Hello, I'm Lale Aricopu, and welcome to Women Who Travel, a podcast for anyone who is curious about the world and excited to explore places both near and far from home.

We'll have a lot of varied shows in store for you as we move through 2023.

Different regions, stories, moods, and insights from guests who are obsessed with unique approaches to travel.

The start of a new year is often a time of reflection, and after the last few challenging

pandemic ones, it might also mean reflecting on feelings of loss or grief. For some time,

I've wanted to talk to the creator of a podcast called The Order of the Good Death.

She's Caitlin Dodey, a mortician, the owner of a funeral home in L.A.

and an advocate for funeral reform.

She's toured the world exploring death rituals.

It's a quest to discover where death has the most dignity and what we can learn from it.

Thank you. has the most dignity and what we can learn from it. In her 2017 book from here to eternity, Caitlin travels to Barcelona, Mexico, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Japan.

But why did she pick those places?

I think primarily it was where did I have a good opportunity and where was I invited?

Because with death, you have to be so careful about where you insert yourself, obviously.

You know, it's absolutely not acceptable for me to just show up at some random funeral in some far-flung country and be like,

hello, everyone.

I'm here to just take down the details of your mother's dead body and all the ways that you're grieving.

How are you feeling?

You know, that would be terrible. That's like absolutely the least appropriate place to insert yourself.

So in choosing the places that I did, I always tried to be really careful. Do I have a connection?

Do I know a funeral worker or a funeral director? Do I know a family member? Do I have someone who is a close friend who

has been to this country many times before and has connections there so I can have these

...