Tuesday, October 20, 2020

31 Days of Halloween - Day 20 - Book



Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? by Caitlin Doughty. W.W. Norton and Company. 2019.

Halloween and death go hand in hand, as it's a night when the veil between our world and the world of the dead is thinnest. Caitlyn Doughty, a mortician by trade with her own funeral home, has made a career out of death education and making the notions of death more understandable and commonplace and less fearsome and mysterious.

In this, her third book (I highly recommend the previous two), she tackles questions asked about death by children. While this book is aimed right back at the questioners, it doesn't talk down to them in any way. The answers, while playful in part, are serious in content. Each chapter addresses a single question. Aside from the title question, there are chapters dealing with what happens to an astronaut's body in space, whether or not you can keep the skull of a loved one, cannibalism, what happens when someone dies on a plane, oversized coffins, post mortem pooping, etc. I have an entire shelf on books pertaining to death, and I still learned quite a bit from this book, and I had a great time reading it, too.

This is definitely recommended.




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