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

by Caitlin Doughty

Since religion is the source of many death rituals, often we invoke belief to denigrate the practices of others. 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.” I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on mathematics (e.g., 36.7 percent a “barbarous act”), but on emotions, a belief in the unique nobility of one’s own culture. That is to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own.

Still, it is demonstrably wrong to claim that the West has death rituals that are superior to those of the rest of the world. What’s more, due to the corporatization and commercialization of deathcare, we have fallen behind the rest of the world when it comes to proximity, intimacy, and ritual around death.

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

would be simple to allow open-air pyres in any community that wanted them. Yet government cemetery and funeral boards put up enormous resistance to the idea. Like the curmudgeonly neighbors in Crestone, they argue that outdoor pyres would prove too hard to control, and that they would impact air quality and the environment in unknown ways. Crestone has proven that open-air pyres can be inspected for safety compliance just like any industrial crematory. Environmental agencies can run tests to determine the environmental impact, and regulate accordingly. So why do these local governments continue to resist? The answer is as bleak as it is obvious: money. 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.” To put this cost in perspective, that’s roughly 5 percent of the price of a traditional American funeral. If you don’t have the money but are a member of the community, the nonprofit will even forgo its fee. Ghai promises a similar model for pyre cremations in the U.K. He plans to charge £900, but says “we will do this as a charity, for free. They only need to find the land.”

MEXICAN POET Octavio Paz famously said that while citizens of Western cities like New York, Paris, and London would “burn their lips” if they so much as uttered the word “death,” “the Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it; it is one of his favorite playthings and his most enduring love.”

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.

Prior to the twentieth century, it was not uncommon to believe that the corpse was a dangerous entity that spread pestilence and disease. Imam Dr. Abduljalil Sajid explained to the BBC that the Muslim tradition of burial in the first twenty-four hours “was a way to protect the living from any sanitary issues.” The Jewish tradition follows similar rules. Such fear across cultures inspired the developed world to erect protective barriers between the corpse and the family. The United States, New Zealand, and Canada embraced embalming, chemically preparing the body. Here in Barcelona they placed the body behind glass.

Someone from North America might recoil at the idea of an idyllic cemetery harboring mass graves, filled with hundreds of sets of remains. But this was business as usual at this Spanish cemetery. The dead at Roques Blanques start out in a ground grave, or in a wall mausoleum. But the dead haven’t purchased a home at the cemetery as much as they have rented an apartment. They have a lease, and their time in the grave is limited. 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 extends to most of Europe, again baffling the average North American, who views the grave as a permanent home. In Seville, in the south of Spain, they have almost no available cemetery land. The cremation rate there is 80 percent (very high for Spain), because the government subsidizes cremation down to a cost of only 60–80 euro. It is economically prudent to die in Seville.

Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a “suicide culture.” But the reality is more complicated. 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. Furthermore, “foreign scholars can look at statistical numbers on suicide, but they will not understand the phenomenon,” argues writer Kenshiro Ohara. “Only Japanese people can understand the suicide of the Japanese.”

The history of death and funerals is also filled with ideas before their time—the Reaper’s own 3 a.m. inventions. One such creation arrived in 1820s’ London. The city was at that time hunting for a solution to the problem of its overcrowded and smelly urban graveyards. Stacks of coffins went twenty feet deep into the soil. Half-decomposed bodies were exposed to public view when wood from their coffins was smashed up and sold to the poor for firewood. This overcrowding was so visible to the average Londoner that Reverend John Blackburn said, “Many delicate minds must sicken to witness the heaped soil, saturated and blackened with human remains and fragments of the dead.” It was time to try something else. Proposals to reform London’s system of burials began to pour in, including one from an architect named Thomas Willson. If land shortage was the problem, Willson proposed that instead of digging further down to bury the bodies, London should send its dead skyward in a massive burial pyramid. This pyramid would be made from brick and granite and situated at the top of a hill—what is now Primrose Hill, overlooking central London. It would be ninety-four stories tall, four times taller than St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hold five million bodies. I’m going to hit you with that number again: five million bodies. The pyramid would sit on only eighteen acres of land, but would be able to hold the equivalent of 1,000 acres of bodies. Willson’s Giant Corpse Pyramid (the actual name was ...