From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with “dignity.”Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette- smoking, wish- granting human skulls), and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved- ones’ bones from cremation ashes. Grandpa’s mummy

She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA. . Mortician Caitlin Doughtyhost and creator of “Ask a Mortician” and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyesfounded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death and co-founded Death Salon

Unless you and your friends are immortal, this book pertains to you.” - A. “Caitlin Doughty is razor sharp, and writes about death with exceptional clarity and style. From Here to Eternity manages to be both an extremely funny travelogue and a deeply moving book about what death means to us all.” - Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura“A thought-provoking book about the complicated, fascinating world of funerary practices. Jacobs“Doughty finds the humanity in others cultures' relationship with death that seems to be lacking in ours.” - Justin Caffier, Vice“Doughty’s fascinating tour of ritu