A review by emilyinherhead
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

We avoid the death that surrounds us at our own peril, missing its beauty and its lessons. (234)

Caitlin Doughty is a progressive mortician and advocate for death industry reform in the United States. I’ve read and enjoyed two of her other books, one a memoir of her time as an intern at a crematorium and the other a collection of answers to questions about death submitted by children. 

 

In From Here to Eternity, she travels around the world to learn about, witness, and compare rituals surrounding death in several different countries, including Mexico, Japan, and Bolivia. Her approach is curious and respectful, but her writing maintains a sense of humor—she’s so good at acknowledging the gravity of human mortality while not taking herself too seriously. 

 

Some of my favorite things I learned about in this book: 

• The Urban Death Project at Western Carolina University (in my own state!), which is figuring out how to safely and effectively compost human bodies
• Tibetan sky burials, where bodies are placed on mountaintops to decompose naturally and be taken apart by carrion birds or scavenging animals
• Towers of silence in India, which no longer work as they should due to decreased local vulture populations caused by medication given to cows (talk about evidence of the interconnectedness of ecosystems)
• Indonesian ma’nene rituals, when family members dig up their deceased relatives’ bodies to clean and redress them