Confessions of a Funeral Director
Caleb Wilde
“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.”
What I thought I was going to get out of this book was a series of interesting, respectful stories about funerals Wilde had directed. Instead I encountered a memoir that aimed to dispel a negative ‘death narrative’ and restore a knowledge of death as inevitable, but not bad. While there are some stories, this book is more about how Wilde has changed his attitude towards God and religion since being a child afraid of hell through to being an adult who sometimes suffers from compassion fatigue.
I picked this up on a whim from the library, looking for something lighthearted to read (think Confessions of a Shopaholic etc). I read it over two days, and didn’t feel very strongly about it one way or another. I wouldn’t recommend it even though it wasn’t bad per se.
