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

by Caitlin Doughty

People die in inconvenient places all the time (armchairs, bathtubs, backyard sheds, the tops of high perilous staircases). But funeral directors usually remove bodies from these places, not deposit them into these places. Funeral work prides itself on taking a dead body from chaos to order, not the other way around.

Mike Adams, a popular blogger (also an anti-vaxxer, 9/11 truther, and Sandy Hook shooting skeptic), wrote about Katrina in an article shared almost 11,000 times on Facebook. Adams viewed the recomposition project as being solely geared toward growing food for the urban populace. Since the new world order would need a steady supply of human compost to keep people fed, it would surely lead to “the forced euthanasia of the elderly so that their bodies can be tossed into the composter.” Adams claimed that the project would be “used by the government to greenwash mass murder.”

part of a new wave in scientific donation practices, where a donor body is considered a person, not a nameless cadaver. Ernest Talarico, Jr., is the associate medical director at Indiana University School of Medicine–Northwest. Bodies are donated to his medical school to be dissected by young students in anatomy labs.

Participation by the family is optional, but allows the students to work through the almost insurmountable task for a modern doctor—honest conversation about death with a family. The students even call their donor body “their first patient.” In a profile of the program by the Wall Street Journal, first-year medical student Rania Kaoukis explained that “it would have been easier to think of the body as a number. But that isn’t what makes good doctors.”

the perfect place to putrefy.

After witnessing firsthand the difficulty officials had in locating the dead, Dr. J opened the FOREST facility to law enforcement and search and rescue volunteers with their cadaver dogs. It is a huge benefit to the trainers to have access to real decomposed bodies, in conditions similar to how they might be found in the wild. After a week of training at the FOREST facility, Dr. J sends the trainers home with a sample of what she calls “dirty dirt”—soil from underneath the decomposed bodies, which the officers can continue using for instruction back home.

On the day John Compost was first put in the woodchips, a layer of vivid green alfalfa had been spread over his body in an attempt to raise the temperature of the mound—which it seems to have done. But composting also needs moisture to work, and as we pulled off more of the pile, it became apparent that the alfalfa layer had had the effect of zapping the moisture from his body.

Harsh body composting lesson number one: don’t overdo the alfalfa layer.

Multiple composting experts have told her, “If you really want to compost efficiently you’d chop up the body first.”

“I had to politely decline on the hospital urine. Is it a good source of nitrogen? Yes. Is it fast? Probably yes. Am I going to put a body into it? No.”

“Saved from the worms, consumed by the purifying flame.”

The poet Walt Whitman spoke of soil and earth as the great transformers, accepting “the leavings” of men and producing “such divine materials.” Whitman marveled at the ability of the earth to reabsorb the corrupt, the vile, the diseased, and produce new, pristine life. There is no reason to zap away your organic material with gas or flame when there is good to be done with “the leavings” of your mortal form.

There are already studies underway on what the composting process does to mercury amalgam fillings in teeth, whose toxic release into the air is one of the biggest environmental concerns about cremation.

‘I dug my own grave and slept in it last night.’

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.’ ”

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 th...

Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men. The corpse, with all its physical and emotional messiness, was taken from women.

To understand the death rituals of Barcelona, you must understand glass. Glass means transparency, unclouded confrontation with the brutal reality of death. Glass also means a solid barrier. It allows you to come close but never quite make contact.

Everyone seemed trapped in the twenty-four-hour hamster wheel. Theories for this time frame ranged from historical factors like Spain’s Muslim past (Islam requires bodies to be buried swiftly after death) to the warm Mediterranean weather, which would allow bodies to putrefy more quickly than elsewhere in Europe.

In Spain, bodies are so swiftly sent off sepultura or incinerar that they are rarely embalmed. Altima did have an embalming room, with two metal tables, but they only perform full embalmings on bodies that are being transported to a different part of Spain or out of the country entirely. Unlike the United States, where aspiring embalmers must pursue the overkill combination of a mortuary school degree and an apprenticeship, in Spain all training is done in-house, at the funeral home.

“Seeing the truth like this, is always elegant,” he explained. “It gives you what you deserve as a human being. It gives you dignity.”

All Spanish cemeteries are public, but private companies like Altima can contract to run them for a designated length of time.

Before a body is placed into a grave, the family must lease a minimum of five years’ decomposition time. When the corpse has decayed down to bone, they will join their brethren in the communal pits, making way for the more recently deceased. The only exceptions are made for embalmed bodies (again, rare in Spain). Those bodies may need more like twenty years for their transition. Joan’s crew will periodically peek in on embalmed bodies, and say, “Oh, okay, buddy—not done!” The corpse will have to stay in its grave or wall crypt until it is ready to join the collective bone club. This “grave recycling” is not just a Spanish practice.

It is economically prudent to die in Seville.

in Berlin, German families rent graves for twenty to thirty years. Recently, the cemetery land has become not only prime real estate for the dead, but for the living. With so many choosing cremation, long-standing cemeteries are being converted into parks, community gardens, even children’s playgrounds.

