From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  What remains consistent is that the pyre experience, for those present, is transformative. The youngest person they have cremated was Travis, just twenty-two years old, who died in a car crash. According to the police report, he and his friends were drunk and high, speeding too fast down a dark rural road. The car flipped, and Travis was ejected and declared dead at the scene. All of the young people from Crestone and the surrounding towns came to take part in his cremation. As Travis’s body was laid on the pyre, his mother pulled down his shroud to kiss his forehead. Travis’s father grabbed the driver by his face and, in front of the community, said, “Look at me, I forgive you.” Then the pyre was lit.

  About an hour into Laura’s cremation, the pall of grief had lifted from the circle.

  The last speaker came forward to address the crowd in a way that would have been inappropriate just ninety minutes earlier. “Everything you all said about how Laura was a wonderful person, that’s true. But in my mind, she’ll always be one of the wild crones. A partier. I’d like to give her a howl.”

  “Oooooooooooooooooooooo,” she bellowed, with the crowd joining in around her. Even I, who had just recently been too timid to drop my juniper bough on the pyre, let out a tentative howl.

  BY 9:30 THAT MORNING, only Stephanie and I (and what remained of Laura) were left at the pyre, sitting on a carved wooden bench. Just three logs remained among the embers, in their gentle, end-stage burn. An infrared gun from the fire department measured these embers at over 1,250 degrees.

  Stephanie is often the first to arrive and the last to leave the cremation site. “I like the silence,” she said.

  Stephanie stayed still for a few minutes, and then suddenly she was on her feet again. She picked up a piece of metal grating and examined it. “This is Paul’s new spark protector design. It’s supposed to keep the ashes contained on a windy night. Chunks of wood can’t get out, but what about sparks from the embers?”

  Within a couple of minutes, Stephanie was on the phone with the fire department to arrange spark protector tests and an inspection. Her boundless energy didn’t allow her to remain idle for long. I wondered how she had been able to summon the years of patience required to make this pyre a reality. “It was exhausting, waiting for the community to accept us. It was so hard for me to not drag people in.”

  The longer I spent in Crestone, the more it seemed like a morbid Mayberry. The nonprofit hosts get-togethers for locals to make sure their end-of-life paperwork is in order. People stop Stephanie in the post office to say, “I’m glad you’re here, I’m coming to the next meeting to fill out my advance directive.” People in Crestone just know what to do when someone dies. The volunteers who go into homes to prepare the bodies told me that families have started to tell them, “Oh, thanks for coming but it’s okay, we can take it from here.”

  Even the corpses have a small-town feel. One woman decided she wanted to be buried in Crestone’s natural burial ground (the first in the state). When she died, her daughters drove her body down from Denver in the back of a truck in a Rubbermaid container filled with ice.

  “We didn’t have anywhere to put the woman until burial,” Stephanie said, “so we decided to keep her overnight in the town museum.”

  The daughters liked that idea. “Mom was such a history buff, she would have been into that.”

  The natural burial ground is open to anyone, but the pyre is restricted to those living in the community. The nonprofit receives calls from all over the country, from Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and general pyre enthusiasts who want their bodies sent to Crestone after they die. As a small volunteer operation, they just don’t have the ability or manpower to handle out-of-town corpses (even if they did, the local commissioner only allows them to serve the surrounding county). Having to decline is difficult for both sides.

  The only time they made an exception was when a hiker from Georgia, missing for nine months and the subject of a massive search, was found. Well, a portion of him was found—his spine, his hip, and a leg. They agreed to do the cremation, deciding that he had “established his residency postmortem.”

  The pyre funeral is so appealing that some people have even bought land in Crestone just to qualify for an open-air cremation. A forty-two-year-old woman dying of cervical cancer obtained a small plot of land, and when she died her twelve-year-old daughter helped prepare her body for the pyre.

  This existential longing for the pyre’s fiery embrace is common worldwide. In India, family members transport dead bodies to a row of cremation pyres along the banks of the Ganges River. When a father dies, his pyre will be lit by his eldest son. As the flames grow hotter, his flesh bubbles and burns away. At just the right time, a wooden staff is brought forth and used to crack open the dead man’s skull. At that moment, it is believed the man’s soul is released.

  A son, describing the cremations of his parents, wrote that “before [breaking the skull], you shiver—for this person was alive just a few hours back—but once you hit the skull, you know what burns in front of you is after all just a body. All attachments are gone.” The soul is set free, as an Indian spiritual song intones over a loudspeaker: “Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning firewood.”

  Pittu Laugani, a Hindu living in the West, explains the pain of witnessing a commercial, industrialized cremation. Instead of placing the body onto the wood of the pyre, mourners watch the coffin “slide off on an electrically operated carousel and drop into a concealed hole.” Locked away in the steel and brick-lined chamber, when the skull cracks open, the man’s soul will be imprisoned in the machine, forced to mingle with the thousands of other souls the machine has trapped. It will be an akal mrtya, a bad death. For the family, the whole process “can be an unnerving and even grotesque experience.”

  Davender Ghai, a Hindu activist, has fought Newcastle City Council in England for years to legalize pyres like the one in Crestone. Ghai won the court battle, and open-air pyres may soon be a reality in the U.K. He explained that “being bundled into a box and incinerated in a furnace is not my idea of dignity, much less the performance of an ancient sacrament.”

  It would be simple to allow open-air pyres in any community that wanted them. Yet government cemetery and funeral boards put up enormous resistance to the idea. Like the curmudgeonly neighbors in Crestone, they argue that outdoor pyres would prove too hard to control, and that they would impact air quality and the environment in unknown ways. Crestone has proven that open-air pyres can be inspected for safety compliance just like any industrial crematory. Environmental agencies can run tests to determine the environmental impact, and regulate accordingly. So why do these local governments continue to resist?

  The answer is as bleak as it is obvious: money. The average American funeral costs $8,000 to $10,000—not including the burial plot and cemetery costs. A Crestone End of Life funeral costs $500, technically a donation “to cover wood, fire department presence, stretcher, and land use.” To put this cost in perspective, that’s roughly 5 percent of the price of a traditional American funeral. If you don’t have the money but are a member of the community, the nonprofit will even forgo its fee. Ghai promises a similar model for pyre cremations in the U.K. He plans to charge £900, but says “we will do this as a charity, for free. They only need to find the land.”

  In the twenty-first century, removing money and profit from death is almost unheard of, mostly because it is so difficult to accomplish. After Hurricane Katrina, a group of Benedictine monks in southern Louisiana began selling low-cost, handmade cypress caskets. The state’s Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors drummed up a cease-and-desist order, claiming that only funeral homes licensed by their board could sell “funeral merchandise.” Eventually a federal judge sided with the monks, saying it was clear there was no public health risk from the sale of the caskets, and the motivation of the board was solely economic protectionism.

  Legally and logistically, circumventing the funeral industry and
its regulations to create a nonprofit death service for a community is nearly impossible. In this landscape, where funeral boards are coming after monks—monks!—it is a challenge to convey how truly astounding the accomplishments at Crestone are.

  THE MORNING AFTER the funeral in Crestone, I entered the cremation circle and was greeted by two adorable dogs bounding around the pyre. McGregor, Stephanie’s brother and volunteer ash gatherer, had arrived early that morning to sift through Laura’s remains, four and a half gallons of bone and cinders. From the ash pile he pulled out the largest bone fragments—chunks of femur, rib, and skull—which some families like to take home and keep as relics.

  There were significantly more ashes in this pile than after a typical commercial cremation, which leaves only as much remains as can fit in a Folgers coffee can. In California, we are required to grind the bones in a silver machine called a Cremulator until they are “unrecognizable bone fragments.” The state frowns on distributing the larger, recognizable bones to the family.

