One of the most compelling scenes in Caitlin Doughty’s new book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, takes place in the small town of Crestone, Colorado. The body of a woman – who is called Laura – is carefully wrapped in a coral-tinted shroud and placed on a smooth concrete pyre. The scent of burning juniper branches perfumes the air. Surrounded by those who’d known and loved her (as well as the author, who’d been invited to observe), the body gradually turns to ash beneath. The ceremony takes place at the only open-air pyre in the western world and is one of alternative funerals that Doughty explores.
“It was an honor, but to be honest, I was pretty jealous,” Doughty said when I asked her how it felt to have witnessed the final goodbye. “There was so much ritual power to it. It made me think about how many cremations I’ve witnessed in my life that were in big industrial machines, and how it doesn’t compare at all. I would be lying to say that I didn’t want this for myself and for the people I help as well.”
Earlier this month when we spoke, Doughty’s new book had just landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angeles-via-Hawaii transplant’s voice crackled with excitement discussing it; for someone whose bread, butter and entire personal aesthetic revolves around death, she’s an absolute livewire. Doughty, who currently helms a progressive non-profit funeral home called Undertaking LA (and who documented her former exploits as a crematory operator, funeral director and mortician in her bestselling debut, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory) has emerged as a sort of de facto figurehead for the steadily growing death-positivity movement.
Since launching a “death acceptance” collective with the aim of promoting more open, honest engagement with death, The Order of the Good Death, back in 2011, Doughty has had numerous speaking engagements to discuss destigmatizing death, dying, and the deceased. She first gained public notice thanks to her wildly popular Ask a Mortician video series on YouTube, but has truly found her niche as a spokeswoman for the concept of death positivity, which involves embracing one’s own mortality, accepting the inevitability of the end, and working towards having a good death, one that comes free of pain. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes was a fascinating, often hilarious warts-and-all look into the business of death, and now, with From Here to Eternity, Doughty’s mission is simple: to learn how to change the American death industry and our own attitudes towards death for the better.
Doughty may cut a somber figure with her blunt-cut black bangs and funereal attire, but her sense of humor and worldview are far more impish than diabolical. She peppers her sentences with self-deprecating wisecracks (“I was never seen as just this person who was like, ‘So I heard your dad died, what’s up with that?’”) and her writing will give you the giggles as well as send a chill down your spine. But her willingness to joke about death never comes across as ghoulish or flippant. Her comfort with the subject and all of its attendant awkwardness seems rooted in her bones, something that’s as much learned as it is intentional.
“Death is such a difficult topic,” she says. ”Who wants to sit down and talk about their advanced directive, or talk about what somebody wants done with their body when they die? That just seems like one other emotional burden, so if you’re not treating it with humor and a lightheartedness that makes it seem like not another incredibly emotionally draining task, nobody’s going to do it or have these conversations.”
It’s that level of empathy and self-awareness that enabled her to gain access to people’s most private, sacred rituals during her research for the book, which sees her travel from Laura’s open-air cremation to Indonesia, Spain, Japan, Mexico and Bolivia (as well as North Carolina and California), where she spends time with family members both living and dead.
On her journey, she meets burial icons, bleached skulls and sacrificial pigs in Indonesia’s Tana Toraja mountains; she explores Western Carolina University’s body farm, where scientists work to turn corpses into compost; in Tokyo, she’s invited to pick up a pair of chopsticks and join a family in sorting bone fragments from a pile of ash that was once a loved one. Throughout each experience, she sees how, in each of the other cultures she encounters, death is seen as natural, normal –and in some cases, so unremarkable that sharing a bed with your grandfather’s mummified body seems as mundane as washing your face in the morning. It’s a stark contrast from the American way of death, which Doughty is hellbent on reforming through her own death activism as as part of the greater movement, which she and Order of the Good Death director Sarah Chavez are continually working to make more inclusive.
“Every place around the world feels the same kind of sorrow when someone dies,” she says. “One of the reasons I wanted to write the book was that I’d hear people say, ‘Oh, they just did this with the body, how disrespectful, they just don’t care about their dead,’ and for me it’s like, what are you talking about? They’re not dishonoring their dead.”
“If they’re mummifying them, if they’re cremating them on a pyre, if they’re having vultures eat them, all of those things are being done with tremendous respect and honor. So we can’t say what we do is dignified and what everybody else does is disrespectful, that’s ludicrous.”
That’s what happened to all of the indigenous and Native American customs at America’s founding; people came in and said, ‘Oh, well we’ll have to get rid of your barbaric customs, of course; we want you to become Christians, and one of the first steps to that is to make sure you don’t disrespect your dead in this horrible way,’ whereas they had these incredibly rich, detailed, intricate death customs prior to colonization and invasion.”
As a self-described “six-foot tall white lady in a polka dot dress,” Doughty took especial care to ensure that her interest in these rituals – the majority of which were being practiced by people of color – didn’t feel exploitative or predatory to those who welcomed her into their lives.“But that was incredibly important to me, because obviously, ‘white girl looks at other cultures and gives opinions’ could go so wrong. I think what helped me most is that I already have a somewhat negative view of my own country’s death rituals, specifically the industry that runs death in America, and I’m trying to reform that industry; I saw visiting these other places as looking for inspiration, where I’m looking to them and saying, ‘Help us, please, help us figure this out!”
Ultimately, Doughty hopes that From Here to Eternity will open people’s eyes to alternative attitudes towards death, and other options for their own burial beyond the American way – with all of its chemicals, concrete, and nervous, almost clinical detachment from the physicality of death.
“Originally, I didn’t set out to write anything about America; I wanted to make it clear that I was going to these other places looking for help and for ideas, but that it was already happening here as well,” she says. “That’s why I ended up going to the body composting farm, and to the only open-air pyre in the western world, and to a natural burial site here in the US. I wanted to give credit to the people who I know are doing this amazing work.”
Death becomes them: five ‘death-positive’ books
Joanna Ebenstein, Death: A Graveside Companion
The former curator of Brooklyn’s now defunct Morbid Anatomy Museum compiled artworks, artifacts, and ritual objects that explore and interrogate our evolving concept of death, and paired them with a series of essays from scholars from across the macabre spectrum.
Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Fitzharris traces the fascinating story of British surgeon Joseph Lister, “the father of modern surgery”, whose obsession with conquering the germs that plagued his Victorian hospital wards made him a medical hero.
Carla Valentine, The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors
In her debut, British mortician and pathologist Carla Valentine takes the reader through the process of an autopsy, drawing on her own colorful experiences and peeling back the often grisly layers of our complicated relationship with death, sex and the afterlife with grace and wicked charm.
Thomas Mira y Lopez, The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead
Thomas Mira y Lopez’s debut essay collection is a finely wrought exploration of grief, mythology, history, and global death practices. Inspired by his own father’s demise. Mira y Lopez travels far and wide – including to a cryonics institute, a Roman catacomb, and his family’s burial plot – in search of answers.
Caleb Wilde, Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life
Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde already knew a lot about the business of death when he reluctantly entered the family trade, and in this personal memoir, he offers up entertaining behind-the-scenes tidbits alongside family stories and his own reflections on how embracing death can make life sweeter.
