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

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

The Western sanitization of death is the key cultural trend that Doughty wants her book to address and remedy. This is an outlook toward death that is prevalent in industrialized, capitalist countries with European influence, often via colonization. Doughty says that for the last couple centuries, these Western countries have undergone a series of changes to their death industries that have corporatized death and created distance between the living and their dead. She sees this as harmful and wants people to feel “held” in their grief rather than distanced.

Doughty sees two negative aspects to the Western ideas of death, and these are often interrelated: One is the actions of the funeral industry, and the other is the negative views of death and dead bodies. Doughty says that the funeral industry is full of “purposeful obfuscations.” People do not know “what chemicals are pumped into their mother during an embalming procedure” or “the state of their mother’s body […] years after her death” (13, 76). This distance between the living and the dead makes the physicality of death a mystery. Often, mourners ask Doughty questions about these things, showing her that people might subliminally want to close this gap. She thinks that practices like those in Tana Toraja, where people care for the mummies of their loved ones, might be “less frightening than the specters of the human imagination” (76). However, since people in Western society are kept at a distance from death by the funeral imagery, they get no closure or understanding about death.

Additionally, Doughty argues that the American funeral industry is a “profit-oriented” and “commercial” system that exploits people’s belief that dead bodies are “unhygienic” (25). The industrial cremation industry was initially born in Europe and America because of this belief. The leaders of this innovation in the late 19th century posited the idea that this style of burial was “modern” and “scientific”—and therefore objectively better than the “mass of corruption” that occurred when bodies were buried naturally (26). This view, inflected with value judgments about burial practices, continues to affect Western people, who think that their own funerary practices are “right while all these ‘other people’ are disrespectful and barbarous” (14). The sanitization of death has convinced American audiences of this, and the funeral industry and their “funeral boards” in local governments are enabled to exploit this belief for “money and profit” (38).

According to Doughty, this drive toward the sanitization of death is belief based rather than literal. While the funeral industry claims that they are literally sanitizing the death process, Doughty emphasizes that there is nothing inherently dirty about the dead body. She recounts the story of Agus, a Torajan man who slept in the same bed as his grandfather’s mummified corpse for seven years. While Agus, his family, and his community felt that this was perfectly normal, Doughty compares it to a similar story in Western pop culture: Norman Bates in Psycho. Bates also “preserved the corpse of his mother,” “lived with his mother’s body for many years,” and “had conversations with his mother’s body as if she were alive” (70-71). Yet Bates is a classic movie villain, and Western audiences “feel there is something profoundly creepy about interacting with the dead over a long period of time” (71). This is not due to any objective trait of death or corpses but because of ingrained cultural beliefs about death in society. Torajans do these things with their dead as well, but their society conceptualizes death in a different way and integrates death rituals into daily life.

Doughty believes that Western audiences are fully capable of changing their views toward death. She hopes that this will happen so that the industry will change as well.