overcome in my life is losing my mom four years ago. I wouldn't even say that I've overcome it, really. I don't imagine that I ever will.

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

I lost my partner [Anselmo Feleppa] to HIV then it took about three years to grieve; then after that I lost my mother. I felt almost like I was cursed.

A lot of people ask me about my father's passing when I was young, which I'm never comfortable with. I invariably move around that subject.

There is no shortcut to grieving.

Attachments and bereavements are inseparable.