From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I previously read another book by Caitlin Doughty, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? This book, From Here to Eternity, (not to be confused with the classic of the same title by James Jones) is likewise about death and bodies, but with a different focus. The other book (which I also recommend) is more about answering questions children (and others) have about death an decay, this one is all about exploring alternatives to the ludicrous funeral industry we have here in the Western world. 

 

Thus, the book takes the author from a natural funeral pyre in Colorado to the preserved skulls in Bolivia - and a lot of places in between. 

 

Doughty runs her own funeral home, so she is an insider on all of this. She is also a rebel, advocating strongly for a better approach to death and decay than the expensive, environmentally awful, and death-denialist approach we currently have. 

 

Central to this idea is that by separating us from death and dead bodies, we interrupt the grieving process and create greater fear of death - which is the most natural part of living, if you think about it. 

 

I discuss this more in my review of Doughty’s other book, so you might read that one for more. 

 

As Doughty explores the rituals of other cultures, she notes that there is a long and sordid history of denigrating differences. Throughout the book, she is respectful and thoughtful. And occasionally sarcastic. 

 

I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on Mathematics (e.g. 36.7 percent a “barbarous act”), but on emotions, a belief in the unique nobility of one’s own culture. That is to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own. 

 

Throughout her journey around the world, she meets up with strange characters. One of those is Dr. Paul Koudounaris, who is described in the book as “an eighteenth-century highwayman reimagined by Tim Burton,” and self-described as “a cross between Prince and Vlad the Impaler.” 

 

In describing the elaborate rituals in an area of Indonesia honoring the dead, she has a great quip. 

 

All of these rituals might seem complicated, but Agus claimed they have actually become far less so. His parents were born into the animistic Aluk religion, but his father converted to Catholicism at age sixteen. Agus gave his theory: “There are 7,777 rituals in Aluk. People left because it got too complicated.” Catholicism hardly seems the place to go for fewer complicated rituals, but there you go.

And likewise on first seeing the mummies:

 

The first mummy I saw wore eighties’ style aviator sunglasses with yellow-tinted frames. 

“Damn,” I thought, “that guy looks like my middle school algebra teacher.”

 

Doughty muses on why Westerners go through all the trouble of embalming, but then freak out about the regularly tended mummies. 

 

The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body. Given that the Torajans now use similar chemical formulas as North Americans to mummify their dead, I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living. Which raises the question, why preserve the body so intensely if you’re not planning to keep it around, America?

 

Unsurprisingly, the book talks about the Dias de los Muertos celebration in Mexico. It apparently made its return to prominence in more modern times as a protest against the Americanized celebration of Halloween, and as a protest against injustice. 

 

These groups adopted Dias de los Muertos to mourn for those kept from the public eye, including sex workers, indigenous and gay rights groups, and Mexicans who died trying to cross the border to the U.S. In the last forty years, Dias de los Muertos has come to represent popular culture, tourist culture, and protest culture throughout Mexico. And Mexico is viewed as a world leader in practicing engaged, public grief. 

 

I will mention here my post on reclaiming Halloween from my fundamentalist childhood, and the lovely experience the kids and I had a few years ago at the local Dias de los Muertos celebration. 

 

As part of the discussion of the closure and complete grief that comes with rituals such as Dias de los Muertos, Doughty tells the story of a woman who went through hell to terminate a non-viable pregnancy, whose combined trauma of the event and the loss of a wanted child led her several years later to participate, which helped her find peace.

 

“One particularly vile woman screamed over and over that I was a murderer. I couldn’t take it, so I walked directly up to her and screamed in her face, ‘My baby is already dead! How dare you!’”

 

I was raised in the subculture that believed abortion was always murder. There were several factors that made me change my mind, and come to oppose all forced gestation. One of those moments was meeting a local woman who was the most vocal protester of Planned Parenthood here in my city. I have never before in my life met a more vile, evil, self-righteous, hateful monster of a woman than her. Even though I still (at the time) agreed with her basic political position, I was creeped the hell out. I swear you could smell the sulphur and brimstone. It was then that I realized that the anti-abortion industrial complex drew the worst possible people, the ones who needed vulnerable younger women to take their hate and rageful self-loathing out on. Just disgusting. 

