Hey there, Steven Dubner. Today on the show, the latest installment of our Freakin'

I'm X Radio Book Club. I am not very good at predicting the future, but I am predicting

that you are going to love this episode. It is guest hosted by Maria Kanakoba, the New

Yorker writer and author of The Biggest Bluff, which was the very first selection of our

Book Club last summer. That episode, if you would like to listen back, is called How to Make

Your Own Luck. It's episode 424. Maria also happens to have a PhD in psychology. Today, she is

speaking with Caitlin Doady about her book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and other lessons from the crematory.

It is a fascinating and timely discussion, and it starts right now. Here is Maria Kanakoba.

What do you say when someone dies? I don't know about you, but I've never really learned how to

talk about death. How to think about it. What to say to someone who's recently breathed.

Just think about the language we do use. Past on in a better place. Lade to eternal rest.

How about just died? The discomfort runs deep. Money doesn't lie, and our aversion to death,

especially in the United States, is big business. We pay for the body to be transported,

embalmed, gussied up, and cremated, or perhaps buried, in expensive caskets. What used to be an

intimate and essentially cost-free process, taking place at the home, has in the last 150 years,

grown into a professionalized $20 billion a year funeral industry.

Increasingly, funeral homes are part of larger chains and corporate entities,

along with every other element of the business, from caskets to gravestones.

The personal is further and further removed.

I think most modern American people will tell you this, that you're just not comfortable

around dead bodies, which is the exact opposite of what our relationship with death was,

for tens of thousands of years of human history. The families took care of the dead body,

...