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

Content Warning: This section discusses death, abortion, suicide, funeral practices, and postmortem bodily phenomena.

“In America, where I live, death has been big business since the turn of the twentieth century. A century has proven the perfect amount of time for its citizens to forget what funerals once were: family- and community-run affairs. In the nineteenth century, no one would have questioned Josephine’s daughter preparing her mother’s body—it would have seemed strange if she didn’t.”

Doughty introduces The Western Sanitization of Death by discussing the way that capitalism has turned death into a profit-driven industry. She juxtaposes deathcare in the 21st and 19th centuries to introduce how ideas of good deathcare are culturally contingent rather than static.

“The land was donated by Dragon Mountain Temple, a Zen Buddhist group. They don’t keep the pyre hidden. As you drive into town there is a metal sign with a single flame reading ‘PYRE.’ The sign was handmade by a local potato farmer (also the coroner), and stands as an obvious landmark.”

Doughty emphasizes that Crestone’s open-air pyre became a reality because of the cooperation of a diverse group of people. The citizens of Crestone met with the pyre’s owners to discuss the pyre until they grew comfortable with its presence. A religious group donated the land. Community members take pride in something that they used to be uncomfortable with. This exemplifies Doughty’s optimism that Westernized people can change their ideas about funerary practices.

“Families are kept behind glass windows in air-conditioned rooms, watching as the body disappears into a small metal door in the wall. The machine concealed behind the wall is the same industrial oven found in the warehouses, but the family cannot see the wizard behind the curtain. The camouflage removes the family further from the reality of death and of the clunky, environmentally inefficient machines. For the privilege of taking mom to a ‘cremation tribute center,’ the price may rise above $5,000.”

Doughty describes what happens during a typical cremation in the United States. The funeral industry has created layers of obfuscation to distance people from the physicality of death, and Doughty uses the metaphor of the “wizard behind the curtain” to emphasize how these cremation centers go to great lengths to conceal this process. She compares traditional industrial crematoriums with “cremation tribute centers,” which are ostensibly more human-centric crematories that provide outreach and comfort to the family.