Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity has firmly earned a spot on my top books list. It’s a thoughtful, compassionate tour of how different cultures care for their dead, and it landed at a time in my life when I desperately needed that perspective.
My mum died unexpectedly in September 2017. Like a lot of people, I found myself navigating hospital corridors, funeral arrangements, and the surreal quiet that follows a sudden death. I visited her in the chapel of rest on my own, not really knowing what to expect, and came away with memories that were powerful but also deeply unsettling. For a long time, those images were what I thought of first when I thought about her.
Months later, I picked up From Here to Eternity. In it, Caitlin Doughty travels to communities around the world - from the US to Mexico, Japan, Indonesia and beyond - to see the many different ways people live with and care for their dead. Each chapter focuses on a particular place or practice, combining reportage, history, and personal reflection in a way that’s surprisingly gentle, often funny, and never voyeuristic.
What I love about this book is that it quietly challenges the very narrow script many of us in the West are given about death: keep it hidden, keep it clinical, keep it quick. Doughty shows that there are other options - families who keep their loved ones at home after death, communities who stay physically close to the body, rituals that acknowledge what a dead body actually is without flinching or pretending it’s something else. Rather than feeling morbid, these stories come across as deeply human and, in many cases, very comforting.
Reading about those practices helped me reframe my own experience. I began to see that what I’d found so disturbing about seeing my mum after she died wasn’t that her body had changed - that part is entirely natural - but that I’d been given almost no cultural language or support for handling it. From Here to Eternity didn’t magically fix my grief (no book can do that), but it did help me understand that there was nothing “wrong” or shameful about what I’d seen, or how I felt. That realisation took away a chunk of the fear and allowed me to find something gentler in those memories.
As a death-positive advocate and funeral director, Doughty is open about her own views, but she doesn’t preach. She’s curious rather than judgemental, and the book balances big questions - about capitalism, environmental impact, and who gets to control what happens to our bodies - with very grounded, specific stories. The tone is accessible and conversational, so even if you’re not usually someone who reads non-fiction about death, it’s easy to follow.
If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to planning your own funeral, this isn’t that. It’s more of a wide-angle look at what’s possible, and an invitation to think about what you might want for yourself and the people you love. I’d particularly recommend it to anyone who’s bereaved, anyone who’s anxious about death, or anyone who suspects that the way we currently do things in the UK and US might not be the only way - or the best way.
For me, From Here to Eternity did what a lot of books about grief tried and failed to do: it made death feel less like a taboo subject and more like something I’m allowed to look at directly. It helped me reconnect with my long-standing interest in death, folklore, and funerary culture, without feeling ghoulish or strange for caring about it.
And if I do come back as a ghost one day, this book has convinced me that Mexico would probably be the place to haunt. Seems a ghost would be welcome there.
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