Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

An interview with Caitlin Doughty

Caitlin Doughty is the founder of The Order of the Good Death, creator of her own “Ask a Mortician” YouTube series, and author of best-sellers Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and most recently Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?. She is co-owner and funeral director of Clarity Funerals and Cremation, a funeral home with a wide variety of affordable and sustainable burial options in Los Angeles, where she lives.

What was the idea behind writing a children’s book?

The idea of having children’s questions is that they’re provocative, blunt, and they snap people out of the mundane. They have a whimsy and a straightforwardness to them that gets people’s attention. But this book is also a chance for adults to go back to their morbid childhood and experience the wonder of a dead body. It’s for talking with your children about death and it’s for directly giving to your children if you feel comfortable with that.

What ages is the book geared towards?

For precocious children I would say starting at nine and up, and otherwise starting at maybe 12. To be clear, I’m not advocating “Talk to your kids about decomposition whether they like it or not.” It’s about when your child is curious, meeting them where they are. Reacting in a way that acknowledges and honors their curiosity also makes them feel safe to have questions about sexuality, or politics, or whatever difficult things come up down the line.

What was the age range of the kids who the questions came from, and where did you typically meet them?

So the first half of the book I wrote from questions that were asked to me while on tour for my first two books. “Will my cat eat my eyeballs?” was the first question that sparked my desire to do this book. For the second half of the book, I turned to my YouTube channel and made a video asking people to please send me their children, so people sent me little videos and clips. The age range was everything from 6-13, but I would say ages 8-10 were the real bulk of the questions. And that’s because this is the magical age that they actually understand mortality to be real, but they’re not yet tainted irrevocably by society and so they have no shame asking questions.

When they understand the finality of death, that’s when you have this unique opportunity to let them know that a curiosity about this very intense, existentially painful fact is ok.

If kids start out naturally curious about death, how do they “become tainted” or learn that there is somewhat of a taboo? When do you think this happens?

We know clinically that it’s about age 7, 8, 9, that a child finally understands that death is permanent. When they understand the finality of death, that’s when you have this unique opportunity to let them know that a curiosity about this very intense, existentially painful fact is ok. And yet for the most part in society, parents will respond to questions about death with, “Oh, that’s a morbid question,” or “Don’t ask that,” or “Oh, now stop that.” We shut it down. So I think the realization of the taboo comes from a combination of kids’ questions not being engaged with by the adults in their lives, and also societal influences in terms of what we see on television and in movies.

Reacting in a way that acknowledges and honors their curiosity also makes them feel safe to have questions about sexuality, or politics, or whatever difficult things come up down the line.

Do you think death anxiety does manifest in children, even for those who have not experienced death directly?

Yea, absolutely! I mean, it can manifest in very young children. We had a rosebush in our front yard and when I was seven, there was this particularly beautiful rose, so I cut it. Then it started to wither and die, and I realized I would never get that rose back, and it was just so painful. It was this desire to hold on, which is sort of the exact feeling we have about our loved ones and our material belongings as adults. So that was absolutely nascent death anxiety. And for many kids it starts with inanimate objects, which is not surprising. I think about how anthropomorphized even my stuffed animals were, when I was a child, and how even as adults we carry this idea. This is why the connection between minimalism and death positivity is so strong; learning to accept the death or absence of your things is so connected to death awareness.

Thanks for sharing. You have been reading Becker for many years. As you look back on his works, do you find that your relationship with the material continues to grow, or has it simply been a knowledge base that you have used moving forward?

It’s absolutely a foundational text for me – multiple of his texts are foundational for me – but I also want to revisit it. The writing mode that I have been in lately has not been in that particular type of communication. However, I plan to go back to that mode for my next book, so I will be in a place where I will be revisiting his texts again, and that’s exciting. That’s what I want to be doing; I want to be able to go back and relearn, the same way that I hope that people might read their favorite book of mine five, 10, 20 years later.