Caitlin Doughty, who was about to open her first funeral parlor, in Los Angeles, gazed at a skull that she had put on display above the desk in her office. Although it was plaster, the skull was a provocative presence in a room where Doughty planned to receive grieving families. It was mid-June, and that afternoon John Gettys, a field representative of the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, was coming to give the business a final inspection. Doughty, who is thirty, said, “I want the office to look like me, but I don’t want it to look too Arty Death Hipster.” This was possibly a futile hope. She grabbed the skull and sat contemplating it; in her vintage wooden swivel chair, she looked like a noble in a memento-mori portrait. “I don’t want the state inspector to think I’m testing him,” she said. “Maybe I’ll put it on a lower shelf. That way, I will stay true to myself.” She checked her phone: Gettys was running late. “Maybe he died,” she said. “How funny would that be?”

Doughty’s office, which is in a medical building on the gritty end of Santa Monica Boulevard, has a view of the 101 from one window and a glimpse of the Scientology campus from the other. On one wall hangs a painting, by a high-school friend, of a coffin that has been bent in half and placed atop a chaise longue, in the manner of Magritte’s “Perspective: Madame Récamier by David.” The bookshelf bears volumes of poetry, including Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” as well as a compendium of nineteenth-century funeral practices titled “The Victorian Book of the Dead.”

When Gettys finally arrived, Doughty rose to shake his hand. She is six feet one in ballet flats, and has pale skin, long mahogany hair with bangs, and a penchant for vintage dresses with nipped-in waists. (Today’s outfit was emerald green, which matched her eyes.) Gettys read through her price list, which offered a biodegradable willow casket for thirteen hundred and seventy dollars and, for a hundred and twenty dollars, a newborn’s casket made from recycled paper embedded with pressed flowers. Doughty considered her business an “alternative funeral service” that would bring mourners into closer contact with the dead by helping people to tend to corpses at home. She did not plan to offer embalming services, although she was qualified to do so, having graduated in 2010 from the mortuary-science program at Cypress College. Regulations of funeral homes vary from state to state, and in California one can go into business without having taken a class in embalming, or even having learned how to securely close the eyes of a corpse. (A piece of cotton from the end of a Q-tip slipped under the eyelid usually does the trick.)

Doughty has a low, mellifluous voice and an ironical manner. “Are you going to give us a cool license number? Like, all the same digits?” she asked. Gettys, a middle-aged man whose pants and shirt were both of an olive hue, was not perceptibly amused, and replied that the number would be up to the bureau, in Sacramento. “We plan to be massively compliant,” Doughty told him. Her funeral parlor does not have its own crematory, so she and Gettys drove to examine the nearby facility that she planned to use. Gettys told her that, thirty years ago, he’d entered the business as an apprentice embalmer. “The funeral industry doesn’t change a lot—it’s been around for a long time,” he said. “Everybody tries to reinvent the wheel. Well, let me tell you something. The wheel has already been invented. O.K.—there are little permutations that can be done to the business model, but by and large the idea is to dispose of dead bodies.”

It was clear that Gettys was not aware of Doughty’s public profile—that he had not, for example, come across her popular series of online videos, “Ask a Mortician,” in which she fields such viewer questions as “Are these really my mother’s ashes?” and “What is the best way to write into my will that my children will receive no inheritance unless they have my dead body taxidermied and propped up in the corner of the living room?” In 2014, she published a best-selling memoir, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory.” (“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves,” it begins.) And she is the founder of the Order of the Good Death, a mostly online meeting place for morticians and academics who are interested in exploring new ways to guide mourners through the experience of death.

A week after Gettys’s visit, Doughty posted on Twitter an image of an official letter that she had received from Sacramento. It began with a cheery “Congratulations!” Doughty tweeted, “I am a funeral home owner. There can be miracles, if you believe.”

Doughty grew up in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. When she was a teen-ager, she fantasized about opening a funeral home that would combine retro charm with up-to-date service. As she writes in her memoir, she even came up with a name for her imaginary establishment: La Belle Mort. She saw herself creating tailored events that celebrated the life of the deceased in a highly personalized manner: sending cremated ashes into space, or shooting them out of a gun, or compressing them into a gemstone.

After graduating from the University of Chicago, she worked for about two years at Pacific Interment, a mortuary and crematory in an industrial district of Oakland. Without ceremony, she processed corpses through preparation and incineration. This work changed her vision of the ideal funeral practice. “When I first thought I wanted to get into the industry, I thought people needed a more friendly death—for death to be more accessible,” Doughty told me. “That changed very quickly. Now I think people need to get closer to it. It should be up in your face, not ‘Let’s turn Mom into a diamond.’ ”

Her new funeral parlor has a blunt name: Undertaking L.A. Along with Amber Carvaly, her business partner, Doughty intends to help people take care of their own dead, rather than outsource the task to professionals. “When I found myself in all these big industrial warehouses, alone with all these bodies, I thought, If I’m doing all this, there are all these other people who aren’t doing this,” Doughty said. “That’s too much death for one person and not enough for all those other people.” Among the services offered by the fledgling company are help with home funerals, in which the body is bathed and dressed, then kept on ice for a few days, while the family grieves; natural burials, without casket or marker, at a green burial ground in Joshua Tree; and witness cremations, which permit family members to help load the body into the cremation machine and push the button that starts the fire.

Sherwin B. Nuland, in his 1994 best-seller, “How We Die,” wrote, “Modern dying takes place in the modern hospital, where it can be hidden, cleansed of its organic blight, and finally packaged for modern burial.” Doughty’s goal is to end our deliberate estrangement from the dead body. “There really are so many places in our culture where we demand something unnatural,” she told me. “As of right now, what most people find acceptable is either no body at all or something that has been highly mediated. Someone comes in, they take the body away, and, the next time you see it, it has been disinfected and treated and made safe and beautiful.” A dead body is not immediately dangerous, except in cases such as Ebola, and in those instances infectious-disease protocols apply. “And maybe a dead body doesn’t need to be pretty,” Doughty went on. “Maybe we need to look and say, ‘Wow, let’s look at this beautiful, natural corpse.’ ” The conventional funeral industry has given people the impression that death is an emergency. “But death is not an emergency,” Doughty said. “Death is the opposite of an emergency. Look at the person who died—all that stress and pain is gone from them. And now that stress and pain can be gone from you.”