Show me your skulls, again

 

For the book that wins me my Goodreads challenge this year I picked Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, knowing that I would be reading in a post-Thanksgiving blobular sort of state: it’s short, it’s morbid, the cover is pretty, and unfortunately, the subject matter seemed timely, given this year’s mass death event that we as a country are refusing to deal with. 

I’m very fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic has touched me lightly, compared to many--everyone I know personally who’s had it (or who we suspect has had it; some couldn’t get tested, especially early on) had mild cases and seems to have made a full recovery. But the deaths are only a degree or two away from me, and of course, non-COVID deaths don’t stop just because the COVID ones are around. My mother’s childhood best friend died earlier this year, a woman I hadn’t seen in decades but who I had fond memories of; a couple close friends have lost parents and other relatives; a few of my family members have had bad health-related news that I will not specify here out of respect for their privacy; and we lost both my housemates’s cats this year. That this, by 2020 standards, constitutes having gotten off easy, is stressful enough; that people can’t even have proper funerals and there’s no real way for any of us to grieve, we’re all just trying to do work and school and at-home fitness classes and generally trying to act normal makes it even worse. So this question of how to deal with death in a healthy manner--something we’re not very good at in our culture even when there aren’t all these complications about gathering in-person at all--seemed like something I should think about.

From Here to Eternity is part travelogue and part political polemic, exploring the funerary customs of cultures across the world not just as anthropological curiosities but as methods of psychological and social processing. Doughty compares the customs she observes--some ancient, some modern; some from hard-to-get to little enclaves in places National Geographic likes to go to take pictures, some in urban areas of “developed” nations--to the methods dominant in the American death industry, and the ways in which they do and do not seem to meet the bereaved’s needs. It would have been easy for this book to come down on the side of a simple “noble savage” kind of thesis where the colorful customs of geographically far-flung brown people are elevated as more natural and superior than the sanitized, processed funerals we have in the U.S., but fortunately, Doughty looks at a wider spread of practices than that and looks at them in more detail and with more nuance than that. She writes very favorably of some kinds of high-tech death rituals, and discusses why things are done the way they’re done, and what changes are and are not being made, with professional death workers in Barcelona and Tokyo; she discusses the legal and cultural difficulties of people within the U.S. who try to buck the norms of the American death industry--whether it’s new, inventive hippie stuff like open-air pyre innovators in Colorado or the nascent experiments in human composting, or groups like Muslims and Jews whose traditional religious rites run counter to the norms and regulations required by the industry. One throughline is pretty clear, whether she’s talking about the U.S. funeral industry or the Catholic Church in Bolivia: When authority figures’ norms and mandates about death rituals don’t meet the needs of the bereaved, people will start to push back. The U.S. funeral industry gets the worst of the criticism here, because, like most things in the U.S., it’s become a commodified mess designed to extract the maximum amount of money out of people at a vulnerable time in their lives--the process is opaque, expensive, and rushed, and people often don’t have any idea what choices they actually have, because the authorities who are supposed to be helping them through the process are often the same people trying to sell them stuff. People in the U.S. are scared of dead bodies, both psychologically and out of an overblown (though obviously not baseless) fear that they’re unsanitary, but handing all the work of caretaking the dead over to professionals seems to a) reify this fear and b) leave people without any meaningful tasks to do to take care of their loved ones, leaving a void which then very conveniently gets filled up with “pay for more stuff.” (Bereaved people also get a lot of paperwork to do along with their fees to pay, but that doesn’t seem to have the same psychological effect as doing… anything that isn’t paperwork.) 

In addition to the thought-provoking questions on how to deal with death (and how not to deal with it), From Here to Eternity also has plenty of jokes, charming travel anecdotes, some very excellent illustrations (assuming you don’t mind that most of them are of corpses), and a very memorable cast of characters, alive and dead. While you do need to be the sort of person who can handle sitting down and reading an entire book about corpses, it’s very much on the “light and readable” side as far as books about corpses go (I’ve read some much more academic ones, and some that are vastly more graphic). In short, it was extremely good and I recommend it highly, even if you’re not quite as morbid as me. After all, we’ll all die someday, whether we’re interested in it or not--and when that happens, someone will try to guilt your descendants into buying a $7,000 casket that will sit in a $3,000 steel vault in the ground, for no real reason other than that they’d rather make $10,000 off that arrangement than make less off something cheaper and more sustainable. If you want that not to happen, well, forewarned is forearmed.