[ed. note] I remember becoming aware a few years ago of the rising internet fame of a young mortician in California — a woman in her 20s whom the Utne Reader called “the world’s most famous practicing undertaker.” My first thought was: What can a mortician put on social media that would garner a massive following? Is it simply the shock value of speaking about death and corpses in a public forum? A little time with her online persona made clear that no, it’s not just about prodding the edges of our comfort zones. Caitlin Doughty wants to change the way we all think about death.

Doughty’s “Ask A Mortician” YouTube series (which has been hosted at Jezebel for several years) invites all manner of questions about how the dead are handled, lowering the opacity on this most universal — and universally hidden — event. While surely people’s morbid fascinations are piqued by Doughty’s open conversation about the end of life, what keeps them following is the undeniable intellect, wit, and genuine commitment to her vocation that comes through in her remarks.

Those qualities are even more obvious in her newly published memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. Seemingly against all odds, Doughty manages to bring levity and humor to descriptions of loading bodies into the furnace and riding home covered with human ash. And that’s kind of the point: She’s not afraid to bring lightness to this ever-dark subject, and she doesn’t want us to be afraid either.

In her most literal expression of this aspiration, she brings up the design of the mortuary and crematory itself — the lack of daylight, the absence of a comfortable space for living relatives to bear witness, the total isolation of the mortician. And by this I was inspired. I wanted to ask Doughty, what would a crematory design look like if we all feared death a little less, if we took down the physical and psychological fortress that separates the living from the recently deceased?

So I did ask. Below, Doughty has described her vision of a new kind of facility for caring for the dead, which reflects an uncommon attitude towards mortality. Artist Josephin Ritschel has created illustrations based on her ideas. This place doesn’t exist now, but Doughty is working on a new venture, Undertaking LA, which aims to realize some of these principles for communities in Southern California, and eventually further afield.