From Here to Eternity
by Caitlin Doughty, Weidenfeld, 272pp, £15
At the outset of this book, subtitled “Travelling the World to Find the Good Death”, Caitlin Doughty quotes the psychiatrist Irvin D Yalom: “Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality.”
This is the second book I’ve reviewed in recent months based on this very premise: the modern world’s failure to provide rituals and practices that help us to face up to death. Kevin Toolis’s My Father’s Wake (Books, October 27) was a wonderful paean to the funeral customs of Achill Island, presenting them as a desperately needed alternative to the impersonal operations of what he calls the “Western Death Machine”.
Caitlin Doughty also despairs of how things are done these days. A century of the funeral business in America has, she feels, wiped people’s memories of what funerals once were: family and community-run affairs in which, for instance, a father might carry his son to the grave in a homemade coffin; or a wife might wash and dress the body of her husband.
Indeed, the latter example is particularly pertinent, as Doughty argues that a role that used to belong to caring, self-sacrificing women has been wrenched from their hands by well-paid, self-serving men. The bottom line is that the mainstream West has “fallen behind the rest of the world when it comes to proximity, intimacy and ritual around death”.
Is some kind of uprising afoot against the businessmen and bureaucrats of the undertaking establishment? These writers certainly know where to go in order to throw our current deficiencies into sharp relief. Toolis concentrated on Achill.
Doughty, a “progressive mortician” in Los Angeles, goes on something of a world tour: 10 countries (though not Ireland) and five continents (but not Africa). She is in search of cultures and communities that make their peace with death and grief by confronting and embracing them, rather than hiding our mortality away in sealed caskets and behind crematorium curtains.
Doughty is a likeable guide to the eye-popping variety of rituals humanity has devised for crossing and re-crossing the border between life and death. Among other things, her field trips take in a corpse-composting centre in North Carolina; cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls in Bolivia; and a Japanese ritual in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck the bones of loved ones from their cremation ashes.
Her own stated preference for the destiny of her mortal remains would be a Tibetan “sky burial” in which the dead body is devoured by vultures: “I spent the first 30 years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?”
Doughty strikes a nice balance between chatty, heartfelt and thoughtful. She brings plenty of that kooky LA spirit to the whole enterprise, though she has a habit of inserting heavily telegraphed wry asides where they really aren’t needed. From Here to Eternity is peppered with anecdotes from the history of funerals, larger-than-life characters from the business of death and eclectic cultural references.
Alongside the reportage, Doughty has a case to make. She wants readers not to dismiss as backward or grotesque the rituals captured here but to “see the beauty” in them. She launches a plea to “reform our funeral industries in the West”, so that the separation of mourners from the deceased is less clinical, more honest, more humane.
All of which is fine. But, like Toolis, Doughty doesn’t really stop to consider whether modern Western practice might be meeting at least some human needs and desires, even if they don’t share them. This strikes me as a touch arrogant and unimaginative.
Moreover, the older rituals Doughty encounters on her travels come from deep wells of religious belief, mingled with superstition. But she doesn’t really engage with these origins, their merits or otherwise. A restoration of more authentic practice in the West will surely require a parallel restoration of cogent beliefs about the afterlife, if we are not to end up with something that isn’t just a collection of, to use the author’s phrase, “impossibly cool” ornamental screens for business as usual.
Naturally, given some of Caitlin Doughty’s destinations – Mexico, Spain, Bolivia – the Catholic Church swings into view from time to time. She doesn’t have many good things to say about it. The poor, apparently, are “cast out from the stern bosom of Catholicism”.
That statement alone, smacking of both a lack of curiosity and a large dose of parti pris, rather shook my faith in Doughty as a reliable narrator. There is a woeful irony in her portrayal of the Church as an enemy when it is the one Western institution that provides an alternative to the death machine.
Doughty really ought to pay Catholic Ireland a visit. Before it’s too late.
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