From Here to Eternity

I've been a huge fan of mortician Caitlin Doughty for years, and this nonfiction book (which sees Doughty traveling from Japan to Colorado to Indonesia, looking at different things people do with the bodies of their deceased loved ones and how it helps them cope with loss) made me laugh like no other death book, and it taught me a lot, too.

I was especially intrigued by the chapter on human composting: the idea that it's possible to let a body decompose naturally in the earth, so it turns to compost. When my father died I had him buried in… show more.

I realize that, like my own book, all my picks so far have been specifically about English funeral traditions. This is just because it’s such a vast topic, but once you get started, I’ve had to draw a line somewhere! So I’m redressing that with this choice, in which funeral director and Order of The Good Death founder Caitlin takes us on a whirlwind tour through assorted fascinating–and occasionally unsettling–traditions of death and burial around the world.

She finds some much healthier relationships with death and the dead out there and finishes with a clarion call to ‘haul our fear,… show more.

I am so impressed with Caitlin’s work on demystifying funeral practices (The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) and opening up our eyes to new possibilities through her writing and her Order of the Good Death. With this book, I was so engaged with the sheer variety of the death and funeral practices that she details.

We need this kind of writing: engaging, funny, and grounded while teaching us that we are not as bound as we might think we are. I left this book more resolved than ever that we can die differently, and especially if we… show more.

I could watch mortician Caitlyn Doughty’s YouTube videos about death for hours. She’s like a stand-up comedian and tour guide in a cross-cultural journey about death practices across the globe. To research my own book, I turned to her adventures exploring sky burials and flame cremation worldwide, as well as embalming in this country as an interrogation into the practices of the conventional U.S. funeral industry. PS: I’ll never think about putting makeup on the dead in the same way again. Doughty’s storytelling strength is her use of specific details you’ll never forget. 

Caitlin, a practising mortician, travels the world to look at the various customs around death and the disposal of bodies. She introduces us to what we might consider unusual practices and explores the beliefs that drive the different practices. This is a thought-provoking comparison of the different ways we deal with our dead.

I liked Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, mortician Caitlin Doughty's first book. It was breezy and fun, with the same sense of humor as her Ask A Mortician videos. In From Here to Eternity, her quest for the one right way to respectfully handle the dead broadens into an exploration of all the ways people around the world commemorate their loved ones and deal with their remains. Caitlin crisscrosses the globe, trying to understand what the dead mean to us and how we can keep their memories alive. There's a lot to think about -- and a lot… show more.