From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty

While a new Crossrail station was being dug in London in 2015, 3,500 bodies were excavated from a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cemetery under Liverpool Street, including a burial pit from the Great Plague of 1665. These bodies represent a history that exists, often unknown, beneath our feet. “At almost any location in any major city on Earth, you are likely standing on thousands of bodies. It is a missed opportunity to not talk about this stuff-you’re certainly not going to have any say in it all once you’re gone. Doughty’s interest was piqued by a trip to Belize, where it’s traditional to have a full-day wake with the body, where she meets a man who tells her that he and his friends talk about their deaths all the time. Doughty owns a funeral home and she encourages the bereaved to hold on to their loved one’s body, rather than going for the instant embalming that is currently in vogue.

On the way, she witnesses Indonesian tribespeople cleaning and reclothing long-mummified corpses of dead relatives, grapples with the emotional power of the misunderstood Mexican Days of the Dead festival, and leaving your body to become compost to enrich the soil for years to come.ĭoughty opens by pointing out that in America (the UK counts as America as we seem to import more and more of their culture), there is a real problem in talking about death. In From Here to Eternity, Caitlin Doughty, an American funeral home owner and mortician, sets about countering the stifling hegemony of cremation and burial in standard Western death rites by exploring the range of other traditions and rituals on offer around the world. So, to try and make sense of a senseless situation, I did what I always do: find a book. It’s the first person I’ve know who’s died since my grandparents died when I was a kid.

I wasn’t very close to him-I hadn’t know him all that long-but I had seen him a lot in the last couple of months of his life. It was sudden “a shock”, as people tends to say. He was old but not that old, and healthy.

From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty