Até à Eternidade: Viajar Pelo Mundo à Procura da Boa Morte

by Caitlin Doughty, Landis Blair (Ilustração)

O que significa tratar os mortos com dignidade?

Fascinada pelo nosso medo generalizado da morte, Caitlin Doughty partiu à descoberta de como outras culturas lidam com a morte e cuidam dos mortos. Até à Eternidade é uma viagem imersiva pelo mundo que nos dá a conhecer rituais fascinantes e poderosos quase desconhecidos.

Na Indonésia rural, acompanha um homem na tarefa de limpar e vestir o corpo mumificado do seu avô. Em La Paz, conhece as ñatitas, crânios humanos que fumam cigarros e concedem desejos, e em Tóquio descobre a cerimónia do kotsuage, em que os familiares usam pauzinhos para separar os ossos maiores dos seus entes queridos das cinzas crematórias.

Com um humor negro e curiosidade sem limites, a autora investiga a história funerária do mundo e analisa como as variadas tradições, do Día de los Muertos do México ao enterro no céu dos Himalaias, nos ajudam a ver os nossos próprios costumes sob uma nova perspetiva.

Primorosamente ilustrado pelo artista Landis Blair, este livro é uma aventura pelo mórbido desconhecido, uma história sobre as muitas maneiras fascinantes pelas quais as pessoas de todos os lugares enfrentam o desafio humano da mortalidade.

Genres: Nonfiction, Death, Science, Audiobook, History, Travel, Memoir

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2017

About the author

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the author of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? as well as the New York Times best-selling books Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity. She is the creator of the “Ask a Mortician” web series and founder of The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, where she owns and runs a funeral home.

Reviews

[PorshaJo · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, this might sound really weird....but I've been to a lot of funerals. And I mean a lot. As a very young girl, I used to go church on weekends with my grandparents, and they would always go to the funeral home after church. It was always the funeral home three day viewings followed by a church service and grave site service. Many, many years later a family member passed and was cremated. I thought it the oddest thing, completely unheard of. I had many long discussions with my husband about it as I was so confused. I didn't know there was anything different. This book was an eye opening experience to see different countries and cultures and their methods of burying the dead.

I found it fascinating to learn of so many different methods from an open air funeral pyre, to cultures who keep a body in the house for 5, 10+ years mummifying the body, to Indonesia where they prop up their bodies, to Japan where they have very ultra-modern places to sit with the deceased and where relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved- ones’ bones from cremation ashes, to homes that store skulls, and many more. Finally, to the one I found most fascinating....the FOREST. The Forensic Osteology Research Station in North Carolina. Here, bodies are placed on the grounds of a research facility and 'composted' providing a green burial. The author is a mortician and is fascinated by how people fear dead bodies. She is also quite rough on the American funeral industry and doesn't hold back. It is a huge area that makes tons of money. Your basic American funeral can start at around $20K and go up substantially from there.

I find it odd to say I 'enjoyed' reading this book, but I learned a lot about how many in the rest of the world view death and how they bury their dead. The book includes illustrations that show many of the rituals and images of Mexico's Dias de los Muertos. I have not read the authors first book but it is one I plan to pick up soon. I can't say this is for everyone. Some might find it quite macabre. I found it a bit educational and it's one that can lead to many in-depth discussions.

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brief tour of some of the world's strangest burial practices. In the epilogue, thanking people, Caitlin says, "Finally Landis Blair, who was an all-right boyfriend but is now a killer collaborator". And that feels like the key to this all-right, 3.5 star (at best) book.

It feels like flushed with the deserved success of first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, the author had decided to have a dual career as of funeral home proprietor and writer and had cast around for a subject to write about it. A tour of the world's more unusual funerary practices! It was so obvious.

There was a New Age funeral pyre in Colorado, the scraped-clean and dressed dead of Sulawesi brought out for their annual, communal party. Then in Bolivia, skulls it seemed everyone had in their home that they and bring offerings to ask favours of (and get blessed by the local Catholic priest). In another country graves are only rented and then the remains turfed out if the family fail to pay. The most interesting was Tibet where the recently dead are chopped up and mixed with flour and butter and offered to birds of prey who having filled up on the corpses fly off, and so it is known, poetically, as 'sky burial'.

I knew most of these funeral rituals so it wasn't that interesting. But one thing really caught my attention. We are schooled to think of Buddhism as some ideal spiritual philosophy, something peaceful that brings contentment, despite one of the world's most celebrated Buddhists and well known champions of human rights, Aung San Suu Kyi's support of the state persecution and violence directed at the Muslims in Myanmar.

But is this not modern thinking? This is what the Buddha thought of women:

"The ancient scriptures tell of the Buddha encouraging his community of male monks to take trips to the charnel grounds to meditate on women’s rotting bodies. The motive of these “meditations on foulness” was to liberate a monk from his desire for women; they were, as scholar Liz Wilson calls them, “sensual stumbling blocks.”

The hope was that charnel meditation would strip women of all their desirable qualities so men would realize they are merely flesh-sacks filled with blood, guts, and phlegm. The Buddha was explicit, claiming that a woman’s deception is not in her accessories, like makeup and gowns, but in her fraudulent garment of flesh, surreptitiously oozing grotesque liquids from its orifices."

That was enlightening. For that the author gets upped to 4 stars.

It's a good book, very readable, the insights and descriptions are very much of the popular science genre, not too deep, not too challenging, a quick read and light non-fiction. It does make you realise that a funeral is for the benefit of the mourners and the funeral directors. You might want to consider a ritual that is personal for the family, and less the killingly expensive pressure that benefits the funeral directors.

[Miranda Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted."

