In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death, mortician Caitlin Doughty answers questions from children about death—ranging from the likelihood of a pet eating its dead owner’s eyeballs to why corpses turn colors as decay sets in. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is Doughty’s third book, and she also hosts the podcast Death in the Afternoon, as well as the YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician. In addition to these undertakings (pun absolutely intended), Doughty is the founder of the Order of the Good Death—an organization that seeks to spread what Doughty calls "death positivity"—and the funeral home, Clarity Funerals & Cremations in Los Angeles, CA. In this, her most recent book, Doughty expertly blends science, history, literature, and humor to make death more approachable to readers and to ultimately aid in the erasure of the death taboo.

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is divided into thirty-four chapters, each of which is devoted to answering a specific question. The opening chapter answers the title question: when I die, will my cat eat my eyeballs? This question comes from the ever-pervading fear of pets tearing apart their owner’s flesh. After all, no one wants to think their beloved pet could do such a horrific thing—don’t bite the hand that feeds you, right? In answering this question, Doughty explicitly explains that cats (and all pets for that matter) are opportunistic and will eat the food that is offered to them. As such, if the owner dies and the pet has no other access to food, it will indeed eat its owner’s flesh. In a bit of humorous pacification, however, Doughty reassures her reader that “Snickers” will first consume the softer, exposed skin: lips, eyelids, and tongue.

The lightheartedness that Doughty brings to the opening chapter is also present through the heavier doses of information, like why corpses turn varying shades of green and yellow. While the descriptions of decaying corpses are something many people in Western society shy away from—after all that’s what the process of embalming, refrigeration, and corpse makeovers aim to hide—Doughty approaches the topic in a very candid way. For once, a mortician is not trying to hide the real effects of death, but instead phrases them quite explicitly:

This technicolor show is happening alongside all the other visible effects of putrefaction, like swelling, “purging,” and blistering or peeling of the skin. The color will change so profoundly that you will no longer recognize the person or be able to tell the age or complexion they were in life.

With this detailed description of death, Doughty notes that often, through embalming, refrigeration, and cremation, families “never come face to face with the reality of decay.” As such, she poses the question of society’s fear of death. That is, it is because of the death taboo, which has been perpetuated by the funeral home industry, that society avoids the real decomposition process. This is an important sociological question as it aims to unpack not death itself but our perception of it.

While I recognize that I have spoiled a couple of the answers to these questions about death, there are still plenty more fascinating answers to be discovered in Doughty’s writing. What is most important about Doughty’s writing is her ability to make something as taboo as death and corpses, a fear that is ubiquitous in pop culture from The Walking Dead to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, normal. In doing this, Doughty dispels the death taboo and even makes it an exciting read for those who are fearful of death and corpses, myself included. Because, as Doughty notes in the dedication, this book is for all ages, it makes it easier to process the information she gives, which is not the case for some of her other books. Beyond the information Doughty provides are the macabre illustrations provided by Dianné Ruz. So, even if reading about death is not your idea of a fun pastime (trust me, you will get many strange looks reading this book in public), perhaps illustrations of skeletons and a black-fringed Caitlin Doughty are.