[Applause] >>CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Hi! [Applause] Hello, Portland! [Applause] For those of you who have NO idea
who I am, first of all, how dare you. [Laughter] Second of all, I have pulled this
headline from Wired Magazine to give you a clearer picture: “This mortician thinks
YOU should spend more time with corpses.” So now that we're all on the same page, [Laughter],
I think it will sort of make more sense why I have decided to title this talk: “Follow
Your Dreams: Or, the Blessings and Curses of a VERY Specific Advocacy.” [Laughter] Now, to be honest, I don't consider
my advocacy “extremely specific.” Like, we're all kind of aware that we're in
these decaying flesh bags that will eventually die. But that doesn't stop people from seeing my
work and my advocacy as incredibly niche. So, as I talk about this today, we’ll start
by talking about where this incredibly specific advocacy all started. The first publication that ever wrote about
me was The Huffington Post in 2012, and the reporter actually interviewed my mother and
this is what she said, "We came to find out that she had been interested in death for
quite some time and that we had somehow missed the signs." [Laughter] Which is very, like, 1990s anti-marijuana
commercial. “She was eating all those potato chips,
but I didn't see the signs!” And with all due respect to my mother, who
is amazing and I love very much, there were signs. [Laughter] Starting way back in second grade,
when I found this award, which I got a “Super Duper Job to Caitlin Doughty” for, what? “A good witch story.” [Laughter] Wish I could find a copy of that. What I DO have a copy of is my diary from
third grade. And "diary" is kind of an expansive term,
because it was a Hello Kitty notebook that’s completely empty except for one single entry,
which is, “Dear diary, today is Halloween. Finally, it’s come!” [Applause] [Laughter] Or, should I said, “finly”
it’s come! We’re working on the spelling, still working
on the spelling. Keep in mind that I grew up in Hawaii. [Laughter] Born and raised my whole life. So that means that I was really trapped between
two worlds. Here we have me in high school, clearly committing
to the combat boots and leaning very moodily against a chain link fence, but I believe
this was school spirit day, so I'm also wearing aloha print shorts and a Hawaiian surf t-shirt. Keeping between two worlds continued, I would
often (sorry again, mom) sneak out, starting at 16 or 17, to go to these goth and fetish
clubs downtown, of which we had two: Flesh and The Dungeon. [Laughter] And then I would sleep in my car
and wake up the next morning to go to my weekend activity, which was of course, my competitive
outrigger canoe paddling team. [Laughter] Because that's what you do in high
school in Hawaii. I also went to an incredibly conservative
Episcopalian all-girls school, the uniforms, chapel, the whole deal, and we had Christianity
courses every year. In 10th grade, we had to write a big final
paper on a character from the Bible. I, of course, chose Satan. [Laughter] [Applause] [Cheering] “The Prince
of Darkness, and his role in the Christian Bible,” on which I got an A+ because I researched the CRAP out of Satan. I knew more about Satan than any Christian
schoolgirl ever. [Laughter] This carries on. In 12th grade, I am made editor of the school
yearbook. And I was SO happy. I loved, loved, loved doing this job. And in the first of two "who let her do this?"
examples we have today, I was allowed to theme the entire yearbook around my, at that time,
favorite goth-punk band, AFI. [Laughter] [Applause] Anyone? Some AFI fans in the house! Okay, great. [Laughter] This is the opening page that I
Photoshopped, which appears to be some of my classmates writhing in pain of hell and
damnation. [Laughter] I pulled this out for this talk,
and I don't like to look at it very often. [Laughter] Because, every time I do, it reminds
me of that Ira Glass quote, “For the first couple of years that you're making stuff,
what you're making is not very good.” Nowhere is this more profoundly true than
this yearbook. So at last I graduate and I go to college
on the mainland. This is my big chance, I’m on the mainland
now. And in the second of “who let her do this?”
