From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

by Caitlin Doughty

Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.

As recently as 1965, James W. Fraser wrote in Cremation: Is It Christian? (spoiler: no) that to cremate was “a barbarous act” and “an aid to crime.” To a decent Christian, it is “repulsive to think of the body of a friend being treated like a beef roast in the oven, with all its running fats and sizzling tissues.”

What struck me was how Luciano had been present for every step of his grandmother’s death. From stealing her body from the hospital, to holding a wake where the family drank rum and played ranchera music (Grandma’s favorite), to tending her grave years later.

Most people could not tell you what chemicals are pumped into their mother during an embalming procedure (answer: some combination of formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol, and phenol), or why they are required to purchase a $3,000 stainless steel vault at the cemetery (answer: so the groundskeeping staff has an easier time mowing the grass). In 2017, an NPR investigation into funeral homes “found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress.”

In Trunyan, the villagers weave bamboo cages for their dead to decompose in, and then stack the skulls and bones out in the lush green landscape. Lonely Planet, instead of explaining the meaning behind these ancient customs, advised wise travelers to “skip the ghoulish spectacle.”

Laura’s family, including a young boy of eight or nine, circled her pyre stacking piñon pine and spruce logs, selected because they burn with heightened intensity.

high. The mourners, all 130 of them, ringed the pyre in silence. The only sound was the pop of flaming wood, as if one by one Laura’s memories were diffusing into the ether.

The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hindus were most famous for employing the modest alchemy of fire to consume the flesh and liberate the soul. But cremation itself goes back even further.

Crestone’s pyre is the only community open-air pyre in America and, in fact, in the Western world.*

“Everything you all said about how Laura was a wonderful person, that’s true. But in my mind, she’ll always be one of the wild crones. A partier. I’d like to give her a howl.”

away. At just the right time, a wooden staff is brought forth and used to crack open the dead man’s skull. At that moment, it is believed the man’s soul is released.

A son, describing the cremations of his parents, wrote that “before [breaking the skull], you shiver—for this person was alive just a few hours back—but once you hit the skull, you know what burns in front of you is after all just a body. All attachments are gone.” The soul is set free, as an Indian spiritual song intones over a loudspeaker: “Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning firewood.”

The average American funeral costs $8,000 to $10,000—not including the burial plot and cemetery costs. A Crestone End of Life funeral costs $500, technically a donation “to cover wood, fire department presence, stretcher, and land use.”

impossible. In this landscape, where funeral boards are coming after monks—monks!—it is a challenge to convey how truly astounding the accomplishments at Crestone are.

“Excuse me, miss. If you will direct your attention to the camera, we will create an Instagram.”

rituals. The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.

Islamic custom is to wash and purify the body immediately after death before burying it as quickly as possible, ideally before nightfall. The Muslim community rejects embalming, recoiling at the idea of cutting into the body and injecting it with chemicals and preservatives. Yet many states have draconian regulations requiring funeral homes to offer embalming and all funeral directors to be trained as embalmers, despite the fact that the embalming process itself is never required. Muslim funeral directors must compromise their beliefs if they want a chance to help their community in death.

For Sarah, adrift amid a sea of “God has a plan for you” banalities, the frankness of Kahlo’s art and letters served as a balm. In Kahlo she saw another Mexican woman forced to grapple with impossible choices for her child and her own body. Kahlo was able to project this pain and confusion through her work, portraying her body and her grief without shame.

Instead of pride, Sarah felt the opposite when her son died. She felt pressure to maintain her “dignity” and to keep her grief silent, lest her visceral trauma depress anyone else. The Western funeral home loves the word “dignity.” The largest American

funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality. Wakes last exactly two hours. Processions lead to the cemetery. The family leaves the cemetery before the casket is even lowered into the ground.

Mexicans “have powers of healing, and of healing what is certainly the United States’ most painfully chronic ailment: its denial of death . . . and its abandonment of the bereaved to a kind of solitary confinement.”

because I don’t have a young child. I’m aware of all the time I have. It makes it more valuable, because I possess this time at a terrible cost.”

like making friends with a person online and then meeting them face to face, in real life. It’s emotional.”

Upstairs, in Kahlo’s small bedroom, there was a pre-Columbian urn containing her ashes. On her single bed lay Frida’s death mask, an eerie reminder that the artist had bled and died in this very room. Above her bed Frida had hung a painting: a dead infant, swaddled in white, wearing a flower crown, lying on a satin pillow: an Angelito.

CULLOWHEE

they release robust fecal plumes. (Note: Poop, they’re pooping.)

“When I die, no fuss. Just dig a hole and put me in it.”

Western Carolina University.

