I’ve been in the funeral profession my entire professional career, and my family has deep roots in the profession too. My great-great-great grandfather was a cabinet maker, or “tradesman undertaker” in rural Milford, Delaware prior to the Civil War. In addition to being a funeral director and embalmer, I’m a certified post-mortem reconstructionist and cremationist, and the president of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association. I’ve written five books on the subject of the funeral profession and am an associate editor for Southern Calls, “The Journal of the Funeral Profession.”
Thomas Lynch does a masterful job in The Undertaking offering a behind-the-scenes look at the funeral profession. Using beautiful, lyrical prose to present a topic (i.e., death) that is often ugly and hard to stomach, and rears its head at the most inopportune times, Lynch offers an unflinching look at what he calls the dismal trade. His deep connection with death and dying translates to the reader not only feeling connected with the subject matter, but empowering the reader to connect with the next death event in their life. Take it from me, someone in the profession, this book is as authentic as they come. A must-read.
"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director.
In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the…
You might recognize Caleb Wilde from his prolific social media presence. And while Wilde’s funeral home is only about an hour from mine, that has nothing to do with the recommendation. What appealed to me about Confessions is Wilde’s naked honesty about the pervasiveness of death that many of us who work in the profession feel. Confessions is introspective, and at times funny, but my main takeaway is Wilde’s attempt to foster a more death-positive attitude with his text. Sure death is sad, and at times tragic, but there are life lessons to be learned and it doesn’t have to be a taboo subject in our culture.
"I tremble to say there's good in death, because I've looked in the eyes of the grieving mother and I've seen the heartbreak of the stricken widow, but I've also seen something more in death, something good. Death's hands aren't all bony and cold."-from Confessions of a Funeral Director
We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and-when it can be avoided no longer-letting the professionals take over.
Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence…
Curiosity is certain she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. Little does she know . . . they saw her first.
Emotionally abandoned by her mother and infatuated by a figurine of a fairy ballerina she discovers in an old toy shop, eight-year-old Curiosity Portland steals the figurine,…
I love history, and stumbled across this book while researching the history of battlefield recoveries. Soldier Dead is comprehensive without being tedious and Sledge organizes the material in “sections” (i.e., combat vs. non-combat recoveries) that work much better than a timeline approach, though he doesn’t skimp on the history. If you’re interested in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier theSoldier Dead offers, in my opinion, a slightly different look at the subject including the story of the eventual identification of the Vietnam unknown soldier (later identified as Michael Blassie). This book is a great mix of military history, forensics, and mortuary procedures.
What happens to members of the United States Armed Forces after they die? Why do soldiers endanger their lives to recover the remains of their comrades? Why does the military spend enormous resources and risk further fatalities to recover the bodies of the fallen, even decades after the cessation of hostilities? Soldier Dead is the first book to fully address the complicated physical, social, religious, economic, and political issues concerning the remains of men and women who die while serving their country. In doing so, Michael Sledge reveals the meanings of the war dead for families, soldiers, and the nation…
As I said before, I love history, and Puckle’s book gives the reader a great look into the why of our funeral customs. As in: why do we send funeral flowers? (To which Puckle offers the glib answer, “the half sovereign he paid for it save him from the mental exercise of composing a suitable letter of condolence” before offering a serious explanation). Sure, the book was published almost a century ago, but that has no bearing on the contents. It’s an evergreen book and a highly recommended read for serious funereal scholars or those considering a career in funeral service.
Puckle's "Funeral Customs" is one of the more in-depth looks at death ever penned. Created in the early 20th century, it casts a rational and skeptical glance at the superstitions of burial practices and cremation alike, and lists in some detail the customs of death over time and changes to them during the black death and then-modernity among other eras. Not just a European work, it delves into Hinduism as well as Egyptian and Zoroastrian practices from antiquity.
From the memento mori to funeral feasts, its pages are filled with interesting folklore, astonishing history, and more than a few bits…
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
During the course of my work week, I get a lot of people telling me they currently are interested in the funeral profession, or if they are of retirement age, they were interested in their younger days. Which begs the question: how do you get started in the profession? Society-girl Meyer simply went in and asked for a job at an East-side funeral home after planning her own father’s funeral. The book details how she helped plan some amazing send-offs for the Big Apple’s rich and famous, and I think is a great how-to for “rolling your sleeves up and giving something a try.” I read somewhere that the experience motivated her to attend mortuary school. Fun read.
Mortuary Confidentialdoes for the undertaker profession what Stiff did for cadavers—it manages to be as informative and heartwarming as it is irreverent and hilarious. This collection of real stories from morticians and funeral directors across America feeds mainstream readers' dark curiosity and sense of humor about "our world of death" with a behind-the-scenes glimpse into every conceivable facet of the people who touch it every day.
In this macabre and moving compilation, funeral directors across the country share their most embarrassing, jaw-dropping, irreverent, and deeply poignant stories about life at death's door. Discover what scares them and what moves them to tears. Learn about rookie mistakes and why death sometimes calls for duct tape.
Born the half-breed, bastard son of an orc chieftain, Wrank tries to survive life in OrcHome among ignorance and spite aimed at his human heritage even as he develops a Talent for folding shadow. When life is no longer viable among the clans, he escapes into the world of humans…
Noam Chomsky has been praised by the likes of Bono and Hugo Chávez and attacked by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Alan Dershowitz. Groundbreaking linguist and outspoken political dissenter—voted “most important public intellectual in the world today” in a 2005 magazine poll—Chomsky inspires fanatical devotion and fierce vituperation.
