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

Content Warning: This section discusses death and funeral practices.

For the past 2,000 years, the cultural dominance of Christianity and the later dominance of empirical science have had the largest influences on Western conceptions of death.

In Christian belief, a person’s actions in life have a bearing upon their eternal afterlife, determining if they will go to heaven, hell, or, according to the Catholic Church, purgatory. Earlier cultures—like Ancient Greece—that influenced European medieval thought also had different afterlife locations. However, according to the Ancient Greeks, Elysium, which was a place of perfect happiness in the afterlife, was only accessible to heroes and demigods; most humans would spend their afterlives in the Asphodel Meadows. In contrast, the Christian concept of an afterlife deemed “that every person [would] be judged after their deaths and [would] be rewarded or punished according to their deeds” (Aramesh, Kiarash. “History of Attitudes Toward Death: A Comparative Study Between Persian and Western Cultures.” Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, vol. 9, no. 20, 2016, p. 3). This reshaped Western attitudes toward death and created a cultural fear around dying—people began to worry that they could be thrown into the Christian hell.

In medieval times, death was everywhere—consequently, so was the fear of death. Famously, the Black Death ravaged Europe. Between 1347 and 1351, various European countries lost between 30% and 60% of their populations (Wade, Lizzie. “From Black Death to Fatal Flu, Past Pandemics Show Why People on the Margins Suffer Most.” Science, 14 May 2020). Other medieval epidemics included leprosy, smallpox, and tuberculosis. Environmental factors, social inequities, warfare, and famine also led to several deaths in the period. Due to the constant threat of death, the subject permeated arts and culture. Momento mori, Latin for “remember you must die,” is a popular trope in medieval art and literature.

With the growth of empirical science, the number of human deaths gradually reduced. There was a large scientific boom in the 17th century, at the beginning of the so-called “Scientific Revolution.” Francis Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum popularized a method of reasoning resembling a rudimentary scientific method, which was built upon by Isaac Newton. These models stressed the role of observation and reasoning in scientific pursuit. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, engaged in “painstaking empirical work” and “meticulous dissections” of corpses to move away from “ancient notions of bodily functions” and toward something resembling modern Western scientific understandings of the human body (Jones, Roger. “Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist.” The British Journal of General Practice, vol. 62, no. 599, 2012, p. 319). In the 16th century, operating theaters opened for public entertainment, so patrons could watch anatomists like Andreas Vesalius dissect human corpses.

Eventually, growing knowledge of empirical science led to an awareness that “spectators brought with them germs and put patients at risk of deadly post-surgical infection” (Enfield, Lizzie. “The Original Drama of Operating Theatres.” The Wellcome Collection, 25 Jan. 2022). As the medical field professionalized, it focused on meticulousness and sterility, and patients began to be treated in hospitals, away from their homes. In From Here to Eternity, Doughty says that after the 19th century, it began to seem strange for a family to care for and bury their own dead. In contemporary times, most people die away from home in hospitals. The dead are then almost immediately shuttled off into the machinations of the funeral industry; they are either cremated or embalmed and buried, with minimal interaction with loved ones.

Gradually, people in Westernized cultures became distanced from the physicality of death; however, their millennia-old fear of death has remained. Doughty seeks to remedy this through her book: She hopes that by closing this distance, people might begin to address the fear. Doughty is a key player in the death positivity movement, which believes that people should discuss death, respect people’s postmortem autonomy, view death openly, de-stigmatize the dead body, and engage in environmentally conscious death practices. In 2011, she founded an organization called The Order of the Good Death, which advocates and popularizes positive attitudes toward death.