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

by Caitlin Doughty

Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality. —IRVIN YALOM, PSYCHIATRIST

I had heard correctly: they stole her body from the hospital. Just wrapped it in a sheet and took it. “What was the hospital going to do to us?” Luciano asked.

Luciano hadn’t bothered to call the authorities to report the drowning. “He was dead, what did they have to do with it?”

THE GREEK HISTORIAN Herodotus, writing over two thousand years ago, produced one of the first descriptions of one culture getting worked up over the death rituals of another. In the story, the ruler of the Persian Empire summons a group of Greeks before him. Since they cremate their dead, the king wonders, “What would [it] take [for them] to eat their dead fathers?” The Greeks balk at this question, explaining that no price in the world would be high enough to turn them into cannibals. Next, the king summons a group of Callatians, known for eating the bodies of their dead. He asks, “What price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire?” The Callatians beg him not to mention “such horrors!”

How were the Wendats expected to believe the French Catholics had noble aims, when they freely admitted to cannibalism, bragging that they consumed flesh and blood (of their own God no less) in a practice called Communion?

Since religion is the source of many death rituals, often we invoke belief to denigrate the practices of others.

That is to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own.

When she died, the woman, now known as Mungo Lady, was cremated by her community. After the cremation, her bones were crushed and then burned again in a second cremation. They were ritually covered with red ocher before being buried in the ground, where they lay resting for 42,000 years.

Industrial, furnace cremation was first proposed in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In 1869, a group of medical experts gathered in Florence, Italy, to denounce burial as unhygienic and advocate a switch to cremation. Almost simultaneously, the pro-cremation movement jumped the pond to America, led by reformers such as the absurdly named Reverend Octavius B. Frothingham, who believed it was better for the dead body to transform into “white ashes” than a “mass of corruption.”

When the body first went into the furnace, observers reported a distinct smell of burning flesh, but the smell soon gave way to the aromas of flower and spice. After an hour in the furnace, De Palm’s body began to glow with a rose mist. The glow turned gold, and finally shone transparent red. After two and half hours, the body had disintegrated into bone and ash. Newspapermen and reviewers at the scene declared that the experiment had resulted in “the first careful and inodorous baking of a human being in an oven.”

Our cremation machines still resemble the models introduced in the 1870s—24,000-pound behemoths of steel, brick, and concrete. They gobble thousands of dollars’ worth of natural gas a month, spewing carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, and highly toxic mercury (from dental fillings) into the atmosphere.

In India, family members transport dead bodies to a row of cremation pyres along the banks of the Ganges River. When a father dies, his pyre will be lit by his eldest son. As the flames grow hotter, his flesh bubbles and burns 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 majority of Indonesians are Muslim, but in the remote mountains of Tana Toraja, the people followed an animistic religion called Aluk to Dolo (“the way of the ancestors”) until the Dutch introduced Christianity in the early 1900s.

Rovinus had died—as Western medicine would define the term—at the end of May, three months earlier. But according to Torajan tradition, Rovinus remained living. He might have stopped breathing, but his physical state was more like a high fever, an illness. This illness would last until the first animal, a buffalo or a pig, was sacrificed. After the sacrifice, ma’karu’dusan (“to exhale the last breath”), Rovinus could at last die alongside the animal.

In Toraja, during the period of time between death and the funeral, the body is kept in the home. That might not sound particularly shocking, until I tell you that period can last from several months to several years. During that time, the family cares for and mummifies the body, bringing the corpse food, changing its clothes, and speaking to the body.

Paul describes death in Toraja, as he’s witnessed it, not as a “hard border,” an impenetrable wall between the living and the dead, but a border that can be transgressed. According to their animistic belief system, there is also no barrier between the human and nonhuman aspects of the natural world: animals, mountains, and even the dead.

French anthropologist Noëlie Vialles wrote of the food system in France, though this could be said of almost any country in the West: “slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is to say large-scale and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent). It must be as if it were not.” It must be as if it were not.

