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

These final chapters introduce one successful, hyper-modern funerary practice and one surviving traditional approach, both of which are juxtaposed with an alternative funerary practice in the United States.

In Japan, Doughty visits the hyper-modern Koukokuji Buddhist Temple, Rinkai, and Lastel, which are a contrast to Ethical Engagement With Diverse Death Practices at Altima’s facility in Chapter 5. While Altima uses its technology to maintain the distance between the living and the dead, these three Tokyo-based places close this distance. In the book’s Epilogue, Doughty says that the Japanese funerary practices she witnessed try to make surviving family feel “held” in their grief.

For instance, Ruriden, the columbarium on Koukokuji’s grounds, was built as an accessible place of mourning. Yajima decided that each set of remains should be watched over by a light-up Buddha so that people wouldn’t have to “squint through names” trying to find their loved ones (159). He innovated the card-swipe system to cue the Buddhas to light up because he saw a “very old woman struggling to type a name” into the keypad (159). While the light-up Buddhas and keypad are aesthetically pleasing, they are ethical contributions made by Yajima, based on his observation of the accessibility needs of the people who use the facilities. These small technological details make it easier for people to access their dead, rather than adding layers of obfuscation, like at Altima.

Rinkai is a huge contrast to the crematory at Altima and to the American crematories that Doughty describes. At first, Rinkai seems like other facilities, where families “watch [the body] glide into the machine” and do “not watch the cremation process itself” (169). However, upstairs they practice kotsuage, where families use chopsticks to pick through ashes for recognizable bones, which are piled in an urn. Western crematories “pulverize these bones into powdery ash” so that there is nothing recognizably human about them (169). Doughty must sometimes pick through ashes to remove bones. This aesthetic move by Western crematories obfuscates the reality of death and removes anything resembling the person the bones belong to, maintaining the distance between the living and the dead. On the other hand, the Japanese process of kotsuage creates connection between the dead and their loved ones. The living recognize the realities of death and care for their loved one a final time. Westerners who have family die in Japan and engage in kotsuage report that while the practice “sounds macabre”—an idea that reflects The Western Sanitization of Death— in reality, it is “emotional” and makes them “feel calmer […] as if [they are] looking after” their loved one (171). This positive experience of Westerners who practiced kotsuage shows that there is nothing inherently superior about Western death practices and the distance they maintain between living and dead. Indeed, there are clear drawbacks to them, as they do not allow people closeness to the dead, which can give them closure.

These chapters touch on how religion affects Cultural Diversity in Death Practices. For instance, Japan has a cremation rate of 99%; in contrast, in the United States, the cremation rate in 2018 (the year after Doughty’s book was published) was 52.9% (“Annual Cremation Growth Rate.” Cremation Association of North America). This is because the “Judeo-Christian view” of matters of death translated into “the dominant Western view” (155). Medieval Christians believed that the body must stay whole for resurrection, and this view has inflected opinions about cremation to this day. In Japan, Shinto and Buddhist religious practices not only allow for cremation but also weave it into cultural practice. Spare ashes at Rinkai, for instance, are planted under cherry trees so that people’s remains morph into another living entity.

On a similar note, Doughty observes tension between popular religion and funerary practices in Bolivia, where the Catholic Church has “vocal dissenter[s]” to the veneration of ñatitas (195). Under Catholic doctrine, these are considered false idols—though Doughty notes that Catholics venerate saints and saintly relics. Thus, the ñatitas keep the skulls secretly so that they aren’t perceived as “bad Catholics.” Despite the protestations of organized religion, Catholic and Indigenous practices become melded together in daily life. Doughty’s acquaintance Andres explains that Bolivians aren’t a “‘blend’ of Catholicism and indigenous beliefs—they just got stuck together” (202). The lived experience of people engaging in various death and funerary customs is a unique and individual blend of beliefs, rather than a homogenous practice.

Doughty says that this is true to an extent even in the United States, though the funeral industry and regulations hamper this ability. Doughty lives with the knowledge that these regulations mean that she will likely never experience her preferred burial method, which is a sky burial. In regulated funeral industries like in the United States, or in cultures that “cannot shift and adapt their traditions” like the Parsis (223), she stresses that the people in charge, be it “the government, religious leaders, etc.,” decide which funerary practices are acceptable and which are “vile spectacle” (223). This choice is then imposed onto civilians. In the United States, this is slowly changing. Mrs. Shepherd’s natural burial in Joshua Tree exemplifies this slow change; Joshua Tree opened for natural burials in 2010. Some natural burial spaces have opened in Los Angeles, too, but a natural burial plot in Santa Monica, for instance, asks for a “‘green’ premium” amounting to thousands of dollars.

While the United States is beginning to explore these alternative methods, they are rare and expensive. In the commercialization of profit-driven death, Doughty notices that Americans are not “held in [their] grief” and hopes that the lessons taken from diverse death practices will begin to change this (233).