Joan has decided to be cremated, but seemed to understand the contradiction in that choice. “It takes nine months to create a baby, but we destroy the body too easily through industrial cremation processes.” He thought for a moment. “The body should take the same nine-month time to disintegrate.”

wildly popular biodegradable urn, Bios Urn, created by a design firm in Barcelona.

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 charg...

It is powerful to be in the presence of a corpse mere moments from being transformed by fire.

Barcelona was the land of almost. They had initiatives for eco-cemeteries, animal conservation, and the growth of native trees. Their bodies were not embalmed, and were buried in wooden coffins. Almost a green burial, except for the granite fortress the coffin was required to be placed in. They had witness cremations that 60 percent of families attended, and funeral homes in which the family could stay the whole day with their loved one. Almost a paragon of family interaction at death, yet there was glass separating the family from the body at the viewing and at the cremation, setting up Mom as a museum exhibit.

with its elegant marble and glass, Altima had provided the one thing the United States needs more than anything—butts in the seats. People showed up for death here. They showed up for daylong viewings, sitting close vigil with the body. They showed up for witness cremations: 60 percent at this location. Perhaps the barrier of glass was the training wheels required to let a death-wary public get close, but not too close.

He thought, and replied that “when your bills come due, you have to pay them. At my company, I pay my bills. Here at this restaurant, I pay my bill. It is the same with feelings. When the feelings come, the fear of death, I must feel those feelings. I must pay my bill. It is being alive.”

Sony discontinued the Aibo in 2006, but promised to keep making repairs. Then, in 2014, they discontinued repairs as well, a harsh mortality lesson for the owners of the roughly 150,000 Aibos sold. A cottage industry of robotic vets and online grief support forums sprang up, culminating in funerals for Aibos tragically beyond repair.

Hachikō is a national hero in Japan. Hachikō was also a dog (a real one). In the 1930s he would meet his owner, an agriculture professor, at the rail station each day after work. One day, the professor never came to meet Hachikō; he had died of a brain hemorrhage. Undeterred, Hachikō returned to the station every day for the next nine years, when his own death halted the ritual. Dogs are a solid meeting point from a cross-cultural perspective. Everyone respects a devoted canine.

On the subway platform, sliding glass barriers separated the riders from the rails below. “Those barriers are somewhat new,” Sato-san explained. “For one thing they prevent”—she lowered her voice—“the suicides.” Japan’s rate of death by suicide is one of the highest in the developed world. Sato-san continued, “Unfortunately, the workers have become very efficient in cleaning up the train suicides, collecting the body parts and whatnot.”

Western view—to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. (“Sin” does not qualify for the DSM-5.)

The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than about fascination with mortality itself.

Funeral directors in the United States blanch with fear at the thought of a national “cremation culture,” which would undercut profit margins in embalming and casket sales. In reality, we have no idea what a homogenous “cremation culture” might look like. But the Japanese do. They have a cremation rate of 99.9 percent—the highest in the world.

(Columbaria are separate buildings for storing cremated remains.)

I had seen photographs of Ruriden, but to be surrounded, 360 degrees, by the luminous Buddhas was overwhelming.

In designing Ruriden, Yajima was creating “an afterlife along the path of Buddha.”

asked Yajima why he had designed Ruriden the way he did, and his response was impassioned. “We had to act, we had to do something. Japan has fewer children. Japanese people are living longer. The family is supposed to look after your grave, but we don’t have enough people to look after everyone’s grave. We had to do something for those people left behind.”

Japanese women have the longest life expectancy in the world;

More importantly, their “healthy life expectancy” (not just old, but old and independent) is the longest for both genders. As the population ages, the need for nurses and caregivers is swelling. People in their seventies are caring for people in their nineties.

This army of the elderly (the “silver market”) worked their whole lives, saved money, and had few if any children. They have money to burn. The Wall Street Journal said that “one of Japan’s hottest business buzzwords has become ‘shūkatsu’ or ‘end of life,’ referring to the explosion of products and services aimed at people preparing for their final years.”

They are victims of Japan’s epidemic of kodokushi, or “lonely deaths”: elderly people who die isolated and alone, with no one to find their bodies, let alone to come pray at their graves. There are even specialized companies hired by landlords to clean what is left behind after a kodokushi.

Yajima enters Ruriden and punches in the day’s date. That morning he punched in May 13. Several Buddhas glowed yellow, representing the people who had died on that day. Yajima lit incense and prayed for them. He remembers them, even if there is no family left to do so. For an elderly man or woman with no remaining family, the glowing Buddhas at Ruriden will act as their afterlife community.

“When I pray, I also think about creating. How do we create something new, filled with dazzling light? How do we create new Buddhas?” For him, the act of prayer is essential to creativity. “Every time I pray, the different ideas pop up. . . . I’m not a man who sits at a desk to create a plan. It’s all while I’m praying.”