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

by Caitlin Doughty

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.

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.

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.