 

Moving on to something more uplifting, the chapter on a North Carolina composting operation (using donated bodies), experimenting on the quickest and surest way to quickly compost a body of any sort, is quite fascinating. Honestly, if I were to have my choice, I think this would be the most environmentally friendly way for my mortal remains to return to the ecosystem. 

 

A particularly hilarious line is about the fencing “to keep out the curious, which include coyotes, bears, and drunk college students.” 

 

Of course, any well-meaning, useful endeavor will find itself attacked by “influencers” looking for clicks by lying about what is going on. No surprise, then, that the operation was attached by an online blogger for being “used by the government to greenwash mass murder.” No points if you guessed this guy was also an anti-vaxxer, a 9/11 truther, and denied that the Sandy Hook shooting was real.

 

This line was also interesting:

 

Katrina looks to this portion of the process, when the water is poured on top of the mound, as a future ritual. She doesn’t want the Urban Death Project facilities to share modern crematories’ allergy to family involvement. She hopes pouring the water on fresh woodchips will give the family the same sense of power as lighting the cremation pyre, pushing the button to start a modern cremation machine, or shoveling dirt onto the coffin. As we poured water onto Frank’s mound, it felt like ritual.

 

Not all of the funerals she visits are old school. She also visits hypermodern mausoleums and funeral homes in Japan and Spain. She describes the look of the one in Spain:

 

By contrast, the Altima funeral home, in Barcelona, is Google-headquarters-meets-Church-of-Scientology. It is minimalist, hypermodern, projecting the potential for cultlike activity. 

 

In this case, bodies are put on display behind clear glass, rather than in coffins. As she quips in the book, but not out loud:

 

“By putting them behind the glass like a zoo exhibit? What trouble are the corpses planning on causing, exactly?" 

 

In the chapter on Japan, she discusses the suicide culture. As an observation, she contrasts the Western view of suicide as a selfish act - a sin - whereas the cultural meaning of suicide in Japanese culture is a selfless act, sparing others the burden. Here again, she snarks a bit:

 

In the Judeo-Christian view - and thus, the dominant Western view - to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. (“Sin” does not qualify for the DSM-5)

 

There is a fun digression in this chapter as well. Because of limited land in cities for cemeteries, there has been a renewed use of vertical space. This was actually proposed back in the 1820s, but rejected at the time. Doughty uses this to note a patent filed in 1983 for a “camera extender.” Alas, the patent expired in 2003….before the Selfie Stick became popular. The inventor could have been rich. 

 

One of the weirdest chapters is about Bolivia, where well-preserved skulls (often with skin and hair) - natita - are prayed to. And sure, it seems weird, but even weirder is the fact that the Catholic church has been engaged in a long-standing war over them. Worshipers, who syncretize the religion with older traditions (like literally every religion ever), want the natita’s blessed. 

 

Doughty makes the connection that seems obvious once you hear it, but that I hadn’t drawn:

 

Bolivia is not the only place where skulls have connected believers to the divine. The irony behind the Church’s disdain for the practice is that European Catholics have used saintly relics and bones as intermediaries for more than a thousand years. The natitas were similar in purpose to other skulls I had met several years earlier, on a trip to Naples, Italy. 

 

Again, the line at the beginning: our rituals are sacred, yours are barbaric and evil. Just something to think about. 

 

Another thing to think about, that Doughty notes: the Catholic Church - and indeed pretty much all conservative religious groups - limit the role of intermediary between worshippers and the divine to males. She notes (and cites scholarly research) that relics and other physical objects used for access to the sacred were popular with women “to seize direct access to the divine from the hands of the male leaders” of religion. 

 

Really, if you think about it, nothing frightens the leaders of organized religion more than the idea that there is no mediator between humans and the divine, and that all of us can access the divine just fine for ourselves, without having to submit to the hierarchy of church authority. It particularly scares them when women can do so without men to tell them what to do. 

 

I’ll end with a great line from the epilogue. 

 

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.

 

I don’t have answers to the cultural problem here. As I noted in my review of her other book, the most religiously devout people fear death the most. Maybe religion attracts those afraid of death? Maybe religion is doing a terrible job of managing grief? Or maybe religion offers an illusion of control? 

 

Whatever the case, our current practices are pretty terrible, and Doughty makes a strong case for positive change. 

I should also mention the delightful illustrations by Landis Blair. Doughty has a knack for pairing great illustrations with her books.

 I believe this is Algebra Teacher Guy...