From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

A New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with "dignity." Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Here to Eternity is an immersive global journey that introduces compelling, powerful rituals almost entirely unknown in America. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones’ bones from cremation ashes. With boundless curiosity and gallows humor, Doughty vividly describes decomposed bodies and investigates the world’s funerary history. She introduces deathcare innovators researching body composting and green burial, and examines how varied traditions, from Mexico’s Días de los Muertos to Zoroastrian sky burial help us see our own death customs in a new light. Doughty contends that the American funeral industry sells a particular—and, upon close inspection, peculiar—set of "respectful" rites: bodies are whisked to a mortuary, pumped full of chemicals, and entombed in concrete. She argues that our expensive, impersonal system fosters a corrosive fear of death that hinders our ability to cope and mourn. By comparing customs, she demonstrates that mourners everywhere respond best when they help care for the deceased, and have space to participate in the process. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a story about the many fascinating ways people everywhere have confronted the very human challenge of mortality.

I really enjoyed this one. I think it's probably the piece of content that I would be most likely to recommend to someone who Is new to idea of alternative funerary arrangements/death positive ideas.
Caitlin's unpretentious and somewhat irreverent approach is not paired with callousness but with a deep sense of care for both the living and the dead and it makes approaching the topics she talks about seem natural instead of grim. I believe that this kind of approach is very much needed because the way we (in Canada and the US) deal with death right now doesn't seem sustainable both in the environmental sense and in the psychological sense.

Loved it, was everything I'd hoped for. Review to come.

Wow, I mean I enjoy a book about funerals and death this much. I am just suprised that the author can make me this intrested in a topic I really had no prior intrest in.
I started reading this only caus the cover loked intresting. Turns out it is about how diffrent cultroes approced death and their funeral and after death rituals.

Did I have any intrest to begin? No.
Do I now want to become a motrician? Also yes.

There was a few MINOR flaws that makes this book not 100% for me. So it lands on a
4.5/5

4.5 stars. As usual, a memorable and death-positive book from Caitlin Doughty. In this one, she explores death culture from all across the world, from Indonesia to Bolivia to Mexico to Japan. She observes these different cultures sincerely, eager to take back all these death-positive messages back with her, presumably to further her work in The Order of the Good Death in the USA.

“Indonesia” was a fascinating chapter. Caitlin explores Tana Toraja in South Sulawesi, where families live with the embalmed corpses of their dead relatives (sleeping in the same room, in the same bed even) for years on end before eventually interring them. Even after burial, the coffins are regularly dug up for families to hang out with the mummified corpses, to clean them, talk to them, and just remember them for who they were. I've definitely heard of the death culture of Toraja before but Caitlin does provide some fascinating insights into their beliefs and practices. I searched up some photos too and it was all very fascinating (the mummies of babies and children were a little depressing though).

“Mexico” was an emotional chapter for me. I thought it would focus a lot more on the Dias de los Muertos but there were some hard-hitting bits about the death of fetuses, infants, and children. That's a particularly soft spot for me now, being a mom of a young child now.

“Japan” was incredibly fascinating! It's actually very much in-character for Japan but I had no idea that they had such high-tech temples and columbariums. The idea that you can just punch in a code to retrieve or locate a loved one's urn of ashes, or even tap a smart card, is just mind-boggling to me. I do wonder how much it removes one from the act of remembering someone though. I feel like there's a lot of distractions there, whether in terms of LED lightshows or figuring out how to use the technology in the first place, to spend your mental bandwidth in grieving for or just cherishing the memories of someone who passed.

This book also made me think about the death culture in my society and country. Much like the USA, it kinda just seems that there's only one viable option for most Singaporeans nowadays (aside from Muslims, who do get concessions to bury their dead per their religious beliefs) - embalming, cremation, and interment into a columbarium/temple (or having ashes scattered at sea which is becoming an increasingly popular option given the sheer costs of booking a niche for an urn anywhere). In a sense, I guess we've come to accept that route as inevitable for most of us, but this book, as well as Caitlin's own views, really widened my perspective and made me wonder what options do I really have in my country? Have we all come to just accept this one route simply because we all don't want to think about death (death-denial, as Caitlin terms it) and therefore outsource all the arrangements as much as possible? It's all very thought-provoking and I'm honestly really glad I read this book.