THE DEATH OF ETERNITY

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!! View all 6 comments. The Japanese use chopsticks to pluck their loved one's bones from the ashes. Fascinating and written beautifully. 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 4. 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. Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for providing me a copy for review. From Here to Eternity is the kind of exuberant, passionate non-fiction I live for.

Caitlin Doughty has a deep fascination with death: 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: 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: The book has wonderful illustrations by Landis Blair, which perform a crucial role: 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: 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. 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. I like to pretend that I'm not, but I am an extremely squeamish person. Despite that, Doughty had me hooked on page one. From Here to Eternity is entertaining, surprisingly heart warming, and very eye-opening.

This book will be out October 3, and I highly recommend grabbing a copy. This author is so awesome. I want to go to her funeral facility when I pass. And Other Lessons from the Crematory. It was a quirky memoir of an inexperienced cremation assistant finding her feet in a macabre and sometimes quite depressing industry. But Caitlin has grown up, the funeral business is no longer just funny anecdotes but an industry that sometimes hurt the grieving more than help by making the final goodbye so absurdly clinical that it loses its humanity. This book follows Caitlin around the world exploring different ways in which cultures revere, fear, celebrate and even at times resurrect the dead.

Sky burial featured in book 1 and this one explores the concept further. I am open to other possibilities for burial but still balk a little at the thought of this one. Caitlin REALLY lays into the Western funeral industry and yes, she has valid points however not everyone wants a bohemian funeral pyre in the forest for grandma. I think what she is trying to convey is that in death, as in life there should not be a one sizes fits all.

This is very much an informational nonfiction rather than a memoir, though there are memoir-esque elements about the companions Caitlin travelled with. This is a great overview of death rituals around the world, but not an in depth resource for death geeks. My favorite chapter was about Japan, as there were more details that helped me understand their rituals and culture. I would still recommend this though and read anything else she publishes. This book was so interesting! It really got me thinking tbh.

Recommend Caitlin's books to everyone they're so good!! 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- My anticipated reaction: These read like interesting blog posts and I wanted 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 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! Crestone Caitlin comes to Colorado!

She came for the Crestone Funeral Pyre which I had never heard of and was excited to learn about. We need to buy some land and start up a burning business. 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!

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. How do you make enough water buffalo for this event? I would have liked this chapter fleshed out ha! 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.

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. Caitlin's Day of the Dead experience was much different.

There is no death, only a series of eternal ‘nows’

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. In this case, the parade started because of the James Bond movie, "Spectre. 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, volunteers and spent a year re-creating a four-hour pageant.

And I thought Coca-Cola had a large global impact. Sarah is important because she's of Mexican descent but was not given 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.

Cullowhee My mom, when she was dying, to concerned parties: I'm going to a better place. You'll be with God, blah blah blah. I'm going to Grand Junction. And not just any body farm! 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 But I'm on board! This chapter will teach you all about the magical whale fall.

It's pretty amazing stuff. It seems they like to put death on display, complete with glass barrier keeping the living from the deceased. 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! Like many European countries, graves in Spain are often recycled, the bony inhabitants exhumed and given eternal rest in communal bone pits. Caitlin gets to see a cremation and she continues to be puzzled by the glass that offers both transparency and a barrier to death.

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: 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.

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

Then Caitlin finds the hotel of her dreams. 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. This time, they go to Bolivia to meet skulls. 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 The person with whom Sandra lives and upon whom Sandra grants favors - found her something nice to wear for the picture.

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. I liked this chapter because she brings death back around to a personal level. And I liked it, obviously. I just didn't love it like I'd wanted. I am interested to find out the title of her next book.

See a Problem?

She's covered a song lyric, a movie title Only time will tell. This is an absolute must-read. Here in America, we are so separated from death. It is something to be feared, kept away from, hidden behind expensive caskets and embalming and services in a "multisensory experience room" p. Our dead are basically ripped from us, held in morgues and funeral homes, with little transition from the state of living to being buried in a cemetery or being resigned to the flames during cremation.

Doughty's point during this book isn't a tour of the world's strang This is an absolute must-read. Doughty's point during this book isn't a tour of the world's strangest burial habits and if this is what you take away from it, you've totally missed the point.

Instead, it's to show how other cultures who are more in tune with death and how to process it and grieve can be seen as having a healthier relationship with death than we do in the western world. In Japan, the families are given special chopsticks with which to gather the bones of their loved ones after cremation.

In Indonesia, bodies are kept at home until they have their funerals which can be years away , and then in certain rituals, the mummified bodies are taken out and cleaned, and the families spend time with them as they would any other family member. These practices might seem barbaric to us, but then it's just a different way of dealing with the dead. It may behoove us to be more connected to our dead to allow us to grieve in a more healthy way. We've lost our intimacy with death, even though one day we will all pass away, and now it's an expensive proposition to die in America.

Doughty wants us to think about how we can begin to fix the extortionist death industry in America, and perhaps open our eyes to other methods that may be cheaper and better for us emotionally. Read this book with an open mind, and I can almost guarantee that you may change your mind about the way the death industry works in America. Many rituals Doughty observes are about maintaining a personal connection to the dead. In South Sulawesi, Indonesia, corpses remain with their families for months or years, preserved as mummies.

A chapter set in Spain was the odd one out for me; it struck me as incomplete and not adding anything to the whole. Some may think a book like this would be too morbid for their tastes, but I can assure you Doughty is a charming and reassuring guide through the underworld. See my full review at Shiny New Books.

Oct 16, lit. The cool illustrations added a lot, and were, I would imagine, more pleasant than actual photos would have been. The writing was a little flat and research paper-ish, though. Rating 5 Stars I really can't find any reason to complain about Caitlin Doughty and her grim but amusing books on her experiences with death.

Especially as she walks hand in hand with the reaper on a daily basis as a mortician; a job I could never do myself but have always been curious about. This book however is more on the customs and traditions of families all over the world when it is time for someone to leave their mortal coil behind. For what I have read from what Caitlin has experienced, th Rating 5 Stars I really can't find any reason to complain about Caitlin Doughty and her grim but amusing books on her experiences with death.

For what I have read from what Caitlin has experienced, there are countless ways to go about this whether they be obscene or wonderful is up to ones own opinion. Mine is much more on the fascinated side of things rather than horrified at the fact that some people keep their mummified grandfather in their house years after they pass and even go as far to sleep in the same bed as them. It puts a different perspective in the western customs I have grown up on and have experienced way too many times. Speaking of Western customs, after reading this I really hate them and I'm really upset that its the only choice I will have really when I go.

It feels so cold and closed minded to just immediately stick your your dad into a funeral home to be put on a slab to be all made up for a wake viewing that and then soon after be cremated or buried. It all so rushed but its what we are used to and never really think anything is wrong about it. But now I can't help but feeling so, especially when looking at traditions such as Dios Los Muertos. I was familiar with this celebration before reading this book but I never realized how amazing it seems.

It is a day of celebrating and remembering your loved ones. To respect them by hanging out at their grave all day, giving offerings and decorating with candles and marigold petals. It makes it feel so cold and upsetting to know that I'm just going to end up six feet under and my body will be left there alone to decay until one of my family member's come to visit. But when they do visit it it will be brief and I will be left there alone once again.

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