A mortician reveals what really happens after a loved one dies.

Funeral director Caitlin Doughty saw her first dead body at the age of eight and has been obsessed with death ever since.

She’s now on a mission to change attitudes about death and dead bodies by encouraging people to take a more active role in the funerals of their relatives.

“I don’t think anybody would say, oh yeah, our culture’s totally cool with death, we’re totally ready for anyone we love to die at any time, because that’s just obviously not true,” she told The World Today.

“Medical science is so much better now at keeping people alive for so much longer, but with that comes an incredible fear around death, and when people die they’re not prepared, and people don’t know what funerals they want or what they want done with the body, and it leaves the family really fragmented and upset.

Caitlin talks about scientific body donation in the below video. Post continues after. 

“If we can be more comfortable having this conversation in advance and [have] a more comfortable relationship with death, we’re just going to be a better society.

Ms Doughty has set-up what she calls an “alternative” funeral parlour in Los Angeles that helps people handle their loved ones’ bodies when they die.

Ms Doughty has also released a book about cremation and burial rituals called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and she hosts a web series called Ask a Mortician.

“I love questions about what you can do with a dead body: ‘Why can’t I have a viking funeral? Why can’t I keep mum’s skull on the mantelpiece? Why can’t I keep the whole skeleton?’

“Those are my favourite because I love the possibilities of memorialisation or burial or cremation that we just haven’t even maybe even discovered yet.”

Through her funeral parlour, families are encouraged to take part in the funeral process.

“Some people are completely ready to dive on in there and they feel competent, and they’ve maybe read a ton about it or it’s something they want to do, and then some people say, ‘can you do almost everything’ and we’ll just wash the fingernails or put on the shirt or something very simple – and that’s fine.”

But she says she understands it is not something all family members are fully comfortable with.

"Sometimes it will be just one or two people who will want to come in and be involved, more hands on, and the other person will just say, 'I'll see the body in the casket later but I don't want to touch it, I don't want to involved in that way'," she said.

"And that's OK. Maybe they're not ready.

"It's certainly not my job or anyone I works with job to say, like, 'you get in here with this corpse and you face your mortality!' That doesn't work at all."

Girl's balcony fall made Doughty 'obsess about death'

Ms Doughty says she was eight years old when she saw a small girl fall from the second floor balcony of an open air mall, to what she assumes was the girl's death.

"I would say it made me very, very afraid, it made me have almost obsessive compulsive thoughts about somebody dying all the time and what could I do to make sure that somebody didn't die, what rituals could I perform to make sure someone didn't die," she said.

Ms Doughty says witnessing the fall made her realise how little death is spoken about.

"And at the time, people around me just sort of said, 'oh kids, you know, they'll get over it', but I wish that we did have more of a structure in our society to say, yeah, kids with no context can get really terrified about this and maybe we should be having a better conversation with them and let them state their fears and give them honest answers," she said.

Ms Doughty wants there to be more honest discussions about death and funerals.

"I'm not totally comfortable with death, that's not the way that it works, but I'm not afraid of dead bodies," she said.

"Being afraid of a dead body is silly.

"It represents things that can be hard, but it's not scary.

"So there are things we can get over and we should get over because when you go into a death of someone you love, it's never going to be fun, it's always going to be awful, but you can prepare in a way so that you're not thinking why did this happen to me? What is death?

"You've thought about that and you can just focus on your grief."

This post originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission.