From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  Her sister went to consult Diony the ñatita, asking for help finding the beloved feline. In a dream, Diony revealed that the cat was in the back of an abandoned car, with plants growing inside.

  “Up the hill behind where my sister lives, there is a hollowed-out car that has been there for fifteen years. And there’s the stupid cat, trapped in a hole in the back of the car!

  “This was a week ago,” Moira explained, “and to be safe, my sister also asked Diony to scare the cat, to make sure it wouldn’t run away again. Now it won’t even go beyond the border of the yard, like it’s being yanked back by a leash.”

  I wondered if Moira believed that the power of the skull had really found this cat. She thought for a moment. “It’s the faith people have when they ask. That’s what matters.”

  Moira thought longer and then added, grinning, “I can’t tell you if it was a coincidence or not. Either way, we found the cat!”

  Any answered prayer can be viewed as a coincidence or not. I wasn’t in La Paz to determine whether the ñatitas had true magical powers. I was more interested in women like Doña Ely and Doña Ana, and the hundreds of other people at the Fiesta, who were using their comfort with death to seize direct access to the divine from the hands of the male leaders of the Catholic Church. As Paul bluntly put it, the skulls are “technology for disadvantaged people.” No problem—whether love, family, or school—is too small for a ñatita, and no person is left behind.

  CALIFORNIA

  JOSHUA TREE

  Sometimes you visit corpses all around the world and realize that the corpses dearest to your heart are right in your own backyard. When I returned to Los Angeles, my funeral home awaited—along with my long-suffering funeral director, Amber, who facilitated cremations and comforted distraught families while I was off requesting help with mutual funds from a Bolivian skull.

  Undertaking LA had an un-embalmed, natural burial scheduled for Mrs. Shepard. Inspired by what I had seen on my travels, I returned to work with a new sense of purpose. In my mind, the grieving family would prepare the body with love, wrapping the dead woman in a handmade shroud lined with peacock feathers and palm fronds. We’d lead a procession to the grave at dawn, carrying candles and scattering flower petals, chanting as we went.

  This burial—well—wasn’t like that.

  By the time we got Mrs. Shepard into our body preparation room, she had been dead for six weeks, trapped in a plastic body bag under refrigeration at the L.A. coroner’s office. Amber and I stood on either side of her as we unzipped her bag. Mold had begun to grow under her eyes, and carried down her neck and onto her shoulders. Her stomach was collapsed, colored deep aquamarine (brought on by the decomposition of the red blood cells). The top layers of skin peeled free from her calves. The bag had been swamplike, bathing Mrs. Shepard in her own blood and bodily fluid.

  We released her from the plastic prison and washed her body down, soapy water sliding down the steel table and disappearing through a small hole near her feet. Amber washed her hair, originally white but now dyed brown with blood, doing her best to work around the patches of mold growing on her scalp. We labored in silence, something about the decayed state of the body making us less vocal than usual. After patting Mrs. Shepard dry, it was clear that she was not done leaking. If Undertaking LA were a typical mortuary, we’d have all types of tricks up our sleeves (Saran Wrap, diapers, chemical powders, even head-to-toe plastic body suits) to combat the aptly named “leakage.” But a natural cemetery won’t accept a body for burial that has been treated with any of those chemical leakage treatments.

  We moved Mrs. Shepard straight into her shroud, hoping to wrap her enough times that she wouldn’t ooze through. Amber had sewn the shroud herself from unbleached cotton fabric. The family had little money, and we were trying to bring down costs everywhere we could. The day before, I had received a text from Amber: a picture of a receipt from JoAnn’s Fabrics with the caption, “Guess who just saved the family 40% on their burial shroud with JoAnn’s points!” The finished product was charming, complete with ties and handles (though no peacock feathers or palm fronds).