Why attempt to compost, though, when the obvious way to address the primeval yearning to have “flesh become soil” would be to open more natural or conservation burial cemeteries, where corpses could go straight into a hole in the ground—no embalming, no caskets, no heavy concrete vaults? Katrina responds, correctly, that overcrowded cities are unlikely to assign huge swaths of valuable, developable land to the dead. And so she aims to reform not the market for burial, but for cremation.

The result of Katrina’s thesis was the Urban Death Project, an architectural blueprint for body composting centers in urban areas. The centers would be scalable worldwide, from Beijing to Amsterdam. Mourners would carry the dead person up a ramp built around a central core made of smooth, warm concrete, two and half stories tall. At the top, the body would be laid into a carbon-rich mixture that would, in four to six weeks’ time, reduce the body (bones and all) to soil.

process: recomposition (“corpse composting” being about three degrees too intense for the general public). At the end of the recomposition, the family can collect the soil to place in their garden, and a mother who loved to garden can, herself, give rise to new life.

In February 2015, that first donor body, a seventy-eight-year-old female

(we’ll call her June Compost) was laid in a bed of pure woodchips at the bottom of the hill at FOREST. A month later, the body of a second donor, a larger male (we’ll call him John Compost) was placed at the top of the hill in a mix of alfalfa and woodchips with a silver tarp pulled over the mound. The experiments were not overly sophisticated. The sole question that these two donor bodies were answering was, “Will they compost?”

“Western Carolina University – Urban Death Project.”

She gazed down at Frank, her eyes wet around the edges. “This man, he’s here on purpose. You know? He wanted to be here.”

She paused, took a breath before continuing, “I am filled with gratitude.”

Katrina took a handful of green alfalfa and wood chips, and placed the mixture over Frank’s face, the first part of his body to be covered. I joined in, and the two of us blanketed the mixture down his neck and around his arms, almost tucking him in. ...

I wasn’t so sure. Earlier in the day Dr. Johnston had told me a story about a man in his eighties who donated his body to FOREST. After he died, his wife and daughter drove his body to the facility in the family truck. They were even allowed to pick a spot in the underbrush for him. Then, only six months later, his wife died. She requested that her body be laid out in an area next to her husband. That request was honored, and man and wife decayed into the earth side by side, together as they had been in life. So much for no one being sentimental.

Dr. J was unapologetic in this attitude. “I like to call the donors ‘Mr. So-and-So’ or ‘Mrs. So-and-So.’ Call them by their real names. I don’t see a reason not to. It’s still them. Other facilities disagree with me and say it is not keeping professional distance. I totally disagree. It humanizes the bodies. I meet some of these people before they die. I know them. They’re people.”

“it would have been easier to think of the body as a number. But that isn’t what makes good doctors.”

As we cautiously dug into the pile, the bright purple and yellow color of the shovels made us look like children building a morbid sandcastle.

Western Carolina,

It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, ‘I love and accept myself.’ ” I agree with Katrina here. Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress.

There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.

Maybe a process like recomposition is our attempt to reclaim our corpses. Maybe we wish to become soil for a willow tree, a rosebush, a pine—destined in death to both rot and nourish on our own terms.

Spain is very good at being almost green in its postmortem ideas. On our tour we passed through a grove of trees, Mediterranean and native to this area, of course. Roques Blanques will plant a tree and bury five sets of your family’s ashes around it, making it a literal family tree. They are the first cemetery in Spain to offer this option.

Roques Blanques’s “family tree” is similar to the wildly popular biodegradable urn, Bios Urn, created by a design firm in Barcelona. You might have seen it floating through your social media feed. Bios Urn resembles a large McDonald’s cup filled with soil, a tree seed, and a place for cremated remains. One of the most popular articles on the Bios Urn is called “This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die!”

It is a lovely thought, and a tree may grow from the soil provided, but after the 1,800-degree cremation process, the remaining bones are reduced to inorganic, basic carbon. With everything organic (including DNA) burned away, your sterile ashes are way past being useful to plants or trees. There are nutrients, but their combination is all wrong for plants, and don’t contribute to ecological cycles. Bios Urn charges $145 for one of their urns. The symbolism is beautiful. But symbolism does not make you part of the tree.

Joshua Tree Memorial Park was not created to be a natural cemetery. They have done what many cemeteries (of sense) are doing, and dedicated a section of their land to offer natural burials. The distance to Joshua Tree is often prohibitive for a Los Angeles family. We Angelenos would prefer to keep our dead closer to home, but where? Forest Lawn Memorial Park, one of L.A.’s celebrity burial spots, insists on heavy vaults surrounding the caskets, and doesn’t offer natural burial. They do make exceptions for Jews and Muslims, both religions that require the natural burial of bodies. In these cases, they agree to poke holes in the concrete of the vault for symbolic dirt to trickle through.

Some states still allow for burial on private property.