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

by Caitlin Doughty

She felt pressure to maintain her “dignity” and to keep her grief silent, lest her visceral trauma depress anyone else.

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.

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.