examples, I was manager of the student-run coffee shop at the University of Chicago. And I was allowed to launch a school-wide
renaming campaign of beloved “Uncle Joe's Coffee Shop,” and choose the winner, which
I deemed “Hallowed Grounds,” which is the name to this day. [Laughter] Because you can't rename it all
the time, and I argue is a good name for a coffee shop. To graduate in medieval history, of which
I was a medieval history major, to graduate you need to do a thesis, a long, researched
thesis. And my thesis was, “In Our Image: The Suppression
of Demonic Birth Accusations in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory.” Which means that, many years later, I was
awarded my thesis, my degree in medieval history, for a good witch story. [Applause] And I ended up eventually just
a year or so ago doing a video on it, which I called, “Demonic Babies: A Guide for New
Parents.” [Laughter] And, just really quickly because
I know some of you are interested. There was a medieval theologian named Thomas
Aquinas, and he proposed that you could have a human male and a female demon, a succubus,
would have sex with the human male, and take his semen and transmogrify into a male demon,
or an incubus, and impregnate a human woman with that semen and thus a demonically-inspired
baby could be born. That’s neither here nor there, I just wanted
to make sure we are all clear. [Laughter] So this is all to say, that by
the time I was 23, I graduated from college and living in the Bay Area, it was not a massive
shock or surprise when I took a job at a crematory, and I was the crematory operator, which means
I was the one who was there behind the scenes, doing the cremation of the bodies. It sounds bizarre to say this, but within
two weeks of doing this job, I knew that that is what I was going to do with my life. I don't just mean working in the funeral industry. I mean doing exactly what I'm doing right
now, translating what was going on behind the scenes in the funeral industry to the
general public. Because I was seeing things every day that
were blowing my mind. For example, this is a cremulator. How many of you know what a cremulator is? [Solitary Woo!] Some cremulator fans in the audience. [Laughter] When you put a body in a cremation
machine, the heat is so high that it takes all the organic material away from the body
and what you’re left with is big bone fragments that are inorganic material, so they’re
very brittle. So you take them over to this machine, the
cremulator, kind of a cross between a Crock-Pot and a blender, it whirs for 20 seconds and
that’s where we get the ashes, the smooth sandy ashes, or cremated remains that you’ve
probably seen. So things like that, I was like, why don't
people know this?! People need to know this! This is gonna make them feel more empowered
and aware of their own mortality. So really, I started right then. And over the next 12 years, this is essentially
what I have been doing with my life. And over that time, my advocacy has expanded
to include green and natural options for death care, new technology, family-involved death
care, encouraging people to, as the headline said, hang out with corpses and not be afraid,
and low-income families and how to help them get better service around death care. We all, as advocates or activists or artists
or whatever you in this room are, we have a lens through which we look at the world,
or understand the world, a paradigm. And mine just happens to look like this. [Laughter] I look at the world through death-colored
glasses, you could say. This is my boss, death, and I always have
to be checking in and seeing if I am doing the best thing for death awareness in our
society. Now that we know how we got here, briefly,
I’ll talk about the things I learned to be the blessings and curses of having this
very specific public advocacy. A pro is that there is no competition! [Laughter] Which works incredibly well for
me, because in this job, being the world's most famous mortician is like being the world's
most famous accountant. Nobody else wants this job. There are incredible advocates who are doing
work on the ground, but they don't necessarily want to do it publicly, which I completely
understand. And for me, I'm not a very competitive person. I live in Los Angeles, where I see people
fighting to get their screenplay made or to be seen in some way, and that seems genuinely
exhausting and genuinely very hard. I remember I was on the basketball team in
high school, not because I was any good, but because I was tall and they made me. [Laughter] And I didn't have any of that “Eye
of the Tiger” drive. I just wanted to trot off the court and keep
running and read my book under the bleachers. That's all I wanted to do. But with that lack of competition, the con
is that doesn't stop me from comparing myself to people all the time, even though no one
is doing what I'm doing, it’s very easy to -- your brain will still find something
at which you are failing at. For example, I write books and I'm very proud
of these books that I have written. But I have friends and colleagues who I consider
REAL writers, like WRITERS writers, whereas I’m just like, “Will my cat eat my eyeballs?” I also make videos. There are people who are making videos and
webseries who are filmmakers, and we still edit on, I’m not kidding you, iMovie. That's how these are made. But I think the worst one is that I run a
funeral home in Los Angeles, and there's this real narrative of, like, I'm a badass female
entrepreneur. [Laughter] Whereas my actual lived reality
is like, LA City Use Seller's Permit, I don't understand! It’s just a nightmare of small taxes that
I have forgotten to pay. [Laughter] And I'm like, what is this bill
for $232? I have no idea what it’s for or where it
came from. Another pro is that it is easy to see value
in what I do immediately, in the sense that cultural change around death is incredibly
