Review: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

Title: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: TRAVELING THE WORLD TO FIND THE GOOD DEATH
Author: Caitlin Doughty
Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover
ARC: No.
MG, YA, ADULT?: It’s a book about death practices all over the world. Proceed with caution at any age.
TW/CW: Um, I mean, death?
Rating: 4/5

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.

After finishing SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES, I knew I wanted to pick this one up right away.

Unlike SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY isn’t quite as personal. We get more death customs and less “I really liked this guy and it went badly”. Which is a good thing if you’re more into the death stuff than the love stuff (like me!).

Doughty did a really great job of alternating death customs. We went from Western cremation to having dead relatives in the living room for years to Japan’s high tech funeral homes. Even though I am not interested in westernized death practices, I still found those chapters interesting enough and they didn’t slow the book down. Doughty definitely has a way with pacing.

There was also a self-awareness in this book that I really loved. At one point, Doughty is talking about a tourist who was basically interrupting a death ceremony to get a picture. When the opportunity arises for Doughty and her friend to get a “backstage view” of an exhumation, she realizes that she isn’t much better than that tourist. It was nice to see her realize that even though she was invited and many places do have death tourism, we’re still interlopers.

I personally hope Doughty continues her search for the good death… and brings us along every step of the way!

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, activist, and funeral industry rabble-rouser. In 2011 she founded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death, which has spawned the death positive movement. Her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was a New York Times best-seller. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA. 

Born on a balmy August evening on the decidedly un-morbid shores of O’ahu, Hawai’i, Caitlin was an even-tempered, bookish child. Her parents had little reason to believe that she would ultimately seek a life tiptoeing the line between the living and the dead. It was only when she began to ask the pertinent questions that her parents suspected a proclivity toward the macabre.

(Example: “Mommy, if I was on the edge of that cliff and I fell off and on the way down screamed, ‘Mommy, Mommy, I need you Mommy why won’t you help me,’ and then smashed my body on the rocks, would you be sad? Yes or no, Mommy?”)

After high school, she fled east to the University of Chicago, where she graduated in medieval history. Her thesis, entitled “In Our Image: The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory,” is the summer must-read for all lovers of demon sex and the late medieval church.

After graduation, Caitlin moved to California, where she has worked as a crematory operator, funeral director, a body-van transport driver, and returned to Cypress College for her second degree, in mortuary science. Unhappy with the state and offerings of the American funeral industry, in 2015 she opened her own alternative funeral home, Undertaking LA, to help people help themselves (handle a corpse).

Caitlin’s webseries “Ask a Mortician” and her work to change the death industry have led to features on National Public Radio, BBC, The New Yorker, Vice, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Forbes.

She frequently gives talks on the history of death culture, rituals, and the funeral industry, presenting for groups as diverse as the TED, SXSW, The Upright Citizen’s Brigade, and universities and libraries all over the world.