  Several of Laura’s friends wanted a portion of the ashes, and any excess would be scattered in the hills around the pyre or further into the mountains. “She would have loved that,” Jason said. “She’s everywhere now.”

  I asked Jason if anything had changed for him since the cremation yesterday. “My mom brought me up to see the pyre the last time I visited. I was confused, I thought that I was going to have to sit on that bench there and cremate my mom alone, all by myself. It seemed so morbid. Three days ago I was horrified at what I was coming to Crestone to do. But Mom had told me, ‘This is what I’ve chosen for my body, you can come or not.’ ”

  When Jason arrived for his mother’s wake in her home, things began to shift. By the time of the cremation, he had realized that he had a whole community by his side. There were talks and songs, and he allowed himself to be supported by everyone who loved his mother. “That was moving to me. It changed things.”

  Crouched down over the ashes, McGregor explained to Laura’s son Jason what they were looking at. He demonstrated how brittle the bones were after being subjected to the heat, crumbling a small fragment into ash with his hand.

  “What’s this?” Jason asked, pulling out a small piece of metal from the pile. It was the iridescent face of a Swatch watch that Laura had been wearing when she was brought to the pyre. Warped into rainbow colors by the heat of the fire, it was stopped forever at 7:16 a.m.—the moment the flames took hold.

  ___________

  * There is one other pyre, a private pyre, at the Shambala Mountain Center, a Buddhist retreat in northern Colorado.

  INDONESIA

  SOUTH SULAWESI

  There is a remote region in Indonesia where people are present with their dead at a length we can’t even begin to conceive—the holy grail of corpse interaction. For years I thought visiting this place was beyond my reach. But I had forgotten one crucial thing: I knew Dr. Paul Koudounaris.

  One day in the spring, I sat in the home of Dr. Paul, scholar of the macabre and longtime Los Angeles cult treasure. By sat, I mean I perched directly on the hardwood floor. Paul’s home in Los Angeles, which he calls the “Moroccan pirate castle,” has no furniture. There are, however, clusters of taxidermied animals, Renaissance paintings, and Middle Eastern lanterns suspended from the ceiling.

  “I’m going to Tana Toraja for the ma’nene’ in August,” he said, with a nonchalance only Paul can pull off. For the last twelve years he has traveled all over the world photographing everything from burial caves in Rwanda, to Czech churches decorated in human bone, to mummified monks in Thailand covered head to toe in gold leaf. This is a guy who, in order to transport himself to rural Bolivia, caught a ride on a World War II paratrooper plane that hauled frozen meat. The only other passengers were a farmer, his pig, his sheep, and his dog. When the plane hit turbulence, the animals scattered. As Paul and the farmer lunged to capture them, the copilot turned and screamed, “Stop shaking the plane, you’re going to make us crash!’ ” Paul is the type of person who can handle a trip to Toraja.

  Then, he invited me to tag along. “But to warn you, the trip itself is a pain the ass.”

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER we touched down in Jakarta, the largest city in Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands and boasts the fourth largest population in the world (behind China, India, and the United States).

  To catch our next flight we shuffled through passport control.

  “Where are you traveling to in Indonesia?” asked the pleasant young woman at the desk.

  “Tana Toraja.”

  An impish grin crossed her face. “You are going to see the dead bodies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh—really?” She seemed taken aback, as if her initial question was just to make polite conversation. “The dead bodies, do you know, are they walking by themselves?”

  “No, the family holds them up. They aren’t like zombies,” Paul replied.

  “I’m afraid of them!” She turned to share a nervous laugh with her coworker in the next booth as she stamped us through.

  When we finally arrived in Makassar, the capital of the island of South Sulawesi, I had been awake for thirty-nine hours. As we exited the airport into the heavy air, Paul was swarmed like a celebrity. I forgot to mention that Paul in person looks just as outlandish as his house—a claim I lay with the utmost aesthetic respect. He has thick dreadlocks, a beaded wizard’s beard, and tattoos. He traveled in a purple velvet frock coat and a top hat with an ermine skull attached to the brim. No one knows his age. He was once described by a mutual friend of ours as “an eighteenth-century highwayman reimagined by Tim Burton.” Paul refers to himself as “a cross between Prince and Vlad the Impaler.”

