Caitlin Doughty
A Room of One's Own 2717 Atwood Ave., Madison, Wisconsin 53704
press release: Room is thrilled to welcome Caitlin Doughty, mortician and author of From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death.
In From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, mortician Caitlin Doughty explores the world’s funeral traditions—from robotic graves in Japan to an Indonesian village where families live with the bodies of their dead for months, even years, prior to the funeral. Following up on her New York Times best-selling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, the author argues that in modern America, funerals have become procedural and impersonal, meant to sanitize and distance the survivors’ from confrontation with mortality—all in the name of profit and “dignity.” The result is a culture pervaded by death anxieties and bereft of traditions that would help people make sense of their own mortal ends. Doughty advocates for alternative rituals designed to save us from the funeral-industrial complex. In her travels, Doughty encounters funeral traditions that, to our eyes, may appear both beautiful and appalling. Doughty, however, goes beyond ghoulish spectacle to ask how different cultures benefit from their unique funeral traditions and to question how our own culture might learn from them.
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 Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs the nonprofit funeral home Undertaking LA.