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

by Caitlin Doughty

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.

Claudio Lomnitz, could end up saving the emotional lives of Mexico’s neighbors to the north. He writes that 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.”

There are exceptions to this rule, but the immediate family is given almost no meaningful time with the body (which in all likelihood was swiftly removed after death). Before the family has time to be with their dead person and process the loss, coworkers and distant cousins arrive, and everyone is forced into a public performance of grief and humility.

Women like Doña Ana and Doña Ely represent a threat to the Catholic Church. Through magic, belief, and their ñatitas, they facilitate a direct, unmediated connection to the powers of the beyond, no male intermediary required.