  Men ceased their frantic taxi hawking in order to get a closer look at Paul’s tattoos and his skull hat. Paul’s visual strangeness gets him through locked doors and into secret monasteries and bone caves that no one else would have access to. People are too confounded to refuse him.

  There was no time for a nap at a hotel. We found our driver and were whisked away on our eight-hour drive north. Green rice fields stretched out on either side of the road and water buffalo plopped languidly into baths of mud.

  As we navigated the southern lowlands, we heard the Muslim call to prayer pumped through the speakers of roadside mosques. The majority of Indonesians are Muslim, but in the remote mountains of Tana Toraja, the people followed an animistic religion called Aluk to Dolo (“the way of the ancestors”) until the Dutch introduced Christianity in the early 1900s.

  We hit the mountains not long after. Our driver barreled the SUV up winding two-lane roads, dodging and swerving around mopeds and trucks in a never-ending game of automobile chicken. Not speaking his language, I finally had to act out the universal symbol for “Seriously, bro, I’m going to vomit.”

  By the time we arrived in Toraja, I was starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep. But Paul, who had enjoyed multiple naps on the plane, wanted to photograph a series of nearby burial caves before dark.

  There was no one at the Londa burial caves when we pulled up. Up against the cliff, set on rickety scaffolding, were stacks of coffins made of uru wood, shaped like boats, buffalos, and pigs. Radiocarbon dating shows that coffins like these have been used in Toraja since 800 BC. Skulls peeked out of cracks in the wood like nosy neighbors, watching our arrival. As the wood of the coffins decomposes, the bones they contain will go rolling and spilling down the side of the cliff.

  Even more surreal, the coffins sat next to rows and rows of tau tau, the Torajans’ realistic wooden effigies of the dead, seated like an important village council. They represent the souls of the anonymous bones scattered in the cave. The older tau tau are crudely carved, with oversized white eyes and straggled wigs. More modern tau tau are distressing in their realism, with finely lined faces, convincing warts, and veined skin. They wear eyeglasses, clothes, and jewelry, and look ready to pry themselves up by their canes and welcome us in.
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br />   Inside the darkened cave, skulls lined the crevices and natural ledges in the stone. Some were artfully arranged in pyramid-shaped stacks and rows, while some were left upside down. Some were bleached white, and others were vivid green, covered in moss. Some had cigarettes posed jauntily in their mouths. A lower jawbone (missing the rest of its skull) smoked two cigarettes at once.

  Paul motioned me to follow him through a small hole, to what I imagined was another chamber of the cave. Crouching and squinting into the darkness, I saw that this move would require crawling on my stomach through a tunnel.

  “Yeah, that’s okay, I’ll stay here.”

  Paul, who sometimes breaks into abandoned copper and pumice mines in the Los Angeles area (because, of course he does), crawled away. The tails of his velvet frock coat disappeared into the hole.

  My cellphone, my only source of light, was at 2 percent battery life, so I powered it down and sat in the dark among the skulls. Minutes went by, maybe five, maybe twenty, when a lantern broke through the darkness. It was a family: a mother and several teenagers, Indonesian tourists from Jakarta. From their perspective, I must have looked like a possum trapped by car headlights against a garage wall.

  In gracious, elevated English, a young man positioned himself at my elbow and said, “Excuse me, miss. If you will direct your attention to the camera, we will create an Instagram.”

  Flashes started going off, sending my image to #LondaCaves. Strange as this felt in the moment, I could see why the discovery of a six-foot-tall white girl in a polka-dot dress in the corner of a cave filled with skulls would be an Instagrammable moment. They took several pictures with me in different poses before moving on.