Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death

4 to 4.5 stars. This was a really good book that was actually written with children as the target audience here. One might be surprised to find a book talking about death and decomposition to be aimed at kids, but Doughty says in the preface that it's actually children instead of adults that have the most bare-faced questions about death and who are the less squeamish about the subject. She believes that everyone, whatever the age, should understand the realities of death because it's a necessary part of life, whether in our dealing with the loss of people around us or in confronting our own mortality, and that's actually a pretty heartening thought.

I've followed Caitlyn Doughty on her YouTube channel for a while now. When I first discovered her channel, my “morbid” curiosity took hold of me and I watched video after video. But I grew to really enjoy not just the entertaining and light-hearted (but always respectful) way she broached the topic of death, I was also surprised by the attitude she hopes to inspire in more people: that we should be less afraid of death, a phenomenon that is as necessary to life as birth, and to understand more about it. This book is no different. I started this very late last night when I was exhausted from finishing another book, but her tone still made me burst out laughing twice in the first couple of chapters.

Some interesting nuggets that I learnt from this book which I hadn't already known from her YouTube channel:

1. In hot, humid climates like where I am, if you bury a person or a dead animal in shallow grave, you're not likely to find anything left after a few months, not even bones. They're all easily degradable in these conditions, and especially in the shallow layers of earth where it's richest in oxygen and therefore decomposing microbes.
2. Differently sized adults could still fit in the same urn after cremation because height matters more than weight in terms of how much ashes a person will end up being.
3. Post-mortem poops happen and morticians have a variety of ways to deal with them, somewhat explained in the book.
4. My turf, Singapore, is given a paragraph here! Caitlyn talks about crowded cemeteries and how America might eventually run out of burial space, but then also give the example of Singapore and Hong Kong (but mostly Singapore) as immensely population-dense places with zero space for burial. We only have one cemetery here still open for burial but even then you only get that plot for 15 years then you're exhumed, cremated, and stored in a columbarium. That happened with my grandfathers who both passed decades before I was born and before our population density got this crowded, so they were both buried for all these decades until very recently in the past 5-10 years it was mandated that they had to be exhumed, cremated, and put in a columbarium.

If you're open to learning more about death in a light-hearted sort of way, including some weird questions about it (”What happens if you eat popcorn kernels before getting cremated?”), this book - and Caitlyn's YouTube channel - is definitely for you.