difficult because people don't want to face it or talk about it. But because I work with so many amazing people
who are so smart and so willing to give their lives over to death in this way, we’ve been
able to make change. In Seattle, in Washington, they just legalized
human composting. [Applause] Which is a radical, fascinating,
eco-friendly new way to dispose of a dead body, and my close colleague Katrina Spade
led that charge and created this method. We really thought it was going to be years
before it was legalized, and here we are, you know, in the year of our lord 2019 and
it is legal in Washington and hopefully more places soon. In California, what I'm fighting for on the
legal front is usually playing catch-up to what Oregon has already done, especially in
death with dignity lies, and alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation laws, which we both legalized
in California as well. It’s a lot of being able to see real legislative
value in what you’ve been able to do. But if you put yourself out there, in any
way, you're not someone who is an advocate, you are an attention-seeking harlot. And you’d be surprised, or maybe no, maybe
you wouldn't be surprised, at the men in my industry and the things they have to say about
me, especially the more traditional funeral directors. Everything from she's a starlet looking for
her 15 minutes of fame. And I always want to tell them, if I was really
looking for my 15 minutes of fame, funeral industry reform is not what I would have gone
with. [Laughter] Surely I could -- I consider myself
a relatively intelligent person. I could have come up with something a little
snappier than that. But it’s especially hurtful when it comes
from within your own community. This is a letter, or an email, that I got
five or six years ago when was starting to become a more public advocate. This is what it said, “You are doing in
the U.S.A. more or less what I'm doing in [her country], but in a much bigger, louder,
more entertaining way! For me too, it is a calling and I love my
work, but unlike you I’m not great at attracting publicity and not naturally attention-seeking.” I mean, I guess there's a more charitable
way to read this, which is that she is saying something nice, but I didn't see it that way,
especially when I was first starting out. And nowadays, I wouldn't have responded to
this, but I did at the time. This is what I said, “I'm naturally an introvert. But at a certain point, what I believed and
what I advocated for became more important than the desire for privacy and the fear of
being judged.” [Applause] Which I think is something that
most activists or advocates go through, not that everyone’s an introvert, but the idea
of, man, if I'm putting myself out there and I feel any pride at all in what I've done,
does that mean I'm all in it for myself? This is only for me, just because I'm proud
of what I do? And the answer is no, of course. Final pro: I do get to, now at this point,
make money for doing something that I care incredibly deeply about. And I'm not advocating for that for everyone. I think it’s equally valid to have a 9-to-5
job, come home and be community engaged, and have hobbies and a rich life outside of your
job. For me, it’s really nice to be able to do
that. I was just in Moscow speaking at the Moscow
Urban Forum, and then I got to spend the day with the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin,
which is something I’ve wanted to do. Talk about top of my bucket list. [Laughter] One of the most iconic corpses
of all time. I got to just go and visit him, and then sit,
which I highly—TripAdvisor, 5 Stars, major. Sit across Red Square, eat my cherry blintz
and drink my cappuccino and go visit Lenin. It was incredible that this was my job, and
one of those moments where you’re like, my god, I get to do this. At the same time, when you work in a non-profit
like I do, or you start a non-profit, or you work as an advocate or an activist, you really
have to excavate whether or not you have very negative money narratives that tell you that
if you earn any money at all, a living wage at all, you are a bad person. Because I definitely had that. And it has only been recently that I’m like,
wait a second, I can do more of this work if I'm not terrified about money all the time. And so really figuring out what those narratives
are that are running your life and running your financial life, and saying, actually,
we need to be paying our activists and our advocates a living wage. [Applause] I was going to make this whole
talk about money, [laughter], but they wouldn't let me. Can I put 401K data up there? No. Fine, okay, I get it. So I wanted to leave you with a final thought
that was going to be incredibly profound and wrap this all up together, but then my boss
stepped in and told me this was the first talk that I have ever done in my adult life
where I have talked about primarily myself instead of what I do and getting across to
you. So I’m just going to leave you with one
piece—if you take nothing else from this talk, I need you to know that dead bodies
aren't dangerous. And the reason you should know that is because
they are actually safer than living bodies, because living bodies are still sneezing,
coughing, and excreting, where dead bodies are not doing that anymore. After a body dies, most viruses and bacteria
and diseases will die within several days, and you’re legally empowered to hang out
with a dead body. I just wanted to get that in. Thank you very much. [Applause]
Love this talk. Glad she starts the discussion.
As someone caring for a terminally ill family member, who is changing how my family views death and death care I admire Caitlin so much. She makes me want to advocate for change in my small northeastern mountain town where we have like 3 funeral homes maybe, but who would ever know where to start?
I hope her vision reaches across the nation as the change she advocates is change that is needed
Just found this and wanted to post it here! Great job!