Memoirs of a Mortician

Memoirs of a Mortician PDF Author: Gary L Sage Sr.
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1641382716
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Gary L. Sage Sr. is a former rodeo cowboy, an air force vet turned mortician, and your tour guide on a journey through a landscape of strange and improbable stories-all of them entertaining, some of them grim, and some of them outright silly, originating in the very necessary field of caring for those who have departed this earth. You will learn that "natural causes" aren't necessarily natural, especially when the Mafia is involved. You'll learn that quick-draw contests using "unloaded" guns are probably best avoided. You'll learn that during mining booms on the western frontier, a popular cause-of-death category was "wore out." Sage is an engaging teller of his unique tales, which stretch across many decades and a number of western-states locations, both urban and remote.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory PDF Author: Caitlin Doughty
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245950
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
"Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)—a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession. Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Mortician Diaries

Mortician Diaries PDF Author: June Knights Nadle
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1577318579
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
After 50 years in the funeral business, 80-year-old grandmother-undertaker June Knights Nadle has seen it all — at least all of what goes on before, during, and after life’s ultimate challenge. In Mortician Diaries, she combines equal doses of charm, humanity, humor, and reality to tell it like it is on this taboo subject. A kind of Prairie Home Companion set in a mortuary, the book features memorable stories of regret — “I wish I had kissed him on the morning he had the accident” — and renewal, as the lesson of facing life’s last great event is learned, or not. Some of the accounts here are funny, some sad. Some are haunting in their strangeness as they reveal the many ways in which people cope. Along the way, the reader is drawn into Nadle’s own life story as an unconventional woman who devoted herself to the dead and to those they left behind.

Silent Siren

Silent Siren PDF Author: Matthew Franklin Sias
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910780541
Category : Emergency medical technicians
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
A twenty-three-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death care business and found a complementarity between seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

Confessions of a Funeral Director

Confessions of a Funeral Director PDF Author: Caleb Wilde
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062465260
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
“Wise, vulnerable, and surprisingly relatable . . . funny in all the right places and enormously helpful throughout. It will change how you think about death.” —Rachel Held Evans, New York Times–bestselling author of Searching for Sunday 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 and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference—in other people’s lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed the family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial; the nursing home that honored a woman’s life by standing in procession as her body was taken away; the funeral that united a conflicted community. Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde’s candid memoir offers an intimate look into the business of death and a new perspective on living and dying. “Open[s] up conversations about life’s ultimate concerns.” —The Washington Post “As a look behind the closed doors of the death industry, as well as a candid exploration of Wilde’s own faith journey, this book is fascinating and compelling.” —National Catholic Reporter “[A] stunner of a debut.” —Rachel Held Evans, author of Inspired

Nine Years Under

Nine Years Under PDF Author: Sheri Booker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1592407625
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
A dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming of age in a black funeral home in Baltimore Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business. As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives.

Mortuary Confidential

Mortuary Confidential PDF Author: Kenneth McKenzie
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 0806531797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From rookie mistakes and runaway corpses to screaming dead men and unusual requests, a collection of stories by funeral directors.

Memoirs of a Mortician

Memoirs of a Mortician PDF Author: Gary L Sage Sr.
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1641382716
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Get Book Here

Book Description
Gary L. Sage Sr. is a former rodeo cowboy, an air force vet turned mortician, and your tour guide on a journey through a landscape of strange and improbable stories-all of them entertaining, some of them grim, and some of them outright silly, originating in the very necessary field of caring for those who have departed this earth. You will learn that "natural causes" aren't necessarily natural, especially when the Mafia is involved. You'll learn that quick-draw contests using "unloaded" guns are probably best avoided. You'll learn that during mining booms on the western frontier, a popular cause-of-death category was "wore out." Sage is an engaging teller of his unique tales, which stretch across many decades and a number of western-states locations, both urban and remote.

Over Our Dead Bodies:

Over Our Dead Bodies: PDF Author: Kenneth McKenzie
Publisher: Citadel
ISBN: 0806536659
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Discover a more lighthearted side of the funeral industry in this collection of real-life stories from the authors of Mortuary Confidential. Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry . . . I Had Lost The Hearse! Funerals and the all the things that accompany them are traditionally somber, contemplative events in which the bereaved look to their undertaker to guide them through that most difficult of times. Of course, sometimes tradition gets thrown under the bus. From a dysfunctional family who turn their mother’s wake into a full-blown riot, to funeral crashers looking for free meals, to a horse-drawn hearse taking the dearly departed for the ride of their afterlife, these accounts from actual undertakers will have you laughing, thinking, and gasping in disbelief. A literal graveyard of wild coincidences, slapstick humor, and touching moments, Over Our Dead Bodies explores the lighter side of the dead, the living, and the lone undertaker who must make it all go as planned—even if it doesn’t. Praise for Mortuary Confidential “Outrageous funeral stories, dipped in beauty and morbid humor.” —Caleb Wilde, author of Confessions of a Funeral Director “Curious, wildly honest stories that need to be told, but just not at the dinner table.” —Dana Kollmann, author of Never Suck a Dead Man’s Hand “As unpredictable and lively as a bunch of drunks at a New Orleans funeral.” —Joe R. Lansdale, author of Moon Lake “Sick, funny, and brilliant! I love this book.” —Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of They Bite! And Rot & Ruin “These true mortuary tales are poignant—and suddenly, gaspi

Driving with Dead People

Driving with Dead People PDF Author: Monica Holloway
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847396909
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
At nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. Small wonder, with a father who drives his Ford pick up with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies feature more footage of disasters than of his children. In between her father's bouts of violence and abuse, Monica becomes fast friends with Julie Kilner, whose father is the town mortician. She and Julie preferred the casket showroom to the parks and grassy backyards in her hometown of Elk Grove, Ohio, where they would take turns lying in their favourite coffins. In time, Monica and Julie get a job driving the company hearse to pick up bodies from the airport, yet even Monica's growing independence can't protect her from her parents' irresponsibility, and from the feeling that she simply does not deserve to be safe. Little does she know, as she finally strikes out on her own, that her parents' biggest betrayal has yet to be revealed...

The Undertaker

The Undertaker PDF Author: Laura Del Gaudio
Publisher: Green Place Books
ISBN: 9781950584116
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Undertaker is Laura Del Gaudio's lively story of learning the family business from under the kitchen table as a child. It is how she learned empathy in the face of unspeakable traumas while understanding the impact of trauma herself. Licensed at the age of 21, she became the 3rd generation in the family business which was located at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Laura Del Gaudio has written a one-of-a-kind book, like the author herself who is authentic, a New York character as any. It is a toss up between "6 Feet Under" meets "A Bronx Tale" and The "Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade" meets "A Walker in the City." The Undertaker is a story about suffering, and also about family, community, healing, triumph and what it means to be loyal. The Undertaker is not only by a woman-for-women, but for those who want to better understand what it means to be a woman in a world where the future is female.