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downsdea 's review for:
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
by Caitlin Doughty
I just wanted something different from this book. It’s fine if all you want from it is some explorations of funeral customs in different cultures. As a physician who deals with death regularly this wasn’t enough for me.
The book repeatedly makes the argument that Americans are too detached from the dead bodies of our loved ones. There is some vague allusion that this is because the funeral industry pushes for expensive caskets and otherwise makes the process unnecessarily expensive and detached. But I didn’t hear any evidence that a closer relationship with a corpse is beneficial to the grieving process. Nowhere were there any examples of studies or even just anecdotes showing that Americans forget our dead or have more trouble grieving than in these other cultures. (It may well be true, but if you’re going to make the argument that we should be touching and hanging out with our corpses, back it up with something.)
I definitely think America has some major hangups around death but this book does not make any inroads into how to address them, in my opinion. Maybe a later edition could add some discussion by a sociologist about the American attitude toward (and fear of) death. Maybe the author could visit a hospital with a family whose loved one is dying of cancer but whose family still want aggressive resuscitation due to that fear of death.
The book repeatedly makes the argument that Americans are too detached from the dead bodies of our loved ones. There is some vague allusion that this is because the funeral industry pushes for expensive caskets and otherwise makes the process unnecessarily expensive and detached. But I didn’t hear any evidence that a closer relationship with a corpse is beneficial to the grieving process. Nowhere were there any examples of studies or even just anecdotes showing that Americans forget our dead or have more trouble grieving than in these other cultures. (It may well be true, but if you’re going to make the argument that we should be touching and hanging out with our corpses, back it up with something.)
I definitely think America has some major hangups around death but this book does not make any inroads into how to address them, in my opinion. Maybe a later edition could add some discussion by a sociologist about the American attitude toward (and fear of) death. Maybe the author could visit a hospital with a family whose loved one is dying of cancer but whose family still want aggressive resuscitation due to that fear of death.