We're kicking off October with a Halloween-appropriate read: From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty. Our Public Services Librarian, Kelly Clever, tells us about this unique twist on the travel writing genre.
Fun fact about me: I sort of grew up in a cemetery. By that, I mean that the "family business" of my family of origin is operating a memorial park. We also took a lot of road trips when I was younger, and my dad took a professional interest in other cemeteries, so we always visited the burial places of the areas we visited. This book is like that but on steroids. And with a lot more discussion of decay.
Caitlyn Doughty is probably best-known for her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician. The same funny-yet-respectful, lightheartedly-morbid tone of her videos pervades this book. I'm not very far into it, but so far she has traveled to a remote town in Colorado to visit the only legal open-air funeral pyre in the United States. She has also taken an arduous 30-hour trip to the Torajan region of Indonesia, where dead people are considered still alive for the first few months or years (they're described as ill or feverish but still cognizant) and go on "living" in the home with their families.
This book and Caitlin's YouTube channel are not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I find it comforting to reflect on the universality of death and how it is not truly an end. Every culture has rituals around mourning, the treatment of the body, and grief, and in every culture, those still alive must find a way to go on living after loss. I would rather not do that with a mummified body in my living room, but it's nice to reflect that many peoples do not perceive the same rigid division between life and death that modern American culture usually does.
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