Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
A book for ‘future corpses of all ages’ as the author – a mortician – answers questions about death asked by children
When I was a child, I remember being terrified by the ending of Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade. The scene is legendary: Elsa hands Donovan a gilded cup to drink from, only to shriek abject horror as he shrivels and crumbles to dust before her eyes, aging decades in just a few seconds. For a young child still new to the concept of mortality, it was a horrifying and gripping – if inaccurate – visualisation of what happens to each of us when we shuffle off this mortal coil.
As an introduction to death, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is a much less traumatic affair than Donovan’s fate, but that’s by no means a reason to call this book tame. Only a few pages into the book readers are treated to the mental image of an astronaut’s frozen corpse being shattered into chunks by a vibrating robotic arm, and things only get grislier from there. Considering that the book is a collection of answers to questions asked by children, author and mortician Caitlin Doughty certainly doesn’t pull any punches when the going gets icky.