From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Caitlin Doughty
The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with “dignity.” Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body. Grandpa’s mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones’ bones from cremation ashes. With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America. Featuring Gorey-esque illustrations by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity introduces death-care innovators researching green burial and body composting, explores new spaces for mourning—including a glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan and America’s only open-air pyre—and reveals unexpected new possibilities for our own death rituals.
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This was an unbelievable read, I already know I will carry it with me through the rest of my life. Towards the end, Doughty describes the importance of deathcare as "these are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss." I think that's actually a perfectly apt summary of the books contents. All of the rituals described are absolutely fascinating, and prompted me to really reconsider my own views of death and the treatment of the dead, and examine beliefs I often didn't know I held. Doughty's narrational voice was incredibly engaging and knowledgeable and even humorous at times as she leads you around the world to tie together wildly different, yet somehow ultimately similar, practices. I was really pleasantly surprised by the commentary on the roles that commercialization, technology, and the efforts of marginalized and disadvantaged groups have played in deathcare too. There is SO much food for thought, I truly think every single person should read this. ------------------------- A few quotes that really spoke to me from one of my favorite chapters, about composting corpses (yes, seriously) : "It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women - scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong." "For those who have been socialized female the [anti-aging] pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It's a way to say 'I love and accept myself.' ... There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse." "Maybe a process like recomposition is our attempt to reclaim our corpses. Maybe we wish to become soil for a willow tree, a rosebush, a pine - destined in death to both rot and nourish on our own terms."
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