  A SHROUDED MRS. SHEPARD was placed into the back of a van and driven two and a half hours east of Los Angeles, through the Inland Empire (a deceptive Tolkien-like name for what is essentially clusters of suburbs) and finally into the Mojave Desert. You know you’ve reached desert not from the change of landscape but from the casino billboards, advertising performances from a rotating cast of slightly less relevant celebrities. (This particular drive: Michael Bolton and Ludacris.) Then you are well and truly in the desert, among the Joshua trees, Yucca brevifolia, with their spiky arms reaching to the sky in whimsical, Seussian poses.

  Joshua Tree Memorial Park was not created to be a natural cemetery. They have done what many cemeteries (of sense) are doing, and dedicated a section of their land to offer natural burials. The distance to Joshua Tree is often prohibitive for a Los Angeles family. We Angelenos would prefer to keep our dead closer to home, but where? Forest Lawn Memorial Park, one of L.A.’s celebrity burial spots, insists on heavy vaults surrounding the caskets, and doesn’t offer natural burial. They do make exceptions for Jews and Muslims, both religions that require the natural burial of bodies. In these cases, they agree to poke holes in the concrete of the vault for symbolic dirt to trickle through.

  A natural section has recently opened at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. But to purchase a plot there you’ll pay a several-thousand-dollar “green” premium, even though a natural burial is easier to accomplish (if you need to go scream into a pillow in frustration, I’ll wait).

  Joshua Tree’s natural burial section opened in 2010. They set aside sixty burial plots, forty of which are now filled, in a plot of land surrounded by a low wooden fence. The natural burial section, tiny compared to the vast desert surrounding it, further highlights how ludicrous our modern policies on burial are. The world used to be our burial ground. We buried bodies on farms, ranches, and in local churchyards—anywhere we wanted, really. Some states still allow for burial on private property. But California is not one of them, and our corpses must be herded into small pens in the desert.

  One of the priests I met in Japan, Masuda jūshoku, had heard that the cremation rate in America was rising in part because of fears we might run out of land in which to bury people. He didn’t understand this motivation. “From my Japanese perspective, the U.S. is a big country. There is so much land everywhere, it would be very easy to build these big cemeteries and graves.”

  Some picture a “green” burial and need that directive to be literal: verdant rolling hills, dense forests, burial under a willow tree. Joshua Tree, with its stocky cholla pencil cacti, creosote bushes, and globemallows fighting their way through the sandy soil, can seem a harsh landscape, not a place of mystical regeneration.

  But the desert has always nurtured the rebels, the wild-hearted. Alt-country musician Gram Parsons was only twenty-six when he overdosed on a combo of heroin, morphine, and alcohol in his hotel room in Joshua Tree. His (allegedly) wicked stepfather wanted Parsons’s body flown back to New Orleans so he could take control of his estate, in the erroneous belief that to the body-holder go the spoils.

  Parsons’s good friend Phil Kaufman had other plans. The two men had made a pact that if one of them died, “the survivor would take the other guy’s body out to Joshua Tree, have a few drinks and burn it.”

  Somehow, through charm and brazen drunkenness, Kaufman and an accomplice managed to track down Parsons’s casket at Los Angeles International Airport and prevent it from being loaded onto the plane to New Orleans by convincing an airline employee that the Parsons family had changed their minds. The duo even got a police officer and an airline employee to help them transfer Parsons’s body into a makeshift hearse (no license plate, broken windows, filled with liquor). Off they drove, Parsons rattling in the back.

  When they reached Cap Rock, a natural boulder formation in Joshua Tree National Park, they
removed the casket, doused Parsons’s body with fuel, and set it on fire, sending a colossal fireball shooting into the night sky.

  The two men fled. A coating of fuel is not enough to fully cremate a body, and Parsons was recovered as a semi-charred corpse. For all their antics, Kaufman and his accomplice were charged only with misdemeanor theft for stealing the casket (not the body, mind you). What was left of Parsons’s body was sent to New Orleans, where it was buried. His stepfather never got the money.

  Mrs. Shepard, for her part, did not have a “throw back a few drinks and burn it” advance directive for her mortal remains. She had, however, been a liberal activist and environmental advocate her whole life, and her family felt that embalming and a metal casket would be against everything she stood for.

