About this item
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 grandfathers mummified body. Grandpas 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 Americas 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.
About the Author
Caitlin Doughty (born August 19, 1984) is an American mortician, author, blogger, and YouTube personality known for advocating death acceptance and the reform of Western funeral industry practices. She is the creator of the web series "Ask a Mortician", founder of The Order of the Good Death, and author of the bestselling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, published in 2014 by W.W. Norton and Company.Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Mara Zehler (Caitlin Doughty)
