"From Here to Eternity" by Caitlin Doughty review
When I think of reading something for fun to relieve stress, my mind rarely jumps to talking about death. But while “From Here to Eternity” isn’t exactly what I’d consider a light book, but for a book written almost entirely about death, it’s about as much fun as you’re likely to find. This is mostly because it’s about death rituals rather than death itself. And more than that, it’s about death rituals that may seem strange, like keeping a dead relative in your house for years.
What is “From Here to Eternity” about?
This book starts with an important point. That people most often find rituals around death that aren’t their own strange, disrespectful and even barbaric. More than that, if you did some things it would be disrespectful because you don’t believe in that. But that doesn’t mean it would be for someone who actually believes in it. This is important for the context of the book because while it discusses different ways to deal with bodies, it does so without judgment explaining them, but not saying whether they are right or wrong. In fact, one of the few practices that comes off truly bad in this book is the one we are likely to be most familiar with, not because it is wrong but because its focus has largely become about companies making money selling coffins rather than about helping people through a difficult time.
The book begins with a small town in the USA where they have open air cremations. Here, they literally put wood under a body and light it on fire. But while it is unusual, the real story is that the entire community comes together for these funerals, allowing people to heal in a way that many traditional funerals don’t. Caitlin Doughty points out how difficult this was and that people to do something that is considered strange too many.
Most of the rest of the book involves her going to other places all over the world where they have different views of death and corpses than we do in the world. Each of these is interesting because it shows a different aspect of one of the most important things. This includes things like mummification, the day of the dead, suicides, catacombs and more.
One of the more entertaining stories was of a plan to deal with the many bodies in London with the pyramid of death. The plan was to build a 94 story tall pyramid in the middle of London for bodies. And it was evidently a serious discussion, and I am disappointed didn’t happen just because a giant death pyramid in the center of London.
What did I think of “From Here to Eternity”?
I enjoyed this book a lot more than I had expected. The author kept the book respectful while not making it feel more macabre than was necessary. It focused on the things that people do or how the process can be made better for people while both never forgetting that both the living and the dead are real people with real emotions without forcing the reader to spend too much time with the painful feelings. So my recommendation is that if you’re not bothered by somewhat graphic descriptions of what happens to corpses, a frank discussion of suicide and want to learn more about other cultures, this is an interesting book.
Conclusion
Death isn’t a subject a lot of us want to spend our time thinking about. And this book doesn’t shy away from that, but it is written by someone who is comfortable both with the idea of death and the discomfort that it can cause. In this way it helps to demystify the processes we use and tells interesting stories about other cultures. There is no point that this book didn’t keep my attention and only a couple where I felt any real discomfort and usually those were simply because how other people dealt with death differed from what I was taught was proper. And the book helped me to overcome that discomfort, at least in the abstract, though I fear I’d still be uncomfortable if I had to deal with it more directly. So, if you’re interested in burial rituals or simply want to become more comfortable with the physical aspects of death, then this is a book that has a great deal of value.