In this delightfully macabre book, Caitlin Doughty takes the audience on a whirlwind adventure across countries and continents as she seeks to understand death culture and customs of various global communities.

"There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild."

In this book, we learn about sky burials - where vultures carry the remains into the air and scatter them throughout the land.

We discover the surprisingly high tech cremation techniques in Tokyo, where ashes are placed in light-up Buddhas accessible by the swipe of a card.

There's the families who believe their loved ones are just resting in their bodies, and thus it is normal to keep the corpse around for months to years.

And there's the body recomposition, where bodies are broken down into fertilizer to nourish trees or other greenery that the families wish to grow.

"We consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own."

Throughout all of this, Caitlin both explains and provides perspective on death through the lens of her American heritage.

"Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men."

She often points out how things have changed over time and what can be done to restore power to the people. How caring for our dead allows for true peace at the loss of a loved one - a final goodbye to their body and often a hello to their spirit.

"Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss."

Whew! This was a fascinating book.

I've watched Caitlin's youtube videos for about five or so years now, so I'm fairly familiar with her views on death and various deep dives she's gone into about death culture...and yet, even with all that base knowledge, I was wholly fascinated by this book.

There were a few stories here and there that I had heard before in a video and yet, reading about them in print was a whole new experience.

I liked getting more of her thoughts and opinions on the various rituals and learning more deeply about the various cultures she toured.

I also appreciated how this book made me examine my own biases and hang-ups on death, and to ponder my own mortality.

Cause like it or not, one day we'll all be worm food.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a strange choice for Christmas reading, I found this book utterly fascinating. It seems that the United States may be the only country that avoids the subject of death. Other countries, not only have a different view of their dead, but treat their dead entirely different.

In the Torajan region of Sulawel in Indonesia, many live along side their dead. The mummified corpses are not buried, but remain part of the home. In Mexico, most of us have heard of the the Day of the dead, which actually lasts more than one day. The dead are invited back, tempted with their favorite foods, to come and visit with their loved ones.

Japan's dead are often cremated. In fact, Japan has a 99.9% rate of cremation, and the cremation is attended by 60% of their loved ones. They also have the highest longevity expected, for women, and they are healthy to boot. The different ways the dead are treated in this country is very interesting and makes remarkable reading.

Different ways of treating the dead are making a push in the United States. Making death a natural part of life, not something to fear, and a less abrupt way of dealing with this subject. Practices of old as well as the evolving role and costly practice of our current ways of handling death, are also discussed.

Truly fascinating, though not a subject I actually thought of before reading this book. All the same, the constant TV commercials trying to convince the elderly, or near elderly, to buy insurance so their family is not financially responsible for the significant costs of their deaths, is distasteful.

The author narrates her own book, and does a very good job doing so.

[Saajid Hosein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note that this isn't a review as much as it is a personal reflection. You've been warned.

This book made me think a lot about how we construct knowledge differently across the globe. What might seem gross and macabre for some of us might be a deeply important ritual of mourning and death observance for others. I like that Doughty is decentering Western ideas of how death should be conceived and observed, showing us that our own fear of death causes us to forget what we were biologically designed to do and that is to decompose back into the planet that fed us.

Growing up in the Muslim community of Trinidad, I was lucky to be exposed to a more naturalistic way burial. In my area we have one small Muslim cemetery where graves are reused. In Islam, the afterlife is more important than the mundane, the body is merely a vessel. We bathe it, no embalming, and the body is placed into the earth and left to decompose naturally. The body will sink over the years making the grave reusable once more, which is why the very small cemetery never runs out of space.

However, I've always had death anxiety and my religion never really helped me deal with it in a way that was positive. It's not the religion itself, but what Muslims choose to focus on. There's a lot of hellfire talk and all the punishments that people will face in the grave. I've had to bar these ideas from my head, not because I don't believe them, but because they've always been used to instill fear in ways that only bolstered my fear of death, rather than allowed me to come to terms with it.

It took a YouTuber/mortician from California to help me come to terms with mortality in a healthier way. Finding myself at the intersection of queer and Muslim is extremely difficult. You might ask "Okay Saajid, but what does death have to do with your queer Muslim woes?" EVERYTHING! Death marks the beginning of your journey into the metaphysical world, a world where evil and corrupt souls are subjected to divine retribution. When you grow up learning that your own natural desires and expressions as a queer person supposedly fall into the categories of evil and corrupt, death isn't a prospect to look forward to. As I journey through my faith, though, I've been working on decentering mainstream fundamentalist ideas that plague a religion which is a lot more historically and culturally diverse than we give it credit for. There's space for me in Islam, I just have to find it myself, inshaAllah.

Oh and one more thing: Naya Rivera (if you haven't heard, look it up). Her death affected me in ways I couldn't have imagine. I knew of her, was familiar with her work, but I wasn't a super fan or anything. I think the sheer suddenness and sadness of her death is what got to me. A young, talented, woman of colour, gone in a matter of minutes. Leaving her baby stranded on a boat, the last memory he will ever have of his mother is her disappearing into the waters. Naya's death reminded me of something I've always grappled to accept and that's that death can come anytime, anywhere. With that in mind, I realized what bothered me so much about her dying and that's that I've been conditioned into thinking that death doesn't suit someone like Naya. It's an odd match. I would go back and watch old interviews and clips of her singing and dancing and acting on 'Glee' and think so myself "How can SHE actually be dead?" She's too young, too healthy, too wealthy, too talented, too successful, too loved for death too have the audacity too take her away. But it doesn't work like that, now does it?

