From Here to Eternity Quotes

“Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother’s hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn’t dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or a ring. Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, ‘I love and accept myself.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals—funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Holding the space doesn’t mean swaddling the family immobile in their grief. It also means giving them meaningful tasks. Using chopsticks to methodically clutch bone after bone and place them in an urn, building an altar to invite a spirit to visit once a year, even taking a body from the grave to clean and redress it: these activities give the mourner a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve. Grieving helps the mourner begin to heal.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Women’s bodies are so often under the purview of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Holding the space is crucial, and exactly what we are missing. To hold the space is to create a ring of safety around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly, without fear of being judged.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“We owe our very lives to the soil, and, as William Bryant Logan said, “the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” Though, presumably, they are a start.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Why do we refuse to have these conversations, asking our family and friends what they want done with their body when they die? Our avoidance is self-defeating. By dodging the talk about our inevitable end, we put both our pocketbooks and our ability to mourn at risk.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not
based on mathematics (e.g., 36.7 percent a "barbarous act"), but on
emotions, a belief in the unique nobility of one's own culture. That is
to say, we consider death rituals savage only when they don't match
our own.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“All that surrounds us comes from death, every part of every city, and every part of every person.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“In my practice as a mortician I've found that both cleaning the body and spending time with it serves a powerful role in processing grief. It helps mourners see the corpse not as a cursed object, but as a beautiful vessel that once held their loved one.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“There is a freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Many children and grandchildren of immigrants, have, like Sarah, found themselves severed from their family’s cultural rituals. The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“We won’t get our rituals back if we don’t show up. Show up first, and the ritual will come. Insist on going to the cremation, insist on going to the burial. Insist on being involved, even if it is just brushing your mother’s hair as she lies in her casket. Insist on applying her favorite shade of lipstick, the one she wouldn’t dream of going to the grave without. Insist on cutting a small lock of her hair to place in a locket or in a ring. Don’t be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“we consider death rituals savage only when they don’t match our own.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“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. —IRVIN YALOM, PSYCHIATRIST”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“He explained that he talks about death "all the time" with his friends. They ask each other, "Hey, what you want when you die?"

Luciano asked, "Don't people say that where you come from?"

It was hard to explain that, no, for the most part, they really don't.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it's a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals--funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.

Nine years ago, when I began working with the dead, I heard other practitioners speak about holding the space for the dying person and their family. With my secular bias, "holding the space" sounded like saccharine hippie lingo.

This judgment was wrong. Holding the space is crucial, and exactly what we are missing. To hold the space is to create a ring of safety around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly, without fear of being judged.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“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. No one would have questioned a wife washing and dressing the body of her husband or a father carrying his son to the grave in a homemade coffin. In an impressively short time, America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on Earth.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Not everyone in my industry is supportive of the way I run my funeral home. Some believe a dead body must be embalmed to be safe (untrue) and that a body should be handled only by licensed professionals (also untrue). The dissenters imagine that younger, progressive morticians are “starting to make our profession look like a joke” and wonder if “circus is the right word for what funeral service is becoming.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“We need to reform our funeral industry, introducing new practices
that aren't so profit-oriented, and that do more to include the family.
But we cannot begin to reform—or even question!-our death systems
when we act like little Jean de Brébeufs, falsely convinced we have it
right while all these "other people" are disrespectful and barbarous.

This dismissive attitude can be found in places you'd never expect.
Lonely Planet, the largest guidebook publisher in the world, included the idyllic Trunyan cemetery in their book on visiting Bali. In Trunyan, the villagers weave bamboo cages for their dead to decompose in, and then stack the skulls and bones out in the lush
green landscape. Lonely Planet, instead of explaining the meaning behind these ancient customs, advised wise travelers to "skip the ghoulish spectacle.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Even if we recognize the benefits of another culture's ritual, we often allow bias to undermine those feelings of acceptance.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“I could see why the discovery of a six-foot-tall white girl in a polka-dot dress in the corner of a cave filled with skulls would be an Instagrammable moment.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“In the opening scene of the film, Bond glides through the mêlée in a skeleton mask and tux and slips into a hotel with a masked woman. Except, here’s the trick. The Días de los Muertos parade did not inspire the James Bond film. The James Bond film inspired the parade. The Mexican government, afraid that people around the world would see the film and expect that the parade exists when it did not, recruited 1,200 volunteers and spent a year re-creating the four-hour pageant.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“The site of the whale fall turns into a decades-long version of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, a debauched, celebratory party where creatures devour the whale “course by course, one by one.” The whale is the epitome of a postmortem benefactor, part of an arrangement as beautiful as it is sensible—an animal dying and donating its body so that others may thrive. “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious,” the carcass seems to say. The whale, in short, is a valuable necrocitizen.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“About an hour into Laura's cremation, the pall of grief had lifted from the circle.
The last speaker came forward to address the crowd in a way that would have been inappropriate just ninety minutes earlier. 'Everything you all said about how Laura was a wonderful person, that's true. But in my mind, she'll always be one of the wild crones. A partier. I'd like to give her a howl.'
'Oooooooooooooooooooooo,' she bellowed, with the crowd joining in around her.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it's a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals - funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death