Agus—who, remember, slept with his dead grandfather for seven years as a child—shrugged. “For us, we are used to it, this kind of thing. This life and death.”

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.”

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.

Among the places they visited was Guanajuato, home to a famed collection of mummies. In the late nineteenth century, bodies buried in the local cemetery were subject to a fee, a grave tax, for “perpetual” interment. If the family couldn’t pay the fee, the bones were eventually removed to make room for a fresh body. During one such disinterment, the city was shocked to discover that they were not digging up bones but “flesh mummified in grotesque forms and facial expressions.” The soil’s chemical components, along with the atmosphere in Guanajuato, had naturally mummified the bodies.

Other child mummies in the museum had their own props, such as scepters and crowns. These were the Angelitos, or Little Angels. Prior to the mid-twentieth century in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, a dead baby or child was considered a spiritual being, almost a saint, with a direct audience with God. These Angelitos, free from sin, could offer favors for the family members they left behind.

Adopting or adapting the customs of the Días de los Muertos, argues 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.”

Down here in the bathyal (or midnight) zone of the ocean, it is cold and completely dark—sunlight does not reach these depths.

Whales spend their whole lives supporting the environment that surrounds them. Their diet is fish and krill, and for years humans assumed that fewer whales = more fish and krill for us. This equation justified the whaling industry’s slaughter of almost three million whales in the twentieth century alone. As it turns out, fewer whales does not mean more fish. Whales dive down to the shadowy depths of the ocean to feed. They must return to the surface to breathe, and while there, they release robust fecal plumes. (Note: Poop, they’re pooping.) The whale poop is full of iron and nitrogen, which trickle down to fertilize plankton, which—you guessed it—fish and krill depend upon to live and thrive. Whales are a crucial part of this cycle during their lives, and in death they are no different.

Microscopic sorcery takes place when a body is placed just a few feet deep in the soil. Here, the trillions of bacteria living inside you will liquefy your innards. When the built-up pressure breaks the seal of skin an orgiastic reunion takes place, in which our bodies merge with the earth.

The experiments being done at FOREST recall Italian anatomy professor Lodovico Brunetti’s attempts in the late 1800s to create the first modern cremation machine.

In his 1884 paper, Brunetti wrote of cremation: It is a solemn, magnificent moment, which has a sacred, majestic quality. The combustion of a corpse always produced in me a very strong emotional arousal. As long as its shape is still human, and the flesh is burning, one is overcome by wonder, admiration; when the form has vanished, and all the body is charred, sadness takes over.

By 1873, Brunetti was ready to debut the results of his experiments at the Vienna World Exhibition. His booth, #54 in the Italian section, featured various glass cubes containing the results of his experiments—bones and flesh in varying degrees of disintegration.

A sign at Brunetti’s booth at the Vienna exhibit read “Vermibus erepti—Puro consumimur igni,” or “Saved from the worms, consumed by the purifying flame.”

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, thanks to its Catholic roots, has been slower to adopt cremation than most European countries; its cremation rate is at 35 percent, with urban Barcelona closer to 45 percent.

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.

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.

I wanted to be self-righteous about the use of glass, but couldn’t, for this simple reason: 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.

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.”

The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It’s viewed as a selfless, even honorable act. The samurai introduced the practice of seppuku, literally “cutting the abdomen,” self-disembowelment by sword to prevent capture by the enemy. In World War II, nearly 4,000 men died as kamikaze pilots, turning their planes into missiles and crashing into enemy ships. Apocryphal but famous legends tell of the practice of ubasute, where elderly women were carried on their sons’ backs into the forest to be abandoned in times of famine. The woman would stay dutifully put, succumbing to hypothermia or starvation.

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.”

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. No other country even comes close (sorry, Taiwan: 93 percent; and Switzerland: 85 percent).

