From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

Funeral home owner Doughty skips around the world, observing the rituals that surround death if different cultures: in Indonesia, Spain, Bolivia, Mexico, Japan, and a few locations in the U.S. where people are trying something different than the norm (funeral pyres, composting bodies, natural burial, as opposed to burial or cremation). Doughty believes that the American discomfort with death can change through meaningful ritual and important conversations with family, but the culture and the industry (which is mainly to sell coffins) must change as well. Doughty's lighthearted and somewhat irreverent tone is reminiscent of Sarah Vowell's history/travelogues, and her subject is relevant to everyone. ("We are all going...")

See also: Being show more Mortal by Atul Gawande; anything by Sarah Vowell; Stiff by Mary Roach

Quotes

One of the chief questions in my work has always been why my own culture is so squeamish around death. Why do we refuse to have these conversations....? Our avoidance is self-defeating. (6)

Torajan and American death culture share this particular trait of overexpenditure; no one wants to be perceived as disrespecting the dead. (54)

The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms. (85)

The Western funeral home loves the word "dignity." ...What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality. (102)

Not only do the young have zero death literacy, they don't seem to mind. (Japan, 167)

History is filled with ideas that arrived before their time. (179)

...women...were using their comfort with death to seize direct access to the divine from the hands of the male leaders of the Catholic Church. (Bolivia, 211)

Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it is a cultural one. (232)

[Meaningful tasks and] a sense of purpose [help] the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal. (235) show less

As someone who has lost their fair share of friends and family members, as well as pets, almost exclusively to cancer, I’ve never really come to terms with how we, in the US, process death. A friend, who is currently going to school to be a mortician/funeral director, introduced me to Caitlin Doughty, an L. A. based mortician and founder of the Order of the Good Death, a nonprofit organization that focuses on helping people come to terms with their mortality and make decisions regarding the care and keeping of their body after they die.

These facts, when the book club picked it, made me a bit wary – I’m still not entirely at peace with my grandmother’s passing in the fall. I don’t like to talk about death. I don’t like to show more talk about dead bodies. I have difficulty with viewings and other death-related occasions. But, with an open mind, I started reading, with the hope that Caitlin would help me develop a better relationship one of the only facts about our lives on earth – they will end.

My husband often says he wants a Viking funeral, or a Tibetan Sky Burial, and each time he brings it up, I ask him to stop. I can’t stomach it. But Caitlin has gone all over the world, and her own country, exploring different cultures’ death rituals. And maybe it’s her writing, maybe it’s the distance, but it is absolutely fascinating! I really could not put From Here to Eternity – the travel aspect also helped me stomach the content. And at times, I cried, but for good reasons – Caitlin expertly goes back and forth between being detached and un-emotional, to feeling all the things when listening to her coworker recount the circumstances of the loss of her unborn son.

People die all the time, and she also goes into why cremation has become such a large part of the modern funeral industry, as well as the monopolies, corruption, and out-of-date laws that govern the industry in the US. To say I learned something would be a massive understatement. I was freaked out significantly less than I anticipated being while reading Packing for Mars last month. show less

An eye-opening look at something we spend our lives attempting to avoid.
Traveling the world with Caitlin, we discover that the James Bond film Spectre inspired The Dias de los Muertos (The day of the dead) parade in Mexico, that the fear surrounding death and the dead doesn't hold true throughout the world, and that we in the west have so sterilized the natural process of death that we have replaced both intimacy and rituals with distance and shame. This book is an heartfelt offering that sheds light on a dark topic with ease, humor and hope.

A beautiful survey of international traditions surrounding death and morning. How are other countries dealing with the rising costs of funeral arrangements and limited space for burial? How are other cultures memorializing their dead? Are they breaking new cultural ground or are they lovingly maintaining centuries old rituals?

I found this collections of essays very illuminating and it gave me lots of food for thought about my own death wishes and my thoughts concerning death. The traditions of other cultures are rich in ways that my culture is stunted or underdeveloped. I enjoyed thinking about the practices developed by other peoples to act out their grief and to examine Western culture's death phobias. Why do our taboos exist and what show more about our death culture would offend others? show less

I totally thought that this book was a work of fiction when I initially added it to my TBR, but I was delighted to discover that it was instead an excellent piece of non-fiction which explores a variety of death practices around the world. Some of them are so strange and foreign to our Western/North American mindset that they seem almost fictional in their differences and rituals, but instead of seeing this as a negative and macabre thing I was actually rather charmed. The thesis of the book resounds around the idea that Western culture has become so sterilized and separated in its treatment of the dead that we are not able to experience this last stage of life in a positive or meaningful way, causing undue emotional harm to mourners. show more The author is a practising mortician and funeral director, but her observation of unhealthy emotional practises around death and a seeming increase in people wanting to explore alternatives to tradition led her on a journey around the world to research, explore, and ultimately participate in a multitude of multicultural funeral practises in an effort to better her understanding of what possibilities are out there - and how these practises affect people. Obviously her study is not meant to be scientific, focusing instead on personal emotional reactions and observations, and in some cases her work could be viewed as voyeurism (our reading about it definitely is), but as a way to get an entrance into the topic I think that this book is an excellent start. Her exploration and resulting reactions are genuine, respectful, and driven by an honest curiosity to learn more about the cultures she explored, and the resulting text is one that piques the beginning of a broader understanding of death. She (and therefore we) may not have all the answers, but the book does much to begin asking the questions and to begin re-evaluating our own personal practises. show less

I've been fascinated by death (and undeath) ever since I watched Michael Jackson's Thriller video at the tender age of three. And for just as long, I've been terrified by the subject, too. This push-and-pull dichotomy has created a feeling of compulsion, bordering on obsession. All that to say that I now read just about every book on the topic I can get my hands on, and I watch every zombie movie from behind my interlaced fingers.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY is one of the best takes on the subject of death rituals I've ever come across. Doughty takes an almost loving approach to examining the way other cultures care for their dead. She's open-minded and non-judgemental, and she allows for the possibility that other people's death rituals, as show more bizarre as they may seem to North Americans, are no less valid and perhaps much more... dare I say it? Humane.

I particularly appreciated the chapter on Biolivia's natita culture - and the people's strong belief in magic, ritual, and spiritual faith. I was delighted to see that Doughty didn't disparage these folks for their beliefs, but treated them with respect and understanding.

I can't recommend this book highly enough! I'm excited to read more by the author. I also just discovered she has a YouTube channel (WHAT? How did I miss this?!) and I'm eager to dive into more of her work. show less

Awesome book. I love Caitlin's conversational and somewhat snarky tone throughout her work, and it does a good job of offsetting some of the truly disturbing things she writes about. This book was so interesting and made me want to sit and look up other cultures' death rituals at work all day. Sorry, IT guys, you'll be seeing some weird shit.