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From Here to Eternity

I follow Caitlin Doughty on Twitter (@TheGoodDeath) and when I saw my library had her new book, I hopped on that hold list. This is a world tour of death rituals, led by Doughty in a conversational, empathetic, and at times deeply funny style. Each chapter examines how different cultures and groups, including some that are quite remote and hard to get to, care for their dead, and the rituals that are part of their funeral and long-past-funeral rites.

I found this book fascinating. It was a very fast read, but each chapter was grounded in the stories both of a cultural ritual and of the individuals who keep that ritual and custom alive. In Indonesia, bodies are taken out of mausoleums, cleaned, dressed, and posed with for pictures. In Bolivia, the Catholic church struggles against the belief system focused on ñatitas, which are wish-granting human skulls, each with a highly specific area of expertise. In Japan, Doughty examines the tension between the expectation of honoring and visiting the dead and the practical realities of time, work demands, and lack of physical space. The solutions were extremely creative and thought provoking. The chapter on Dia de los Muertos in Mexico City is incredibly moving (content warning for child loss) and also surprising (wait till you read about the parade).

I wished each chapter had explored more, gone a little deeper (no pun intended) into the ways other cultures and groups honor their dead, both the memory of the person and the physical body they inhabited. Basically, I wanted more of everything.

The intimacy of the way the people in this book interact with and care for their dead was the most interesting part, as it caused me to question why American funerary rites are the way they are. There is a “death industry” in the US, one that profits greatly on the sale of coffins, and Doughty has been battling against it as a mortician for a long time. Reading this book was an intimate journey through world cultures of mourning, and also an inspiration for me to question why funeral practices are the way they are, and more importantly, to question what it is that I want to happen to my body after I die.

– SB Sarah

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 fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Here to Eternity is an immersive global journey that introduces compelling, powerful rituals almost entirely unknown in America.

In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones’ bones from cremation ashes.

With boundless curiosity and gallows humor, Doughty vividly describes decomposed bodies and investigates the world’s funerary history. She introduces deathcare innovators researching body composting and green burial, and examines how varied traditions, from Mexico’s Días de los Muertos to Zoroastrian sky burial help us see our own death customs in a new light.

Doughty contends that the American funeral industry sells a particular—and, upon close inspection, peculiar—set of “respectful” rites: bodies are whisked to a mortuary, pumped full of chemicals, and entombed in concrete. She argues that our expensive, impersonal system fosters a corrosive fear of death that hinders our ability to cope and mourn. By comparing customs, she demonstrates that mourners everywhere respond best when they help care for the deceased, and have space to participate in the process.

Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a story about the many fascinating ways people everywhere have confronted the very human challenge of mortality.