Bringing it back to this book. It looks at death practices and rituals across the world and how we shouldn't be absolutist with our knowledge of death. Not everyone on this planet is going to conceptualize death in the same way, the least we can do is respect each other's practices. But I think this book also prompts us to learn from those who have mastered the art of dealing with death in ways that honour dead body and the natural process of dying, instead of fear them.

Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un - Verily, we belong to Allah, and to Allah we will return (Qur'an, 2:156).

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun, interesting and sensible about our relationship with death and the rituals surrounding it
“Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals—funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.”

From American initiatives to Barcelona, Mexico, Indonesia, Columbia and Japan, Caitlin Doughty takes us on a trip to various alternatives to dealing with death and have a more healthy and relaxed relation with our deceased loved ones. The Buddhist temple with a card chip that guides you to the urn of your loved one and high rise fancy funeral homes in Barcelona show that death doesn't have to be dreary but can be coupled to high-tech. The restrictions to alternative ways of funerals in the US are apparently quite extensive so new initiatives like an open air pyre and nature burial also get attention. In the end I found the so called Towers of Silence, used in Zoroastrian sky burials (for lack of a better world) most interesting and poetic, but From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death packs a lot to think about and is written in a very accessible and informative manner, really inviting the reader to positively engage with something we (or our loved ones) all will need to think about in the end.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sent this book by the publisher after responding to an email sent to a librarian email list; they had extras leftover from ALA, and I was #ALAleftbehind, so I asked for a few from their list.

I knew of Caitlin Doughty but never read her earlier book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, which talks about her experience running a crematory and funeral home. In this book, she visits several different places that deal with death differently, either from cultural differences or people thinking outside the mold.

From going through my father's death this past year, I certainly was well acquainted with the incredible costs of a burial, and my Dad was fortunate enough to have a gravesite and gravestone provided by the government because of his status as a veteran. But I witnessed price gouging and how funeral homes take advantage of grieving families who feel trapped. It isn't pretty.

I hadn't stopped to think of how it might be different other places, how the racket might be unique to our country or that other countries at the very least would have different rackets. Doughty explores some of the standard expectations of other places and I felt like I learned a lot, from the Japanese crematorium experience (where the family watches), to the corpses living with families on an island in Indonesia, to the idea that a burial plot is only as good as long as the body is decomposing in Spain (and not a permanent space as it is in the USA.) Doughty also tells the story of how the way a Mexican town honors their dead is healing to her friend who lost a baby.

Such a minor part, but I found myself fascinated by the pages about whales... how their poop feeds an ecosystem, how their decomposing bodies sustain life for half a year! These are the things I brought up during dinner conversation. I was surprised too, but the way she has written some of the details proves hard to forget.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Caitlin Doughty has done it again: dragged us death-phobic Westerners into the light of what grieving and death could (and maybe should) look like. In From Here to Eternity, Caitlin travels the globe and shares her first-hand experiences of getting up close and personal with death rituals from around the world.

I found each section absolutely captivating, and although the Tana Toraja bit did give me a nightmare last night (seriously), I'm going to blame that on the arms-length (or maybe football field) distance we Americans prefer to keep from death. I still don't know what I'd like to happen to my remains after I die, but thanks to Caitlin Doughty, I have hope that we as a culture can move towards a more open-minded, natural approach to death that allows different preferences and options to be acceptable and attainable for everyone.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely LOVED this. I cannot wait to pick up more of Doughty's work and to binge watch her YouTube channel "Ask a Mortician."

In this book, Doughty outlines all of the fucked up ways in which the US death industry is fucked up. She looks at expenses, dignity, and the seeming moratorium on public grief here in the states.

In contrast, Doughty takes the reader along with her as she travels the world learning about other cultures' death rituals and mourning practices. This could have very easily devolved into some gross, appropriative, fetishization of how beautiful and spiritual non-Western cultural traditions are. I mean, a white lady visiting Buddhist monks and remote Indonesian villages? I was ready to say, "No thank you, macabre Eat Pray Love." But now I have to eat my words! Doughty looks at different cultural traditions without a tinge of fetishization, and with a whole lot of respect. It's WONDERFUL. It's educational, it highlights how awful the corporatization of death is, AND it touches on the impacts of colonialism. I mean... I just could not have been more wrong. And I'm so happy about it.

Doughty's tone in this novel is great. She's informative, blunt, and funny. None of these seems in-line with how American's typically talk about death (which is pretty much the point of this book). She pulls back the curtain, gives you honesty and insight, and makes death a whole lot less scary.

Can't recommend this book enough!!

[TarHeelReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this about a year ago as a buddy read with Beth. I must have forgotten to formally review it. It’s a fascinating glimpse into customs and rituals from around the world after the death of loved ones. It reminded me of my undergrad studies in anthropology, and I learned a vast amount. Well-written and completely absorbing, I’ll definitely read all of Doughty’s other books.

[Paul Lockman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am way out of tune with the majority here. This book just didn’t work for me. I am all for getting death and dying into the conversation more broadly and it's especially important to discuss it with your loved ones and find out exactly what sort of funeral or service they would like and what they want done with their body. I also agree with the author that time spent with the deceased person is very important before they are whisked away. She also makes valid criticisms of the funeral industry in that it is overpriced and needs an overhaul and different options and practices should be available. However, the author seemed to imply or make the broad generalisation that Western countries have it completely and absolutely wrong and that increased contact with and viewing of the deceased person is preferable and a more meaningful and healthier way to approach death and dying. I think it is a totally personal decision and choice and some people are perfectly OK with the way funerals are done in the West and may not be comfortable with the idea of their deceased body being available to friends and loved ones for too long. My Mum, for example, left explicit instructions that she didn't want a viewing or an open coffin. In my opinion you can be perfectly comfortable with death and dying but still find some of the practices from other cultures the author describes as a bit off-putting and not for them. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Another gripe I had - I am just not sure there was a book's worth of material here, it was more like a blog, or a handful of anecdotes or a travelogue of some of her travels and experiences with a few other cultures and communities and I found the writing was a bit disjointed and all over the place. It didn’t have much depth or historical or cultural context and I would have liked additional research on the funeral practices of a broader cross section of civilisations rather than this series of brief anecdotes. I just didn’t come away from this book as informed as I would like to have been but I did enjoy learning about a few death customs and practices that I wasn’t aware of.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

So interesting and a great introduction to this topic!

[Montzalee Wittmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Here to Eternity
Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
By: Caitlin Doughty
Narrated by: Caitlin Doughty
The author traveled around various countries and described the countries way of treating their dead, their thoughts on death, and how it may have changed. She compares these countries to the US. It was very interesting, a little strange from the view from an American. I do see how we have lost sight of the respect of the ritual of death and the big business of funeral homes have made it impersonal and costly. I love her books. I have read all three now and love her website. She did a remarkable job with the narration.

[Iben Frederiksen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book Caitlin Doughty's published, and it is also my second read of hers.
In this book Caitlin, a writer and mortician, chronicles her meetings with other cultures death and burial traditions, in a very chill and humorous way.
It's interesting to say the least, how very different the ending of someone's life is dealt with around the world.

From Mexico to Japan, the business of death is quite different aross the globe, making the reader aware of practices that are so very unlike their own. Some of these practices and traditions may seem miles apart from what the reader considers "the norm", but Caitlin let's the representatives from burial companies around the word, explain in their own words how their traditions have come to be, making you consider and decide for yourself, which practices you can realate to the most, and which ones you just find too unusual.

Being danish myself, even the practices that are "the norm" to american Caitlin Doughty, are very different from the ones we have here in Denmark. I find things like embalming and open caskets, to be very different (and also slightly creepy) from the burials we have.

A fascinating and humorous read!

[Lois Bujold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three-and-a-half stars, really. Read in one fascinated day. The personal explorations by a young California mortician of funeral practices across the world.

My eye was first caught by her more recent work, the irresistibly titled Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions From Tiny Mortals About Death, but my library's wait list was too long, so I selected this one instead. Good value. Her others are certainly on my to-read list now.

Ta, L.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

My anticipated reaction:


My actual reaction:


This isn't bad, not by a longshot. It's also not the stunning masterpiece I'd lead myself to believe it would be. A lot of that is my fault because I've stalked Caitlin Doughty for about 4 or 5 years now and am up to date on all her YouTube videos. I often read articles about her or by her or those written for Order of the Good Death so not a lot of this information was new to me. While I expected such to be the case, I also expected to get a more in-depth anthropological/sociological analysis of the death rituals explored in each chapter and that is the source of my lackluster response. These read like interesting blog posts and I wanted more. MORE!
Also, the book is illustrated nicely but I wanted photographs or, in a perfect book, a mix of photographs and illustrations. That disappointment is solely on me and, yes, I did do a lot of Googling, as you're about to find out.

There are eight chapters in this book, each a compilation of Caitlin's (we're not friends but I'm calling her by her first name anyway. I'm older than she is and in some societies, that totally gives me the right to not be formal) experiences with community traditions surrounding death. I felt it was a little odd so much of this centers on American experiences - 3/8 chapters take place in the ol' US of A. I guess that could go to show that we're not as death squeamish as we think and that there is hope for progress among the pearl-clutchers but I wanted more glimpses of what other cultures do with their dead because I already live here and know what we do with corpses.
She starts out in Colorado (Represent!) and I'm going to go ahead and talk about what I thought of each chapter but I'll put it all under a spoiler tag in case you want to be surprised in regard to the places she travels and the things she sees!


Colorado: Crestone
Caitlin comes to Colorado! As I noted in my while-I'm-reading-this update, I was sure she'd come here for Frozen Dead Guy Days or the coffin races in Manitou.
I was wrong! She came for the Crestone Funeral Pyre which I had never heard of and was excited to learn about.
After I read this chapter, I called up (texted) my BFF, T, and was all, "Hey. We need to buy some land and start up a burning business." She was like, "LOLWUT?" And I was, "You know how we're always talking about sumping the bodies? Well, now we can burn them. We can rent out a funeral pyre and hold funerals! It will be just like a wedding venue only, you know, with death and fire!" I waited awhile to hear back and then finally got, "Ok, there's available land in..." and this is why we are soulmates for life.

Indonesia: South Sulawesi
First, she and her death buddy went to see the Londa Burial Caves where she is supposedly Instagramed by strangers (I did a quick sweep of Instagram and found nothing, but Instagram could have been used as a name for any general social media site or I just didn't dig deeply enough) and I was completely fascinated by this. However, too quickly, she moved to the next place and topic, the Tana Toraja death rituals which I'd known about, to an extent. I love that the families hang out with their dead, put their dead in little houses and then bring them out to change their clothes and catch them up on all the gossip but now I worry they’re going to run out of buffalo. How do you make enough water buffalo for this event?
I would have liked this chapter fleshed out (ha!) a little more. Like, how are the Londo Caves related to the people who get to come out and be cleaned up on visitation day? Who gets the wood carvings and when? How does this all work?
I felt this was the weakest chapter with the least amount of solid explanation and observation which is a shame because it seems like such an affirming and happy place to embrace death.

Mexico: Michoacán
It's Days of the Dead in Mexico! Caitlin runs down to Michoacán to see what they've got going on for their Dias de los Muertos.
Let me tell you about my experience with Day of the Dead. There's a pretty solid Hispanic and Latino population around here so I'd heard of Day of the Dead but it wasn't taught in school when I was a kid and I didn't know anything about it. When I was in my 20's, though, my boyfriend at the time moved down to Taos and since it was just 4 hours away, I'd visit every other weekend. I went down one Halloween and went home two days later, in the dark, and noticed the cemeteries were glowing. Actually, they were full of live people and candles with farolitos and luminarias everywhere. When I got home, I called back down to ask just what in the world was going on and the boyfriend told me he'd find out. When he got back to me, he said it was the Day of the Dead celebration. When I went down again two weekends later, his delightful neighbors (whom I still miss), told me all about it and invited me to attend with them the following year. And when the following year rolled around, they remembered the invitation and extended it again, telling me I could meet grandma! It was a hard sell but because I am the whitest white girl, I figured I really wasn't supposed to go visit the grandmother I'd never met in the cemetery I'd only ever seen from the road so I demurred as gracefully as possible but I still feel honored that they wanted me to come with them to celebrate with their family in the graveyard. And even though we can't do the marigolds up here, due to them all being long dead by the time Nov. 1 and 2 roll around, the graves are still lovely to see, all brimming with light and food and living people.
Caitlin's Day of the Dead experience was much different. First, she got to go to the traditional Dias de los Muertos parade in Mexico City! In its inaugural year, no less!
And you're all like, "Erica, you can't have a tradition that is inagurual."
I'm here to tell you that yes, you absolutely can because traditions have to start somewhere. In this case, the parade started because of the James Bond movie, "Spectre."
In the opening scene of the film, Bond glides through the melee in a skeleton mask and a tux and slips into a hotel with a masked woman. Except, here's the trick. The Dias de los Muertos parade did not inspire the James Bond film. The James Bond film inspired the parade. The Mexican government, afraid that people around the world would see the film and expect that the parade exists when it did not, recruited 1,200 volunteers and spent a year re-creating a four-hour pageant.
And I thought Coca-Cola had a large global impact.
So, anyway, the next day, Caitlin and her friend/associate, Sarah, go to Michoacán. Sarah's story is important because she's of Mexican descent but did not grow up with her heritage. After she lost her baby, she had a hard time finding ways to express her grief in a culturally appropriate manner, appropriate to death-shunning Americans, I mean. It was through Frida Kahlo she learned about the betrayals of a woman's body and the unashamed acknowledgement of bereavement. That took her to Mexico to experience Day of the Dead with people who did not shy away from death, where she could express her agony and it was recognized and accepted. So, of course, she took Caitlin on her next trip so that they could see the mummies and angelitos, could visit an effigy of Father Cornelio, and take part in an actual Dias de los Muertos festival and the following walk to the cemetery.
This is probably the most personal chapter in the book. It's touching, sad, and also hopeful and I appreciated Caitlin's friend, Sarah, giving Caitlin, and therefore her readers, the gift of her story and journey.
On a related note, If you’re interested in Day of the Dead and haven’t seen Coco, do yourself a favor and view it ASAP.

North Carolina: Cullowhee
My mom, when she was dying, to concerned parties: "Don't be sad. I'm going to a better place."
Us, her family: *rolling eyes, shaking heads*
Concerned parties: *hands on hearts, tears in eyes* "Yes. To heaven. You'll be with God, blah blah blah."
Mom: "No. I'm going to Grand Junction." *endless cackling even though she's told this joke a thousand times by this point*
Concerned parties: *confusion or, at least, polite bemusement*
Us, her family: "She's going to a body farm in Grand Junction after she dies."
Concerned parties: *blanch and flee*
Guess where Caitlin is today, kids?
A body farm! And not just any body farm! This one is helping Katrina Spade with her Urban Death Project. It's here she's trying to figure out the magical soil mixture to quickly and efficiently compost human bodies! This is something I'd found out about through Caitlin and have been watching ever since because I would freaking LOVE to be compost and then go into a garden or a park! That would be absolutely perfect for me! So I'm hoping this is a thing by the time I die, but after reading this chapter, I realize I need to hold off on dying for awhile because while it's possible to compost big animals at a rapid rate, there's a lot of wasteful stuff that goes into that and this project is all about being eco-friendly, sooo...there's still more experimentation to go. But I'm on board!
Oh, and also? This chapter will teach you all about the magical whale fall. It's pretty amazing stuff.

Spain: Barcelona
Oh! A critical piece!
Caitlin journeys to Spain to conduct interviews with the National Press regarding Spain’s treatment of death. It seems they like to put death on display, complete with glass barrier keeping the living from the deceased.
Though Caitlin was asking critical questions of Spain's funeral industry, Altima Funeral Home, Google-headquarters-meets-Church-of-Scientology...minimalist, hypermodern, projecting the potential for cultlike activity agreed to give her a tour of their sleek facilities. She learned that families can choose sepultura or incinerar for their dead and because of Catholicism not having the most positive views on cremation, many still choose sepultura except in Seville where there is no room, no room! so the government subsidizes cremation for its citizens. Also, there’s not a lot of embalming going on because Spain is pretty quick to dispose of its no-longer-living. Like many European countries, graves in Spain are often recycled, the bony inhabitants exhumed and given eternal rest in communal bone pits. I assume some families have mausoleums for their bones, but that’s just a leap I’m making on my own. Caitlin gets to see a cremation and she continues to be puzzled by the glass that offers both transparency and a barrier to death.
You can probably tell I wasn’t as interested while reading this. It seemed pretty cut and dry, like something that would happen here, Stateside, except for the grave exhumations but that’s something I’d already encountered sooo… moving on.

