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

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2017) is a work of nonfiction by Caitlin Doughty. It investigates various cultural practices and beliefs around death and dying. Doughty is especially curious about why some cultures—especially Westernized ones—don’t openly discuss death practices. She criticizes the sanitized, industrialized, and capitalistic funeral practices of the West while exploring diverse funeral practices and cultural beliefs about death from across the world.

Doughty is an American mortician, author, and influencer. She is an advocate for death positivity, a movement that argues that discussing death should not be morbid, taboo, or secretive. In 2011, Doughty founded a non-profit called The Order of the Good Death to advocate for death positivity, natural burial, and death practice awareness. Doughty owns a funeral home in Los Angeles and runs a popular YouTube channel called Ask a Mortician, which has over two million subscribers. She is the author of the books Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory (2013) and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions From Tiny Mortals About Death (2019).

This guide refers to the 2017 W.W. Norton and Company hardback edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss death, abortion, and death by suicide. Funeral practices and postmortem bodily phenomena are described in detail.

Summary

Caitlin Doughty describes herself as a young, progressive mortician, and she owns a funeral home in Southern California. She finds herself at odds with the corporatized, capitalistic American funeral industry, which she argues sanitizes the physicality of death, creates distance between mourners and the dead, and is financially exploitative. Wondering why Americans are nervous about death, she travels to explore culturally diverse death practices, aiming to show people the benefit of alternative funerary practices and destigmatize death on a societal level.

In Crestone, Colorado, she visits an open-air pyre; though initially resistant, the citizens of Crestone have come to embrace the pyre as well as the highly customizable and affordable burials that the company offers.

Next, Doughty travels to Indonesia, where she witnesses a Torajan funeral. A corpse is paraded through town, and an animal is sacrificed to facilitate their spirit’s release. She also observes a ma’nene’, a ritual where mummies are exhumed, cleaned, redressed, and laid to rest annually, bringing people closer to their dead loved ones.

In Mexico, Doughty and her friend Sarah Chavez observe the Día de los Muertos festival in Mexico City, visit the mummies in Guanajuato, and watch a parade in Tzintzuntzan. Sarah, who struggled with the inadequacy of American death culture after terminating a pregnancy, found healing by reconnecting with her Mexican heritage and its closer relationship to death.

In North Carolina, Doughty visits Katrina Spade and Dr. Cheryl Johnston of the Forensic Osteology Research Station, who are exploring human composting. Though their early experiments fail, their research into natural decomposition continues.

In Spain, Doughty visits Altima, a high-tech crematorium. Most United States facilities are hidden away in industrial parts of town and have very low visitation rates. In contrast, Altima is hypermodern and gets 60% cremation attendance. However, Altima preserves the distance between the living and the dead, just like in the United States.

In a sharp contrast, Doughty observes that while Japan also uses technology in their funeral facilities, they do so to close the distance between living and dead. Doughty visits a columbarium in Tokyo that uses technology to bring visitors closer to their deceased loved ones, and she sees another facility that uses technology to bring cremated remains directly to loved ones. The crematorium Rinkai is hypermodern, like Altima, but it allows families to participate in kotsuage, a ceremony in which they take bones from the ashes and place them in an urn. Lastel, a corpse hotel, allows people to spend long stretches of time with their deceased loved ones before cremation. These facilities convince Doughty that technology can help people grieve and normalize death.

In Bolivia, Doughty meets Aymara women who keep ñatitas, skulls believed to offer blessings. Like Catholic saints, the skulls each have areas of expertise. For this reason, and because the Catholic Church markets saints’ relics, Doughty finds it ironic that the Catholic Church in the area tries to squash veneration of the ñatitas. Since the skulls are maintained largely by Indigenous women, ñatitas are a source of authority and power for historically marginalized groups.

Finally, back in the United States, Doughty assists with a natural burial in Joshua Tree National Park. Doughty relates this to other funerary practices where the body nourishes the environment around it after death. For instance, the Parsi people and the Tibetan people have sky burials, where bodies are given to scavenger animals like vultures. This is the type of burial that Doughty would prefer for herself, though she knows that the American funeral industry would never allow it.

Doughty concludes by emphasizing that funerary practices are not spectacles—rather, they are an important aspect of cultural history. Her travels showed her examples of death practices that were supportive of the grieving process. She urges Americans to engage more directly with their death practices so that they can foster cultural change.