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

by Caitlin Doughty

During this time, as scholar Claudio Lomnitz wrote, the Days of the Dead “became a generalized marker of national identity” that stood “opposite of the Americanized celebration of Halloween.” Those who had once rejected the Días de los Muertos (or who lived in areas where it had never been practiced at all) came to see the celebration as very Mexican. Not only did Días de los Muertos return to major cities—looking at you, James Bond parade; the festival also came to represent the struggles of many disenfranchised political groups. These groups adopted Días de los Muertos to mourn for those kept from the public eye, including sex workers, indigenous and gay rights groups, and Mexicans who had died trying to cross the border to the U.S. In the last forty years, Días de los Muertos has come to represent popular culture, tourist culture, and protest culture throughout Mexico. And Mexico itself is viewed as a world leader in practicing engaged, public grief.

Sarah’s grandparents moved from Monterrey, Mexico, in the early twentieth century and settled in the East Los Angeles neighborhood known as Chavez Ravine. In 1950, the government sent letters to the 1,800 families of Chavez Ravine, mostly low income Mexican American farmers, informing them that they would have to sell their homes to make way for public housing. The displaced families were promised new schools and playgrounds and housing priority when the developments were finished. Instead, after removing the families and destroying a community, the city of Los Angeles scrapped the public housing plan and partnered with a New York businessman to build Dodger Stadium. Supporters of the new stadium, including Ronald Reagan, called the critics “baseball haters.”

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.” This is not to say Mexicans have never feared death. Their relationship with death was hard-won; it emerged after centuries of brutality.

The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.

In a particularly heartbreaking example, many Muslims would like to be able to open funeral homes in the U.S. and serve their communities as licensed funeral directors. Islamic custom is to wash and purify the body immediately after death before burying it as quickly as possible, ideally before nightfall. The Muslim community rejects embalming, recoiling at the idea of cutting into the body and injecting it with chemicals and preservatives. Yet many states have draconian regulations requiring funeral homes to offer embalming and all funeral directors to be trained as embalmers, despite the fact that the embalming process itself is never required. Muslim funeral directors must compromise their beliefs if they want a chance to help their community in death.

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.

Because the mummies were not intentionally preserved by the hands of other humans but naturally mummified by their environment, many of them have gaping mouths and twisted arms and necks. After death, the body reverts to “primary flaccidity”—all of the muscles in the body relax, dropping the jaw open, loosening tension in the eyelids, and affording the joints extreme flexibility. In death, corpses don’t hold themselves together. They no longer have to play by the living’s rules. The visual ghastliness of the Guanajuato mummies was not designed to “terrify” Mr. Bradbury, but a result of the bodies’ normal postmortem bioprocesses.

Santa Fe de la Laguna is home to the Purépecha, an indigenous people known for their unique pyramid architecture and their feather mosaics made from prized hummingbirds. In 1525, with a population debilitated by smallpox, and aware that the formidable Aztecs had already fallen to the Spanish, their leader pledged allegiance to Spain. Today, school in the region is taught bilingually, in both Purépecha and Spanish.

At the time of the conquista, a Dominican friar wrote that the native people were happy to adopt the Catholic festivals of All Saints and All Souls because they provided the perfect fronts for their existing festivals honoring the dead.

Attempts were made over the ensuing centuries to eradicate the practices, which were “above all, horrifying to the illustrious elite, who sought to expel death from social life.” In 1766, the Royal Office of Crime banned the indigenous population from gathering in their family cemeteries, cruelly cutting them off from their dead. But the customs, as they so often do, found a way to persist.

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.

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.

Frida Kahlo’s true feelings on bearing children may never be entirely clear. Some biographers are so keen to protect her saintly image that they have rebranded her medical abortions as the devastating “miscarriages” of an otherwise eager mother. Other biographers insist that Kahlo was uninterested in children and that her “poor health” was just an excuse to duck the cultural expectation of raising a family.

Down here in the bathyal (or midnight) zone of the ocean, it is cold and completely dark—sunlight does not reach these depths. Our whale hasn’t come down here to “rest in peace” and lie on the ocean floor in cool, undisturbed darkness. Her remains are about to become the location of a grand banquet that will last decades. This process, known in the ocean science community as a whale fall, creates an entire ecosystem around the carcass—like a pop-up restaurant for the alienlike creatures of the primordial depths.

Recently, scientists have discovered that the sulfur-loving bacteria present at a whale fall are similar to those found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible—an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive.

The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.

Katrina and I drove up the winding roads of southern Appalachia, the Blue Ridge Mountains that straddle the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. Here, as in the rest of the United States, the modern funeral industry has seeped in and taken over the rituals and logistics of deathcare. But because of the isolation, religion, and poverty of the area, the creep of industrialized death took longer here than almost anywhere else in the country.

But, as Dr. J is quick to point out, “body farm” is an inaccurate term: “A farm grows food. We don’t grow bodies. Considering our end product, you could call it a skeleton farm, I guess?”

The result of Katrina’s thesis was the Urban Death Project, an architectural blueprint for body composting centers in urban areas. The centers would be scalable worldwide, from Beijing to Amsterdam. Mourners would carry the dead person up a ramp built around a central core made of smooth, warm concrete, two and half stories tall. At the top, the body would be laid into a carbon-rich mixture that would, in four to six weeks’ time, reduce the body (bones and all) to soil.

Father Crowe was a composter himself, and was well versed in the technicalities of the process. In a corporatized funeral industry, where I’ve heard a natural burial described as a “hippie myth that our clients would never want,” it was a joy to see a more traditional funeral director present himself as an unexpected ally to a somewhat radical idea.

Dr. J was unapologetic in this attitude. “I like to call the donors ‘Mr. So-and-So’ or ‘Mrs. So-and-So.’ Call them by their real names. I don’t see a reason not to. It’s still them. Other facilities disagree with me and say it is not keeping professional distance. I totally disagree. It humanizes the bodies. I meet some of these people before they die. I know them. They’re people.” Dr. J’s approach is part of a new wave in scientific donation practices, where a donor body is considered a person, not a nameless cadaver.

Why would the cadaver dogs ignoring the composting mounds be a big deal? The dogs work by smell and have no trouble sniffing out bodies laid out in the open, or even those buried in shallow graves. But inside a compost pile, the moisture, aeration, carbon, and nitrogen are balanced to trap the odor within the pile. Katrina is aware that the public will not accept this new method of body disposal if the recomposition facilities, meant to be places of grieving and ritual, reek of human decay. The dogs’ complete lack of interest in the body-mounds was great news for the future of the project.

It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. 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 this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.

When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. 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 ...

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.

Altima boasts two large oratorios (chapels) and twenty family rooms. A family can rent one of these rooms and spend the entire day with their dead, showing up first thing in the morning and staying until the doors close at 10 p.m. And many families do. The catch is that the entire time, the body will be behind glass.

You have options as to the manner of glass you’d prefer be placed between you and your loved one. If you select a Spanish-style viewing, Altima will display your loved one in their coffin, surrounded by flowers, behind one large pane of glass, akin to a department store window. If you prefer the Catalan-style, Josep and his team will slide the open coffin into a Snow White display case in the center of the room. Either way, Altima can maintain a steady temperature around the body of 0–6 degrees Celsius (32–42 degrees Fahrenheit).

The people I spoke to in Barcelona (regular citizens and funeral workers alike) complained of how rushed the process of death seemed. Everyone felt the body should be buried within twenty-four hours, but nobody was quite sure why. Mourners felt pressure from funeral directors to get things completed. In turn, the funeral directors protested that families “want things fast, fast, fast, in less than twenty-four hours.” 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.

The Centers for Disease Control puts it even more bluntly: “The sight and smell of decay are unpleasant, but they do not create a public health hazard.”

In Spain, bodies are so swiftly sent off sepultura or incinerar that they are rarely embalmed

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.

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

There were no graves up here, just three discreet manhole covers. The groundskeeper bent down to unlock the heavy padlocks and slid back the metal circles. I squatted beside him and peeked in. Beneath the covers were deep holes carved into the hillside, filled to the top with bags of bones and piles of cremated remains. 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 on...

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.

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 charges $145 for one of their urns. The symbolism is beautiful. But symbolism does not make you part of the tree.

“Sixty percent of our families come to witness the cremation,” Joan announced. Here’s where my jaw hit the polished granite floor. “I’m sorry, 60 percent?” I reeled. That is an enormous number—far higher than the percentage in the United States, where many families don’t even know they have the option of witnessing the cremation.

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.

When the feelings come, the fear of death, I must feel those feelings. I must pay my bill. It is being alive.”

Japan’s rate of death by suicide is one of the highest in the developed world.

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).

Moments later, two thousand floor-to-ceiling Buddhas began to glow and pulse a vivid blue. “Woooaahhh,” Sato-san and I bleated in unison, stunned and delighted. I had seen photographs of Ruriden, but to be surrounded, 360 degrees, by the luminous Buddhas was overwhelming. Yajima opened a locked door, and we peeked behind the Buddha walls at six hundred sets of bones. “Labeled to make it easy to find Miss Kubota-san,” he smiled. Each set of cremated remains corresponded to a crystal Buddha on the wall.