Content Warning: This section discusses death, funeral practices, and postmortem bodily phenomena.

The Western sanitization of death is the key cultural trend that Doughty wants her book to address and remedy. This is an outlook toward death that is prevalent in industrialized, capitalist countries with European influence, often via colonization. Doughty says that for the last couple centuries, these Western countries have undergone a series of changes to their death industries that have corporatized death and created distance between the living and their dead. She sees this as harmful and wants people to feel “held” in their grief rather than distanced.

Doughty sees two negative aspects to the Western ideas of death, and these are often interrelated: One is the actions of the funeral industry, and the other is the negative views of death and dead bodies. Doughty says that the funeral industry is full of “purposeful obfuscations.” People do not know “what chemicals are pumped into their mother during an embalming procedure” or “the state of their mother’s body […] years after her death” (13, 76). This distance between the living and the dead makes the physicality of death a mystery.