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

by Caitlin Doughty

Not everyone in my industry is supportive of the way I run my funeral home. Some believe a dead body must be embalmed to be safe (untrue) and that a body should be handled only by licensed professionals (also untrue).

In America, where I live, death has been big business since the turn of the twentieth century. A century has proven the perfect amount of time for its citizens to forget what funerals once were: family- and community-run affairs. In the nineteenth century no one would have questioned Josephine’s daughter preparing her mother’s body—it would have seemed strange if she didn’t. No one would have questioned a wife washing and dressing the body of her husband or a father carrying his son to the grave in a homemade coffin. In an impressively short time, America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on Earth. If we can be called best at anything, it would be at keeping our grieving families separated from their dead.

Belize has a diverse population, sandwiched between Caribbean and Latin American influences, with English as the national language. Luciano identified as a mestizo—a descendant of the indigenous Maya and the Spanish colonizers.

One of the chief questions in my work has always been why my own culture is so squeamish around death. Why do we refuse to have these conversations, asking our family and friends what they want done with their body when they die? Our avoidance is self-defeating. By dodging the talk about our inevitable end, we put both our pocketbooks and our ability to mourn at risk.

That attitude—revulsion at the way other groups handle their dead—has endured through millennia. If you have ever come within 500 feet of a modern funeral home, you know that morticians love the following quote, attributed to William Gladstone, a nineteenth-century British prime minister: Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.

(In fact, Gladstone may have never even produced this quote at all. It is first recorded as appearing in the March 1938 issue of The American Cemetery, in an article called “Successful Cemetery Advertising.” I can’t prove Gladstone didn’t say it, but one prominent Gladstone scholar told me he had never come across the quote. The furthest he would go was to say it “sounded like something he could have said.”

Even if we recognize the benefits of another culture’s ritual, we often allow bias to undermine those feelings of acceptance.

In that moment, standing at the edge of the pit, I’m sure Brébeuf was moved by the death rituals of the Wendat people. But it did not change his final, fervent hope: that all of their customs and ceremonies would be obliterated and replaced with Christian ceremonies, so they could be “sacred” as opposed to “foolish and useless.”

Historian Erik Seeman wrote that the First Nations and Europeans often discovered “chilling perversions” about each other. 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.

In 2017, an NPR investigation into funeral homes “found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress.”

We need to reform our funeral industry, introducing new practices that aren’t so profit-oriented, and that do more to include the family. But we cannot begin to reform—or even question!—our death systems when we act like little Jean de Brébeufs, falsely convinced we have it right while all these “other people” are disrespectful and barbarous.

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.

Cremation, in the form they practice it in the tiny town of Crestone, Colorado, has been around for tens of thousands of years. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hindus were most famous for employing the modest alchemy of fire to consume the flesh and liberate the soul. But cremation itself goes back even further.

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

The organization will assist a family with its postmortem logistics regardless of finances. The family doesn’t have to choose open-air cremation, either. The volunteers at Crestone End of Life are prepared to help whether the family chooses a conventional (embalmed) burial, a natural (no vault or embalming) burial, or a cremation at the funeral home several towns over. Paul referred to the last option as “commercial cremation.” Stephanie interrupted, “Paul, you’re supposed to call it conventional cremation.” “No,” I argued, “commercial cremation sounds right.”

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.

On the train journey from New York to Pennsylvania (where he would be cremated), his mummified corpse briefly went missing in the baggage car, launching what historian Stephen Prothero called “a macabre game of hide-and-seek.”

But the aesthetics and ritual surrounding the process have hardly changed. 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.

I’m not arguing that a switch to open-air cremation would resolve all of these issues. In countries where pyre cremation is the norm, such as India and Nepal, the many millions of cremations every year burn 50 million-plus trees and release carbon aerosols into the atmosphere. After carbon dioxide, carbon aerosols are the second leading man-made cause of climate change. But the Crestone model comes close. The nonprofit has received several calls from reformers in India wanting to adopt the structure and methods of their pyre—raised high off the ground to use less wood and release less damaging pollution. If reform is possible for this ancient method, inextricably tied to religion and country, then reform is possible for the modern, industrial cremation machines as well.

Some were more casual, like the cremation of the young man who wanted a half gallon of tequila and a joint placed on his pyre. “Well, I can tell you everyone downwind enjoyed it,” one volunteer told me.

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.”

Pittu Laugani, a Hindu living in the West, explains the pain of witnessing a commercial, industrialized cremation. Instead of placing the body onto the wood of the pyre, mourners watch the coffin “slide off on an electrically operated carousel and drop into a concealed hole.” Locked away in the steel and brick-lined chamber, when the skull cracks open, the man’s soul will be imprisoned in the machine, forced to mingle with the thousands of other souls the machine has trapped. It will be an akal mrtya, a bad death. For the family, the whole process “can be an unnerving and even grotesque experience.”

It 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.

In the twenty-first century, removing money and profit from death is almost unheard of, mostly because it is so difficult to accomplish. After Hurricane Katrina, a group of Benedictine monks in southern Louisiana began selling low-cost, handmade cypress caskets. The state’s Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors drummed up a cease-and-desist order, claiming that only funeral homes licensed by their board could sell “funeral merchandise.” Eventually a federal judge sided with the monks, saying it was clear there was no public health risk from the sale of the caskets, and the motivation of the board was solely economic protectionism. Legally and logistically, circumventing the funeral industry and its regulations to create a nonprofit death service for a community is nearly impossible. In this landscape, where funeral boards are coming after monks—monks!—it is a challenge to convey how truly astounding the accomplishments at Crestone are.

Paul’s visual strangeness gets him through locked doors and into secret monasteries and bone caves that no one else would have access to. People are too confounded to refuse him.

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.

There was no one at the Londa burial caves when we pulled up. Up against the cliff, set on rickety scaffolding, were stacks of coffins made of uru wood, shaped like boats, buffalos, and pigs. Radiocarbon dating shows that coffins like these have been used in Toraja since 800 BC. Skulls peeked out of cracks in the wood like nosy neighbors, watching our arrival. As the wood of the coffins decomposes, the bones they contain will go rolling and spilling down the side of the cliff.

Even more surreal, the coffins sat next to rows and rows of tau tau, the Torajans’ realistic wooden effigies of the dead, seated like an important village council. They represent the souls of the anonymous bones scattered in the cave. The older tau tau are crudely carved, with oversized white eyes and straggled wigs. More modern tau tau are distressing in their realism, with finely lined faces, convincing warts, and veined skin. They wear eyeglasses, clothes, and jewelry, and look ready to pry themselves up by their canes and welcome us in.

The body was being transferred in a replica of a traditional Torajan house. These houses, known as tongkonan, resemble no residence you’ve ever seen, standing high on stilts with a roof that swoops up to two points in the sky. This corpse, inside his mini-house, was carried atop the shoulders of thirty-five young men.

Tourism in Tana Toraja is a recent development, almost unheard of before the 1970s. The Indonesian government had concentrated on developing tourism (to great success) on other islands like Bali and Java, but Tana Toraja had something those other places didn’t: impressive, ritualistic death. They no longer wanted to be viewed by the rest of Indonesia as a place of “headhunters and black magic,” but as participants in a high culture tradition.

Torajan and American death culture share this particular trait of overexpenditure; no one wants to be perceived as disrespecting the dead.

All of these rituals might seem complicated, but Agus claimed they have actually become far less so. His parents were born into the animistic Aluk religion, but his father converted to Catholicism at age sixteen. Agus gave his theory: “There are 7,777 rituals in Aluk. People left because it got too complicated.” Catholicism hardly seems the place to go for fewer complicated rituals, but there you go.

In recent years the narration at Torajan funerals (as well as choreography and costume choices) has taken cues from television variety shows.

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.

For as much time as I had spent facing human mortality, I didn’t recognize a dead animal that didn’t come wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. 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.

A mother unwrapped her son, who had died when he was only sixteen. At first, all that could be seen was a crooked pair of feet. Hands emerged, and seemed well enough preserved. Men on either side of the coffin pulled gently on the body, testing to see if they could lift it without the body crumbling. They managed to stand him vertical, and though his torso had been preserved, his face was skeletal, excepting his teeth and thick brown hair. His mother didn’t seem to mind. She was ecstatic to see her child, even for a moment, even in this state, and held his hand and touched his face.

This was his second appearance at a ma’nene’ ceremony and he was still in good shape, preservation-wise. His family brushed his face with a grass broom and flipped him over, peeling dried flesh from the back of his head. They stood him up for a family portrait, and the family gathered round, some stoic, some smiling. I was observing off to the side when a woman called me over to join the picture. I waved my hands, as if to say, “Nope, terrible idea,” but they insisted. Somewhere deep in Indonesia, there exists a picture of me with a Torajan family and a freshly cleaned mummy.

I had heard of mummification occurring in very dry or very cold climates, but the lush, humid air of Indonesia hardly fell into that category. So how did the dead of this village become mummies? The answer depended on who you asked. Some claimed they would only mummify the body in the old way—pouring oils into the person’s mouth and throat, and spreading special tea leaves and tree barks on the skin. The tannins in the tea and bark bind with and shrink the proteins in the skin, making it stronger, stiffer, and more resistant to bacterial attack. The process is similar to how a taxidermist would preserve an animal hide (hence the word “tanning” in leather).

The new trend in Torajan body mummification is none other than good ol’ embalmer’s formalin (a solution of formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, and water) injected into the body.

The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body. Given that the Torajans now use similar chemical formulas as North Americans to mummify their dead, I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living.

But while these villagers spend an afternoon cleaning the graves, exuding a mundane normalcy, Norman Bates is the American Film Institute’s second scariest movie villain of all time, coming in behind Hannibal Lecter and ahead of Darth Vader. He didn’t win that sinister acclaim by murdering innocent hotel guests wearing his mother’s clothing; he won it because Westerners feel there is something profoundly creepy about interacting with the dead over a long period of time.

That was the end of the excitement for John Hans, until three years later when he would emerge again.

For Torajans, hauling someone out of their grave years after their death is not only respectful (the most respectful thing they can do, in fact), but it provides a meaningful way to stay connected to their dead.

I realized that they don’t need to inquire with a mortician about the state of their mother’s body. They know perfectly well what Mom is up to, even eleven years after her death. Seeing Mom again, even in this altered state, might be less frightening than the specters of the human imagination.

The Días de los Muertos parade did not inspire the James Bond film. The James Bond film inspired the parade. The Mexican government, afraid that people around the world would see the film and expect that the parade exists when it did not, recruited 1,200 volunteers and spent a year re-creating the four-hour pageant. To some, the parade was a crass commercialization of the very private, family-centered festival that is Días de los Muertos—the two days at the beginning of November when the dead are said to return to indulge in the pleasures of the living. To others, it was Días de los Muertos’s natural progression to a more secular, nationalistic holiday, boldly celebrating Mexico’s history in front of a worldwide audience.

The next day we would be traveling west to Michoacán, a more rural area where families have long celebrated Días de los Muertos. But here in Mexico City, there was a period in the early twentieth century when Días de los Muertos fell out of popular favor. By the 1950s, Mexicans in urban areas viewed celebrating the Days of the Dead as outmoded folklore, practiced by people at the outskirts of civilized society. In an intriguing twist, one of the main motivators in changing that perception was the southward creep of Halloween from the United States.