The emperor and empress were the final holdouts, still choosing full body burial. But several years ago, Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko announced they would also be cremated, breaking with four hundred years of royal burial tradition.

Religious scholars John Ashton and Tom Whyte described the Pure Land (the celestial realm of East Asian Buddhism) as “decorated with jewels and precious metals and lined with banana and palm trees. Cool refreshing ponds and lotus flowers abound and wild birds sing the praises of the Buddha three times a day.”

Then there are those who do not plan ahead, who have no close family. Their bodies leave dismal reddish-brown outlines on carpets or bedspreads when they are not found for weeks or months after death. 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.

Social anthropologist Hikaru Suzuki explained that in modern Japan (as in the West) “professionals prepare, arrange, and conduct commercial funeral ceremonies, leaving the bereaved only the fees to pay.”

When the cremation is complete, they continue past the crematory to three rooms designated for the kotsuage. After the cremation, a fragmented (but complete) skeleton is pulled from the machine. Western crematories pulverize these bones into powdery ash, but the Japanese traditionally do not. The family walks into the shūkotsu-shitsu, or ash/bone collecting room, where the skeleton of their loved one awaits. The family are handed pairs of chopsticks, one made of bamboo, one made of metal. The chief mourner begins with the feet, picking up bones with the chopsticks and placing them in the urn. Other family members join in and continue up the skeleton. The skull will not fit into the urn intact, so the cremator might intervene to break it up into smaller bone fragments using a metal chopstick. The final bone, the hyoid (the horseshoe-shaped bone underneath the jaw) is placed in the urn last.

To someone alive today, the list of rituals once performed to decontaminate both the living and the dead might seem endless. A list of highlights: drink sake before and after any contact with the body; light incense and candles so that the fire can cast out contamination; stay awake with the body all night, so no malevolent spirits enter the corpse; scrub your hands with salt after a cremation. By the mid-twentieth century more people began to die in hospitals, away from the home. More professionals in charge meant the Japanese lost the sense that the dead body was impure. Cremation rose from 25 percent (at the turn of the century) to almost 100 percent. People felt contamination could be avoided by sending the corpse into the flames.

There is a difficult discussion that rarely happens among American funeral directors: viewing the embalmed body is often an unpleasant experience for the family. 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. I wondered what it would be like if there were places like Lastel in every major city. Spaces outside the stiff, ceremonial norm, where the family can just be with the body, free from the performance required at a formal viewing. Spaces that are safe, comfortable, like home.

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.

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 the impossibly cool Metropolitan Sepulchre) spoke to Londoners’ enthusiasm for Egyptian artifacts and architecture. Willson was even invited to present his idea before Parliament. And yet, the public did not embrace the concept. The Literary Gazette labeled the project a “monstrous piece of folly.” The public wanted garden cemeteries, they wanted to push the dead outside the cramped churchyards of central London and send them to sprawling landscapes where they could picnic and commune with the dead. They didn’t want a giant death mound (whose weight might have crushed the hill), a monument to rot, dominating the city’s skyline.

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. It reminded me of Santa Muerte, the Mexican Saint of Death, who is unapologetically female. She carries a scythe and her long robes are vividly colored, draped over her skeletal form.

We cannot single out Catholicism as the only belief system with a history of dismissing the agency of female devotees. Regardless of a woman’s more egalitarian place in modern Buddhism, the ancient scriptures tell of the Buddha encouraging his community of male monks to take trips to the charnel grounds to meditate on women’s rotting bodies. The motive of these “meditations on foulness” was to liberate a monk from his desire for women; they were, as scholar Liz Wilson calls them, “sensual stumbling blocks.” The hope was that charnel meditation would strip women of all their desirable qualities so men would realize they are merely flesh-sacks filled with blood, guts, and phlegm. The Buddha was explicit, claiming that a woman’s deception is not in her accessories, like makeup and gowns, but in her fraudulent garment of flesh, surreptitiously oozing grotesque liquids from its orifices.