  Tony, a Joshua Tree native covered in tattoos, had dug the four-foot grave by hand early in the morning, before the unforgiving sun rose. A pile of sandy, decomposed granite soil was piled next to the grave, and four plain wooden boards spanned the hole.

  We hand-carried Mrs. Shepard to the site and laid her shrouded corpse on the boards, where it hovered above the grave below. In her shroud, you could see the outline of her body. It was Grade A humility, just as burial would have been when this land was still wild—the only elements being a shovel, some wood, a shroud, and a dead man or woman. Three cemetery employees pulled Mrs. Shepard a few inches off the boards with long straps, as I knelt down and slid the boards out from beneath her. Then they lowered her while Tony the gravedigger hopped in beside her to see her safely to the dirt below.

  After a moment of silence, the three men, working with shovels and rakes, brought the soil down, on top of Mrs. Shepard. Halfway through the process they placed a heavy layer of stone, to deter interested coyotes (this step appears to be mostly superstitious, as there is no evidence that natural cemeteries attract the notice of scavenger animals). Filling the grave took all of ten minutes. In other cemeteries, the burial process disturbs the grass, leaving the stark, obvious outline of a grave amid the symmetrical green landscape. When Tony and his crew had finished you couldn’t tell where the grave was. Mrs. Shepard had disappeared into the endless desert.

  THAT IS WHAT I want in death: to disappear. If I’m lucky, I will disappear, swallowed by the ground like Mrs. Shepard. But that wouldn’t be my first choice.

  In two minutes they re-appeared with the empty bier and white cloth; and scarcely had they closed the door when a dozen vultures swooped down upon the body, and were rapidly followed by others. In five minutes more we saw the satiated birds fly back and lazily settle down again upon the parapet. They had left nothing behind but a skeleton.

  In 1876, The Times of London described that scene at a dakhma, known in the West by its ominous translation, tower of silence. That day, swarms of vultures devoured a human body down to its skeleton in minutes. This consumption is exactly what the Parsis (descendants of the Iranian followers of Zoroastrianism) desire for their corpses. The religion regards the elements—earth, fire, water—as sacred, not to be defiled by an unclean dead body. Cremation and burial are off-limits as disposal options.

  The Parsis built their first towers of silence in the late thirteenth century. Today there are three towers that sit high on a hill in an exclusive, wealthy neighborhood in Mumbai. A circular brick amphitheater with an open ceiling, a tower of silence features concentric circles on which are placed the eight hundred dead bodies brought to the towers every year. The outer circle is for men, the middle circle for women, the innermost circle for children. In the center, the bones (post-vulture) are collected, to slowly decompose into the soil.

  A Parsi funeral is an elaborate ritual. The body is covered in cow’s urine and washed by the family and attendants from the tower. There are recitations, a sacred burning fire, continuous vigils, and prayers throughout the night. Only then is the body brought into the tower.

  This ancient ritual has hit a roadblock in recent years. There was a time when India had a vulture population of 400 million. In 1876, the swift devouring of the body was the norm. “Parsis speak of a time when vultures would be waiting for bodies at the towers of silence,” explained Harvard lecturer on Zoroastrianism Yuhan Vevaina. “Today, there are none.”

  It is hard to cremate without fire. It is even harder to dispose of a body via vulture without vultures. The vulture population has dropped 99 percent. In the early 1990s, India allowed the use of diclofenac (a mild painkiller similar to ibuprofen) for ailing cattle. Hoof and udder pain were eased, but when the animal perished and the faithful vultures soared down for the meal, the diclofenac caused their kidneys to fail. It seems unfair that such iron-stomached creatures, used to devouring rotting carrion in the hot sun, could be felled by something akin to Advil.

  Without the vultures, the bodies in the towers of silence lie waiting for the sky-dancers who will never show. The neighbors can smell them. Dhan Baria’s mother was placed in the tower when she died in 2005. One of the tower attendants told Baria that the bodies lie exposed and half rotten, with not a vulture in sight. She hired a photographer to sneak in, and the resulting photographs (showing bodies indeed lying exposed and half rotten) caused a scandal in the Parsi community.

