From Here to Eternity

Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

By: Caitlin Doughty

Narrated by: Caitlin Doughty

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. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. Grandpa's mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. 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.

With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America. From Here to Eternity introduces death-care innovators researching green burial and body composting, explores new spaces for mourning - including a glowing Buddha columbarium in Japan and America's only open-air pyre - and reveals unexpected new possibilities for our own death rituals.

Author bio: Mortician Caitlin Doughty - host and creator of Ask a Mortician and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - founded the death acceptance collective The Order of the Good Death and cofounded Death Salon. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA.

©2017 Caitlin Doughty (P)2017 Recorded Books

A book everyone should read.

I think this is an important book for people to read.
I also think that this book, her first book, and her YouTube channel are awesome, because it’s so cool to see someone so unapologetically geek out over something they’re passionate about — especially, in this case, because this is something most people shy away from.

The Perfect Death-tober Read

Caitlin nailed. Killed it? However you want to say it, she wrote and read an amazing book. Humor, beauty, catharsis, it's all in here.

You are awesome

Great book helpful for anyone who may have an interest in death. Thank you for your insight.

I loved this book!

Caitlin is such a storyteller and really beings the book to life, so to speak.....

Great book

I really enjoyed this book. It makes you look at different cultures and how they grieve.