Books about the Inevitable Death

"Kate Mayfield's first foray into nonfiction is a vivid Southern memoir that reads like a novel, about growing up in Jubilee, Kentucky as the daughter of a charismatic but troubled small-town undertaker--imagine Mad Men's Sally Draper growing up in the world of The Help"--

A hilarious and witty look into the history of using cadavers for science, grave diggers, and options to consider about your burial plan. A dark and uncomfortable subject made more palatable and downright funny.

The blogger behind the popular Web series Ask a Mortician describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.

"A literature professor, ... Andrew Meredith's father was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It's a transgression [he] cannot forgive, for it brought about long-lasting familial despair ... [He] treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence--falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next ... Broke, Andrew moves back home to his childhood neighborhood ... and takes a job alongside his father as a 'remover,' the name for those unseen, unsung workers who take away the bodies of those who die at home ... [and] begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but as a sympathetic, imperfect man who loves his family despite his flaws"--

"Six Feet Under" meets The Wire in a dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming-of-age in a black funeral home in Baltimore. Sheri Booker was only fifteen years old when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea that her summer job would become nine years of immersion in a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, she found comfort in the funeral home, and soon has the run of the place, from its sacred chapels to the terrifying embalming room. 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. This vibrant tour of a macabre world reveals an urban funeral culture where photo-screened memorial T-shirts often replace suits and ties and the dead are sent off with a joint or a fifth of cognac. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives"--

This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a "book club" that brings them together as the mother faces an advanced form of pancreatic cancer. The result is a profoundly moving tale of loss that is also a joyful, and often humorous, celebration of life.

A journalist details how Norma Bowe, the professor of a popular class on the stages of dying, death, and bereavement at Kean University in New Jersey, shows her students how to truly heal and live their lives through contemplating the end.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is a 2014 non-fiction book by American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book addresses end-of-life care, hospice care, and also contains Gawande's reflections and personal stories. He suggests that medical care should focus on well-being rather than survival. Being Mortal has won awards, appeared on lists of best books, and been featured in a documentary.

Michelle Williams is young and attractive, she has close family ties as well as a busy social life - but she is far from usual. She is a mortuary technician and her job involves dealing with those things in life that many people do not wish to experience directly. Yet life in the mortuary is neither gruesome nor sad. Told with good humour and common sense, we are introduced to a host of characters - the pathologists, many of them eccentric, some downright mad; the undertakers, the hospital porters and the man from the coroner's office who sings to Michelle every morning. The incidents too ensure that no two days are ever the same. From the tragic to the hilarious they include: The fitness fanatic who was run over as he did pressups in the road on a dark night The decapitated motorcyclist The guide dog who led his owner on to the railway tracks - and left him there The forty stone man for whom an entire refrigerated lorry had to be hired because he wouldn't fit in the mortuary cooler Over the course of her first year Michelle has to deal with situations and emotions that few of us will ever experience, and does so while retaining a sense of humour and a sense of perspective.