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

by Caitlin Doughty

Bolivians may not be homogenous, but funeral customs around La Paz tend to follow prescribed patterns. A solemn, daylong wake is held in the home or funeral parlor. Families hire a local service to deliver a coffin, along with crosses and flowers that light up and glow neon purple (the Bolivian color of death). “Some people think the glowing purple is tacky or kitschy, but I love it,” Andres admitted. Burial happens the next day. The coffin is carried for a block behind the hearse before being loaded in and driven to the cemetery.

November 8 is the Fiesta de las Ñatitas, a chance for the owners of the ñatitas to bring out the skulls and display them. The party is not for the owners, but for the skulls themselves, making sure the ñatitas are esteemed and validated for the work they’ve done throughout the year.

My father was a geologist, and when I was young I used to visit the mines with him. On one of those trips I witnessed the sacrifice of a llama, because the miners demanded it. They wanted to keep El Tío, ruler of the underworld, happy. These strains of magic are still everywhere.”

THAT IS WHAT I want in death: to disappear.

In 1876, The Times of London described that scene at a dakhma, known in the West by its ominous translation, tower of silence. That day, swarms of vultures devoured a human body down to its skeleton in minutes. This consumption is exactly what the Parsis (descendants of the Iranian followers of Zoroastrianism) desire for their corpses. The religion regards the elements—earth, fire, water—as sacred, not to be defiled by an unclean dead body. Cremation and burial are off-limits as disposal options.

There was a time when India had a vulture population of 400 million. In 1876, the swift devouring of the body was the norm. “Parsis speak of a time when vultures would be waiting for bodies at the towers of silence,” explained Harvard lecturer on Zoroastrianism Yuhan Vevaina. “Today, there are none.”

It is hard to cremate without fire. It is even harder to dispose of a body via vulture without vultures. The vulture population has dropped 99 percent. In the early 1990s, India allowed the use of diclofenac (a mild painkiller similar to ibuprofen) for ailing cattle. Hoof and udder pain were eased, but when the animal perished and the faithful vultures soared down for the meal, the diclofenac caused their kidneys to fail. It seems unfair that such iron-stomached creatures, used to devouring rotting carrion in the hot sun, could be felled by something akin to Advil.

There are people in the United States enamored with the thought of giving their bodies to animals at the end of their lives—and we have more than enough vultures and other scavenger animals to pull it off. But the government, religious leaders, etc., would never allow such a vile spectacle on American soil. No, our leaders tell us: cremation and burial, those are your options.

SINCE I FIRST discovered sky burial I have known what I wanted for my mortal remains. In my view burial by animals is the safest, cleanest, and most humane way of disposing of corpses, and offers a new ritual that might bring us closer to the realities of death and our true place on this planet.

In the mountains of Tibet, where wood for cremation is scarce and the ground too rocky and frozen for burial, they have practiced celestial burial for thousands of years. A dead man is wrapped in cloth in the fetal position, the position he was born from. Buddhist lamas chant over the body before it is handed over to the rogyapa, the body breaker. The rogyapa unwraps the body and slices into the flesh, sawing away the skin and strips of muscle and tendon.

The signal is given, the rods are retracted, and the vultures descend with violence. They shriek like beasts as they consume the carrion, but they are, at the same time, glorious sky-dancers, soaring upward and taking the body for its burial in the sky.

I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?

Holding the space doesn’t mean swaddling the family immobile in their grief. It also means giving them meaningful tasks. Using chopsticks to methodically clutch bone after bone and place them in an urn, building an altar to invite a spirit to visit once a year, even taking a body from the grave to clean and redress it: these activities give the mourner a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.