Japan: Tokyo
NO! She did not go to visit Aokigahara, though she did just talk about Aokigahara in a recent video.
Caitlin went to Japan for other death reasons:
But before you learn about those, you’ll learn about Hachiko, a story you’ve probably already heard, and the death of Sony’s robo-dogs. (Happier follow-up story can be found here)
So the first reason was to see Koukokuji Buddhist Temple and Yajima jushoku’s technological upgrade to the old columbarium, which you may have heard about when it took over the news a few years back, and now I want to go there and see it! It sounds amazing.
The second reason was to learn more about the family’s role in cremation ceremonies. Unlike Spain, Japan has the highest cremation rate in the world but they don’t get a bunch of ashes in a bag like we do. Instead, after the incineration is complete, the family stands around the ash tray (because that’s kind of literally what it is, though I doubt that’s what it’s called) to pick out the leftover bones with chopsticks. They put the bones in an urn and take the turn home. The custom is called kotsuage and it sounds like an awfully nice way to continue to care for your loved one after death.
Then Caitlin finds the hotel of her dreams. It’s a corpse hotel. It’s pretty freaking awesome and I’m not sure why this isn’t a thing in all first-world countries that haven’t figured out a good way for people to deal with death.
She also visits the super high-tech Daitokuin Ryogoku Ryoen, a multisensory temple and graveyard.
Seriously, this chapter is worth the price of the book. It’s illuminating!

Bolivia: La Paz
Caitlin’s traveling the world with her friend, Paul, again! This time, they go to Bolivia to meet skulls. It’s the kind of anthropological tale I’ve been waiting for!
I was a tad bitter that there was no photo of Sandra, the fancy natita who had her picture taken that day. There's only a very nice illustration.
Don't worry, I found her on Instagram. That may even be Caitlin holding her, since she was charged with hanging out with Sandra while Sandra's...landlady? Roommate? Minion? Caretaker? The person with whom Sandra lives and upon whom Sandra grants favors - found her something nice to wear for the picture.
While I don’t have much to say about this chapter, it was my favorite.

California: Joshua Tree
Caitlin talks a little about her job at her funeral home, Undertaking LA which segues into a discussion on natural burials, specifically those in Joshua Tree Memorial Park.
Afterward, she discusses her preferred mode of corpse management, the one she’d most like to have if only it were an option. But it’s not for two reasons. 1) It’s not something we do in America and, 2) read the book and find out for yourself.
I liked this chapter because she brings death back around to a personal level. We’ve seen what other cultures do and now we need to think about how we want to approach our own deaths and care for the deceased that start showing up in everyone’s lives eventually.


So that's the book. And I liked it, obviously. I just didn't love it like I'd wanted.

Side note: I am interested to find out the title of her next book. She's covered a song lyric, a movie title...what's next? A dance move? Only time will tell.

[jenny reads a lot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, reads like fiction, I cried at nearly every story.

Will check out more by this author in the future!

| IG | TikTok |

[Ross Blocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Here to Eternity is the kind of exuberant, passionate non-fiction I live for. Caitlin Doughty has a deep fascination with death: she is a funeral director by trade and her knowledge, enthusiasm and good humor are clearly evident as she describes and de-stigmatizes cultural attitudes toward death around the world. Many of the stories revolve around her own travels to various parts of the world to witness ceremonies, crypts, crematoria, and columbaria (places where cremated remains are kept). In Colorado, one group has fought legal battles and intense suspicion to offer outdoor cremation. In Indonesia, families co-habitate with the bodies of their loved ones for many years: talking to them, applying preservatives, and bringing them out each year to walk the streets. In North Carolina, forensics facilities allow experimentation with human composting. In Japan, you might be given a pair of chopsticks to retrieve your loved one's bones following cremation, and a modern facility lets you hold up a keycard to trigger a colorful light display identifying their remains in one Buddha-shaped urn amongst hundreds. In Bolivia, some steal skulls from graves and keep them around to share advice and answer prayers. In Joshua Tree, California, a pilot program lets you be buried, sans embalming fluids, in a simple cloth four feet below the ground. In the mountains of Tibet, bodies are chopped up and fed to vultures: one of the faster returns to nature one might imagine (if one imagined such things). The book has wonderful illustrations by Landis Blair, which perform a crucial role: they let you visualize what is being described without the "yick" factor some might experience seeing photos. I, of course, did plenty of Google surfing to find the photos.

Along the way, Doughty shares numerous fun facts and thought-provoking commentary on our relationship to death. In the US, death has become a lucrative business, and bodies are whisked away and kept hidden, and there are only two options offered: embalming/burial or cremation. She advocates for a more diverse, nuanced approach to death that honors the dead in the way they have chosen and that allows family time and space to process the loss, and also for death not to worsen our ecological crises. At the same time, this can be accomplished without compromising the health or safety of the living.

I found myself jealous of many of the practices described here, and thinking about my own choices for my body after I die. I am an organ donor, and want any useful organs to go to people who need them. I'd love to donate my body to medical students or scientific study (my wife is against this, and she and I have had great conversations after reading this book together). In the end, I don't want to be embalmed, and would even prefer not to be burned - I'd love for my body to be returned back to the earth in the least invasive, time-consuming way, so my nutrients can go back into creating new forms of life. I'm hoping, by the time it comes to that, there will be more options available. If so, it will be thanks to efforts like this book, which I highly recommend.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My wife and I have watched every episode of Ask a Mortician and read Caitlin's other two books. When I was between books and noticed this on the bookcase downstairs, I decided it to was time to give it a read.

In this book, Caitlin Doughty travels to various sites around the world to witness their burial traditions, from places as close as Colorado and the Mojave desert to more exotic locales like Indonesia, Japan, and the Middle East. Catacombs, Towers of Silence, and corpses in the home for years are the order of the day, as are natural burials and outdoor cremations.

