Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

Doughty moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles to attend mortuary school. She finds an apartment in Koreatown and is excited to finally be in the same city as Luke. However, when she confesses her feelings for him in a letter, she does not hear from him for days. She finally receives an email from him that reads, in its entirety: “Don’t ask me for this. I can’t see you again” (161). Doughty is devastated by this loss and sees it as a kind of death. 

While she waits for mortuary school to start, Doughty takes a trip to northern California to hike the Cathedral Trees Trail. As she looks for the entrance to the trail, she gets lost and becomes so frustrated that she almost drives her car off a cliff. Later, when she has found the trail and hiked down to the bottom, she realizes “[she] had gone there to die” (162). She feels cheated of certain things promised to her by society: fairy-tale true love and protection from thinking about death. She wants wild animals to eat her body and sees herself as “just as much an animal as the other creatures in the redwood forest” (163).