From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

Sarah is a key figure in Chapter 3, which describes Sarah and Doughty’s trip to Mexico City, Michoacán, and Tzintzuntzan. Sarah was a preschool and kindergarten teacher for 10 years, and she now works as a director for Doughty’s nonprofit, The Order of the Good Death. Sarah grew up in East Los Angeles, but her grandparents were from Monterrey, Mexico. After moving to Chavez Ravine in East Los Angeles, her grandparents were displaced by the government, which said that they needed the land to build “new schools and playgrounds and housing” and then used it to build Dodgers Stadium (81).

Sarah calls her family “self-hating Mexicans” who wanted “to be as white as possible” (81). She saw herself as “an American who happened to be Mexican” (82). This cultural identification became important when Sarah lost a son after six months of pregnancy. Due to The Western Sanitization of Death, she could not find resources to help her mourn her son in a satisfactory way.

The physical displacement of Sarah’s family by the American government parallels her cultural displacement, as she found American death culture unsatisfactory in her time of mourning. This is what led Sarah to reconnect with her Mexican ancestry. While no one in the United States wanted to witness her grief, in Mexico, Sarah finds that her grief is “recognized. [She] [i]sn’t making other people uncomfortable” (88). Due to Cultural Diversity in Death Practices, especially the festival of Día de los Muertos, Mexican culture is more comfortable witnessing death and grief.

Sarah and Doughty visit multiple grave sites and ofrendas, or altars. Sarah is drawn to the graves of babies. At one grave, a woman sees Sarah crying and gives her a tissue, “quietly holding her arm” (90). This solidarity and act of support and witnessing is something that she lacked in the United States. Sarah also observes a fresh ofrenda on the grave of a baby who died 20 years prior and feels validated by the family’s continued care for the child.

Sarah’s baby had Trisomy 13, a rare chromosomal condition that leads to miscarriage or death shortly after birth; this led four doctors to advise her to end her pregnancy. Sarah found that some sectors of American culture were not only insensitive to grief but were also actively hostile to her, like when she visited an abortion clinic. Anti-choice protestors “screamed over and over that [she] was a murderer,” and even after she was inside the clinic, they yelled from outside and called her “the lady with the dead baby” (100). Sarah found that the binary American way of thinking about death introduced a lack of nuance into people’s reaction to her that made those days “the three worst days” of her and her husband’s lives (101). The more fluid Mexican way of viewing death, where grief is open and continual and the dead are present in the lives of the living, helps Sarah in the aftermath of this difficult life circumstance.

Katrina is a key figure in Chapter 4. She is an entrepreneur, death care specialist, and founder of Recompose, an initiative for human composting. Katrina got her master’s in architecture, focusing on creating a “resting place for the urban dead” (114). Though she supported natural burials without embalming, she didn’t believe that cities would set aside the necessary land; this led her to innovate human composting and create the Urban Death Project.

Chapter 4 centers around Katrina’s collaboration with Dr. Cheryl Johnston of the Forensic Osteology Research Station, who volunteered her facility and donor bodies to the experiments that Katrina needed to do to prove that human composting is viable. Katrina’s goal is to turn a human body into soil in four to six weeks. While livestock composting is a common practice, no one has ever composted humans before.

Doughty is present for Katrina’s unveiling of her first two experiments, John and June Compost, who have both been composting for five years. Neither experiment is a success, with John losing too much moisture and mummifying and June having too much moisture and rotting. Katrina is disappointed but not discouraged. She believes that human decomposition can be a “radical act,” especially for those who are “socialized female” since they are taught to prevent aging and their “bodies are so often under the purview of men” (138). Katrina’s story, and the stories of other women Doughty meets, like Sarah, Doña Ana, and Doña Ely, collectively emphasize how death care interacts with other social milieus like gender-based discrimination. In 2020, three years after the publication of this book, Katrina’s company Recompose started accepting human bodies for composting.