I don't want to spoil too many of the goodies. However, I occasionally put the book down to relate some tidbit to my wife, partly in order to spur her to read the book soon.

Four out of five stars. I hope Caitlin puts out another book and more episodes of Ask a Mortician soon.

[Ilana (illi69) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy Caitlin Doughty’s books so much, I’m now sorry I’ve finished the third book she’s published so far because I could use more of her caustic humour on the facts of death and what happens to our bodies once life as we know it departs from them and other forms of life take over what’s left. Told in delightfully gruesome and funny details.

Here Doughty recounts her travels to different parts of the world to see up close what death rituals involve in different cultures. Japan has death hotels and buddhas with ambient light projections in a high tech funerary memorial. Bolivia has skulls covered in cute caps which bring otherworldly gifts to those who come seeking spiritual guidance. A small town—a very small town in the US allows a not-for profit funeral pyre provider to operate legally, a rare exception in the land where corporate funeral companies are willing to crush out competition even from Benedictine monks for maximum profits.

Doughty is a gifted storyteller and her delivery is casual and entertaining. Here’s hoping she’s already completing her next book project.

[Fátima Linhares · Rating 4 out of 5]

Os familiares recebem pares de pauzinhos, um feito de bambu, outro de metal. A pessoa que era mais próxima do falecido começa pelos pés, apanhando os ossos com os pauzinhos e colocando-os na urna. Outros membros da família juntam-se-lhe, e prosseguem esqueleto acima.

Este ritual é o kotsuage, um dos ritos de despedida no Japão. Após a cremação e, ao contrário do que acontece no ocidente, os ossos não são pulverizados, a família recolhe-os e pode ficar com alguns e os restantes, esses sim, são pulverizados e descartados pela funerária.

Apesar de parecer algo estranho, este gesto dá à família uma sensação de que estão a fazer algo pela pessoa falecida.

São estas e outras tradições que a autora, ela própria dona de uma agência funerária, nos traz neste Até à eternidade. Diferentes ritos funerários, em diferentes locais do mundo. Deixou-me a pensar no que gostaria que me fizessem quando chegar a altura de deixar este mundo. Acho que adubo para plantinhas é uma boa opção.

Para cremar corpos, queimamos combustível fóssil, assim chamado por ser formado por organismos mortos decompostos. As plantas crescem a partir da matéria decomposta de plantas anteriores. As páginas deste livro são feitas a partir da polpa de madeira crua de uma árvore derrubada no seu apogeu. Tudo o que nos rodeia provém da morte, todas as partes de todas as cidades, e todas as partes de todas as pessoas.

Bem, já dizia a Bíblia que és pó e ao pó hás-de tornar.

[Shaimaa شيماء · Rating 3 out of 5]

هدية عصير الكتب في العيد، الله يسامحكم.

أعتقد مفيش كتاب اتخصص للكلام بس عن الموتى والجثث زي الكتاب ده، ممكن نلاقي الكلام ده في وسط مواضيع تانية، لكن الكتاب كله كده بس، حرااام.

صحيح الواحد مكنش يتخيل إزاي الشعوب ليها طرق كثير للتعامل مع الموت، وإن الكلام ده لسه بيحصل لغاية دلوقتي، بس برضه الجو العام للكتاب مش مريح خالص.

الكاتبة حانوتية أمريكية، لفت بلاد كثير عشان تعرف عادات وتقاليد كل بلد.

واحد حكالها إن جثة جده فضلت معاهم سبع سنين بعد ما مات وإنهم كانوا بيناموا معاه في نفس السرير!!!

وواحدة يابانية مدفنتش أبوها ٣٠ سنة عشان تاخد المعاش بتاعه.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I presume most readers come away from this book impressed—even shocked—by the bizarre variety of ways that exist in the world of disposing of dead human bodies. The author travels the world—and our own country—to report of alternative and unusual death and grieving practices.

I’ve decide not to describe the variety of funerary, burial, and cremation practices in this review, but instead focus on the underlying goal of this book to search for “the good death.” By reminding the reader about how one culture’s taboos are another’s sacred practice, this book encourages an eyes-wide-open approach to mortality.

The author’s suggests that current practices may not be the best ways to grieve the loss of loved ones. Perhaps friends and family of the departed should participate in a more active role in the care, preparation, and burial of the corpse. The author believes death avoidance is a cultural failing, and exploration of alternatives deserve to be examined.

Death is an inevitable consequence of living. If there are ways of handling death that can help the process of recovery from grief and loss, I hope they can be found.

A Personal Story:
My sister died at age nineteen after being unconscious in a hospital bed for six months caused by an anesthesia procedure gone wrong. After her death my mother noted that my sister always looked forward to coming home after being away to college, and that it would honor her love of home to bring her body to our house for a period of time to lie-in-state. I wish we had carried out my mother's suggestion because if we had I would now, over sixty years later, take comfort in the memory of having done so.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
In her second book, Caitlin takes us around the world to take a look at how other cultures view and treat death. If you're already aware of how bizarre, detached and corporate-ified the US is about death, this will be a lovely trip through some truly beautiful rituals and cultures. If you aren't aware, well, this might be a bit jarring for you.

Caitlin approaches the topic with respect and just the right amount of humor. I can't recommend her writing enough, and would definitely recommend her first book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory if you'd like to learn a bit more about the way our current death care system works.

Also, moving to Colorado immediately because I WANT THE PYRE TREATMENT.
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for providing me a copy for review.

