From Here to Eternity

I love Ask a Mortician and I also love Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory so I was counting down for this book to get here! I got to finish all of it uninterrupted on my plane trip and it was amazing. I am familiar with Paul Koudounaris and his works, such asMemento Mori: The Dead Among Us, but his books have small print and are harder to read, this book was really amazing to read all about other cultures way of celebrating death and their rituals for the dead.

This was a great book and I learned so much about other's death cultures and a little bit more about cultures that I was somewhat more familiar with. My favorite chapter is about the pyre in Colorado, The Monks caring for ashes in Japan, and the natitas skulls in Bolivia...but really all the book's chapters are captivating. I highly recommend! ~Ashley

Summary: Mortician Caitlin Doughty relays her first-hand learning about the customs and beliefs surrounding death in various places and cultures around the world, and she explores the ways in which the American death industry might adapt its practices in order to allow mourners to more meaningfully grieve and process the deaths of their loved ones.

Super interesting book, really respectful and in-depth without that air of “this is all there is to say on the matter” that can be sort of dangerous with this kind of pop-nonfiction, and I really like Doughty's “Youtube Video Essay” voice as part of the audiobook narration, so I really vibed. If you don't vibe with that voice or the sort of humor that comes from that side of youtube, you may not like this, but I fuck with this heavy. Fascinating stuff and as a Mexican I was surprised the depth and respect of the discussion about our rituals, and really gave me a lot to reflect on as a Chicana who hasn't practiced Dia De Los Muertos since I came to the States when I was under 10.

Thought this would be a refreshing casual encounter with death as I am grieving a loved one, but the gruesome descriptions of animal deaths in this kinda caught me off guard.

Structure: ★★★★★ Prose: ★★★★ Pacing: ★★★★★ Intrigue: ★★★★★ Logic: ★★★★★ Enjoyment: ★★★★★Overall Rating: ★★★★★A selection of adventures from Caitlin Doughty's optimistically death-filled life.I've been a longtime fan of Doughty's online videos and I really enjoyed her “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” memoire I read a couple of years ago. Caitlin is a trailblazer in death-positive education, creating informative and hilarious videos on her YouTube channel about the funeral industry, cultural death practices and macabre stories like her series on “Famous Corpses”. From Here to Eternity deep dives into Doughty's experiences with people around the world who practice ancient and modern death rituals that challenge social norms. I love her prose, and she has such an authentic voice in her memoires.In conclusion, I will eat up anything Caitlin Doughty writes. She is singlehandedly teaching the world that death doesn't have to mean caskets or cremation, and is fighting to give people the power to choose their version of ‘the good death'.

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.

Recommended reading for anyone who is going to die.

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.

Caitlin always tells stories of others' traditions with such respect and such knowledge.

The biggest downside here was that most of these stories have been feature on Youtube.

I know most people find the subject of death, and cultural rituals, morbid. I've never felt that way, and while the thought of dying does (on some level) scare me...the way I want my death handled...doesn't.

The different ways cultures handle their dead is fascinating to me. Some will find horror in it and express wide-eyed confusion. I say keep an open mind and respect their ways. Grieving isn't an easy process and however people need to handle it, is their choice...without judgment.

I am young-ish

What a fascinating read, a great way to provoke conversations about what you and your loved ones might want your end of life to look like aside from the usual cremation or embalming/burial. (I got super into the pyre, but being eaten by vultures also sounds pretty good.) Doughty travels to far-flung locals to see how they treat their dead - Indonesia, Mexico, Japan, and Bolivia each get chapters on unique rituals and relationships with the dead. Includes ink illustrations as well.

I had more fun with this than the topic would suggest. From Here to Eternity is cathartic. Doughty's tone is both conversational and nonjudgmental. She takes us through her research into different rituals of death practiced throughout the world. Doughty argues that industrializing and commercializing funerals—as the US has done—deepens fear of death. The process becomes increasingly clinical, as if grief can be expedited. People are shielded from realities of death even in making arrangements for recently deceased loved ones. This makes it that much harder to heal. This book is critical of Western culture, past and present. I don't think this is a shortcoming. From Here to Eternity is a response to ethnocentric assumptions about how to properly mourn. Doughty shows how being repulsed by unfamiliar memorial rituals is often just a facade for one's unaddressed fear of mortality—in other words, a case of “it's not you, it's me.”I learned a lot, but I would have liked to explore more of the world, especially outside the Western hemisphere. I'd recommend this for fans of the memoir [b:I Am, I Am, I Am 35137915 I Am, I Am, I Am Seventeen Brushes with Death Maggie O'Farrell https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1517352695s/35137915.jpg 55835303].

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

Beautiful and unusual rituals about death are being held all over the world. Americans think of death as commercial and clinical but Doughty shows us some lovely alternatives. Doughty writes about death and funeral customs in such a way that the reader feels safe, comforted, hopeful, not miserable and scared. I would recommend this to anyone interested in or coping with death.

I really enjoyed this! I don't think about death (my death or other people's) very often so I found this to be really eye-opening. I loved that Doughty visited all of these countries to observe and learn about their customs. It's rare that I get all the way through a nonfiction book lately, but this one was hard to put down.

This is a spoiler-free review
Read on In The Sheets

This is a book I have been waiting an eternity for (I'm not even sorry for that pun). I've been a supporter of Caitlin's since she had just a few hundred subscribers (now 200,000+ and growing) on her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician, and am so lucky to have been able to read this a bit early.

Upon the release of her debut novel, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Stories from the Crematory, I immediately purchased it and read it in a single sitting, this book was no different. Caitlin is the only person I've ever been a patron of on Patreon and this is the first book I had ever pre-ordered (though W.W. Norton was nice enough to send me an advanced copy for review, I still wanted to support the book).

Given all of those things and my history with Caitlin's work, I had a lot of expectations for this new book. I was overjoyed when it was announced on her channel and have patiently awaiting it ever since. That being said, it was approximately 1.5 Billion times better than I had expected it to be (the illustrations alone are jaw-dropping).

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death is exactly what it sounds like. It chronicles Caitlin traveling the world and exploring the death rituals of various cultures across it. She does an amazing job through her writing of balancing a heavy topic like death with her brilliant sense of humor. The humor is never distasteful in anyway, it works quite well. The serious moments are serious, and the rest is just fun and educational.

This book is, inside and out, indisputable proof that death can be beautiful. Caitlin observes and describes many death rituals in the most respective way possible, contrasts them with the death industry in North America, and showcases the ways people here are trying to improve death culture, our relationship with death, and the way we interact with our own dead.

While reading this book, I had many conversations with friends and loved ones about death and, while some found a few of the stories in this book to be “creepy” (they're not, they're beautiful), they all seemed to agree that the way we handle death, by not handling it at all, leaves something to be desired. 

I think reading books like Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity should be mandatory. Caitlin is on a very difficult journey of changing the way a lot of stubborn people view death, and these books are a massive step in the right direction. For that, I thank her.