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Ask A Mortician

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Ask A Mortician (Web Video)
"A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves."

Ask A Mortician is a YouTube video series created and hosted by funeral director and author Caitlin Doughty, which currently has over two million subscribers.

After spending her post-graduate years working in a crematorium, Doughty began to wonder if the way Westerners, and Americans in particular, treated their dead — such as pumping them full of carcinogenic formaldehyde and chopping down a forest the size of New Jersey every year to build caskets just to put them in the ground, all for enough money to bankrupt the majority of families — was really worth it, leading her to found the Order of the Good Death in 2011, a non-profit foundation made up of morticians, funeral directors and others in the death care industry who similarly believe in cheaper, more sustainable, and, above all, personal ways to send off the deceased. To this end, she later founded the non-profit funeral home Charity Funerals, providing affordable access to things like funerals, biodegradable coffins and natural burials.

Her web series explores not only her business and philosophy, but also historical and current issues in the industry, historical tragedies and the ethics of dealing with their casualties, so-called "iconic corpses" — deaths or dead bodies that have become legendary — and the biological process of decay. She has also written three best-sellng books: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, about her time as a crematorium employee; From Here To Eternity, about the various death traditions from around the world; and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, a compendium of questions asked of her by children.

As of 2024, Doughty has renamed her channel after herself and stopped using the Ask A Mortician series title, though the formatting of her content remains the same. To avoid Youtube censors, she now posts much of her content (free) on her her Patreon page.


Caitlin Doughty's body of work provides examples of the following tropes:


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