  The tower attendants tried to get around the lack of vultures. They set up mirrors to concentrate solar energy on a group of corpses, like a nine-year-old zapping bugs with a magnifying glass. But the solar blasting doesn’t work during the cloudy monsoon season. They tried pouring dissolving chemicals straight into the bodies, but that made an unpleasant mess. Family members like Dhan Baria ask why Parsis cannot shift and adapt their traditions, try burial or cremation so that bodies like her mother’s are not left intact on cold stone. But the priests are obstinate. Vultures or no, there will be no change to the towers of silence.

  This is the ultimate irony. There are people in the United States enamored with the thought of giving their bodies to animals at the end of their lives—and we have more than enough vultures and other scavenger animals to pull it off. But the government, religious leaders, etc., would never allow such a vile spectacle on American soil. No, our leaders tell us: cremation and burial, those are your options.

  Dhan Baria, and a growing number of Parsis disturbed at the treatment of their dead, would like to explore cremation or burial. No, their leaders tell them: vultures, that is your option.

  SINCE I FIRST discovered sky burial I have known what I wanted for my mortal remains. In my view burial by animals is the safest, cleanest, and most humane way of disposing of corpses, and offers a new ritual that might bring us closer to the realities of death and our true place on this planet.

  In the mountains of Tibet, where wood for cremation is scarce and the ground too rocky and frozen for burial, they have practiced celestial burial for thousands of years.

  A dead man is wrapped in cloth in the fetal position, the position he was born from. Buddhist lamas chant over the body before it is handed over to the rogyapa, the body breaker. The rogyapa unwraps the body and slices into the flesh, sawing away the skin and strips of muscle and tendon. He sharpens his machete on nearby rocks. In his white apron, he resembles a butcher, the corpse appearing more animal than human.

  Of all the death professionals in the world, rogyapa is the job I do not envy. A rogyapa interviewed by the BBC said, “I have performed many sky burials. But I still need some whiskey to do it.”

  Nearby, the vultures have already begun to gather. They are Himalayan griffon vultures, bigger than you’d imagine, with nine-foot wingspans. The vultures tighten ranks, emitting guttural screeches as men hold them back with long rods. They huddle in groupings so tight that they become a giant ball of feathers.

  The rogyapa pounds the defleshed bones with a mallet, crushing them together with tsama, barley flour mixed with yak butter or milk. The rogyapa may strategically lay the bones and cartilage out first, and hold back the best pieces of flesh. He doesn’t want the vultures to have their fill of the best cuts of meat and lose inter
est, flying off before the entirety of the body is consumed.

  The signal is given, the rods are retracted, and the vultures descend with violence. They shriek like beasts as they consume the carrion, but they are, at the same time, glorious sky-dancers, soaring upward and taking the body for its burial in the sky. It is a virtuous gift to give your body this way—returning the body back to nature, where it can be of use.

  The citizens of the developed world are hopelessly drawn to this visceral, bloody disposition. Tibet struggles with what this increased thanotourism (thano being the Greek prefix for “death”) means for their rituals. In 2005 the government issued a rule that banned sightseeing, photography, and video recording at the sky burial sites. But tour guides have still flooded the area, bringing four-wheel-drive vehicles full of tourists from eastern China. Even though the dead person’s family is not present for the vulture portion of the ritual, two dozen Chinese tourists will be, iPhones poised at the ready. They aim to capture death without the tidy edges, like the boxed urns of cremated remains given to them back home.

  There is a story of a Western tourist trying to get around the no-photography rule by hiding behind a rock and using a long-range telephoto lens, not realizing that his presence scared off the vultures who usually waited on that ridge. After being frightened off, they didn’t show up to consume the corpse, which was considered a bad omen for the ritual.

  I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?

  Tibet is the one place I wanted to go on my travels, but could not bring myself to do it. It is difficult to accept that, barring true societal change, I will never have this option for my corpse. What’s more, I may never even witness this ritual in my lifetime. If I were the Westerner with the telephoto lens who scared off the vultures, I’d have to leave myself out for the birds as well.