[Ammar · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating book about the various cultures and how they interact with death, and the concept of the departed or loved one. were many non-western cultures perform more natural acts of burial, a non-industrial cremation. some use a pyre to lit a loved one, while others keep them mummified, and visit them often.

The Japanese use chopsticks to pluck their loved one's bones from the ashes.

Fascinating and written beautifully

[Heather ~*dread mushrooms*~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this quite as much as Doughty's previous book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, but some parts were really interesting (Himalayan vultures with nine-foot wing spans) and others quite moving (people grieving their dead children).

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
This was an interesting non-fiction book that explored a variety of non-traditional burial practices (non-traditional by North American standards, at least). Even though this book dealt with the topic of grief, it was not creepy, but rather try to normalize the topic, taking out the fear that tends to surround dead bodies. I particularly liked the sections about fire burning in Colorado as well as the section on Japanese traditions.

[Victoria ✮⋆˙ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so interesting! It really got me thinking tbh. Recommend Caitlin's books to everyone they're so good!!

[Carole (Carole's Random Life) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

This was such an interesting listen! I have been wanting to read this book since I learned of its existence. I find the way that we handle death as humans to be a topic that I never tire from. When I first picked up Caitlin Doughty's debut novel, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, I had my doubts but decided to read a few pages just to see what I thought. I couldn't put it down and it is a book that I frequently recommend to others today. I went into this audiobook with pretty high expectations and I am thrilled that the book was able to meet them.

In this book, the author travels the world to see how death is handled in a variety of cultures. It was a very eye-opening journey for me. I had no idea how little I actually knew about this topic. I thought that in the United States the options for dealing with a loved one's remains consisted of a choice between burial and cremation. I had no idea that in one community, residents have the option of an open-air pyre. Why don't we have this everywhere?

I was amazed by the variety of customs associated with dying. In this book, we see communities that keep the corpses of loved ones with them for rather long periods of time continuing their relationship with the deceased. There were a variety of rituals from around the world explained. Some of the scenes were quite vivid. While I don't think that I want to rush to practice some of the traditions explained in this book, I really liked being able to see how variations of how people around the world look at the process of death. In some ways, I think that a lot of cultures have a much healthier relationship with the dead. They prepare the bodies and care for the dead while in the United States, we are removed from the process leaving it to the professionals.

This book is narrated by the author. I think that she did a great job with the reading of this book. The book covers things and events that the author has seen so I think that she was able to deliver the story in a manner that nobody else would have been able to do. I thought that she had a very pleasant voice and I found it easy to listen to this book for long periods of time. I ended up listening to the entire book in a single day and found that I liked the narration more and more as I made my way through the book.

I would recommend this book to others. I love the way that this author is able to educate others on the process of death and dying in an entertaining manner. I found this book to be quite thought-provoking and I feel like I learned a thing or two. I could easily see myself reading this book again at some point in the future and I can't wait to check out some of the author's other works.

Initial Thoughts
This was really interesting. I think that there are a lot of problems with the way that death is handled in the US. I found some of the practices in other countries were very eye-opening. I am not going to sign up for a lot of the rituals described in this book but it did make me think about what kind of changes I would like to see closer to home. The author did a good job narrating the book.

Book source: Purchased

[Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for the content of the book itself, which consists mostly of a handful of snappy and informative accounts of death-care practices around the world (Indonesia, Mexico, Spain, Japan, Bolivia, and two or three of the more avant-garde options available in the U.S., too), witnessed firsthand and commented on by our author. If you're familiar with Caitlin Doughty via, for instance, her Ask a Mortician YouTube series, you'll know that she always addresses funerary topics with un-fakeable passion, diligent research, an insider's practical know-how, and more than a little gallows humor. True to form, From Here to Eternity both educates and entertains, its pages flying by despite the potentially off-putting subject matter.

To the uninitiated Doughty's schtick may sound tacky, even offensive, but her mission is not simply to shock the sensibilities of squeamish Western readers with "exotic" anecdotes about dressing up exhumed corpses or watching loved ones burn on open-air pyres; instead, she uses the surprise (and often disgust) of the unfamiliar to question Americans' alienation from the bodies of our dead, and by extension from the inescapable reality of death itself. This alienation, Doughty insistently reminds us, has been manufactured or at least exacerbated by a predatory funeral industry, which empties the pockets of the bereaved for gaudy caskets and competitively-priced cemetery plots and wax-sculpture embalming regimens even as it prevents families from spending more than a few rushed and paid-for hours in the presence of their dead. Doughty has made herself into a sort of living memento mori, constantly reminding us that our time in these bodies is limited and that a little morbidity—aka honesty—is a lot more healthy in the long run than the alternative.

The result of all this is that—though Doughty herself maintains a casual, at times even flippant tone—you can't help starting to think more seriously about your own relationship to this most momentous of subjects: deaths and burials you've witnessed or know you will witness soon enough, funeral services either cathartic or dissatisfying, the solitude of grief without a socially-appropriate outlet, your own mortality and plans for your remains. An aunt of mine died during the course of my reading, and I saw firsthand the sterility of the funeral process and the struggle of relatives who clearly needed space for their grief but were not granted it. I cried during one of Doughty's chapters, about a Mexican-American woman who turned to Día de los Muertos rituals and the art of Frida Kahlo in order to mourn the baby she never had, and my book club's discussion of this book was the most personal and open one I've been a part of, with teary stories about lost loved ones and frank conversations about how we'd like to be sent off ourselves.

That sort of stuff transcends a simple star rating on Goodreads, and inspires me to recommend this book to everyone, no matter how disinterested in the subject matter you may believe yourself to be. Death, after all, is one of the few topics that absolutely no one has the privilege to ignore. Surely it's best to be on speaking terms with yours when it comes.