Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

Praise for Mortuary Confidential

“Alternately poignant and peculiar, Mortuary Confidential is an insightful glimpse into the real lives of undertakers.”

—MELISSA MARR, New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series

“I have always had an insatiable curiosity of anything that smacks of the tawdry. I suppose the ‘goings on’ around funeral parlors must fall under this category because I could not put this book down. Fascinating.”

—LESLIE JORDAN, Emmy Award–winning actor

“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

“Sick, funny, and brilliant! I love this book.”

—JONATHAN MABERRY, multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author of They Bite

Mortuary Confidential

UNDERTAKERS SPILL THE DIRT

Kenneth McKenzie

AND

Todd Harra

The following stories have been collected from funeral directors and morticians across the United States. They are based on actual events; details and events have been altered and/or fictionalized to protect confidentialities.

The contributors are identified by their interests/hobbies outside the funeral service profession as a way to portray their multi-faceted lives.

Death…It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY

Introduction

by Todd Harra

My great-great-great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker, known as a tradesman undertaker, in rural Delaware. His son, my great-great-grandfather, was an undertaker, and my uncle is one, too. So I guess you could say that undertaking is our family business. It’s not uncommon to find that at many funeral homes across the United States, generations of stewards have cared for the dead. Unlike me, however, with my lineage in the business, my co-author, Ken, chose to make it his career.

Ken became interested in funeral directing after his father committed suicide when he was a young boy. While working through his grief, Ken decided to dedicate his life to serving others who are going through their own time of loss. Ken has been in the business a lot longer than I have, well over twenty years, while I have been in it about five. Ken has lived his whole life on the sun-drenched California coast, while I have lived in the east. Our differing ages and geographic locations lead to slightly differing outlooks on the profession and will, we hope, give you a well-rounded look at the industry as a whole.

First, to answer a question I’ve often been asked, and I’m sure you’re wondering, let’s nail down the terms undertaker, funeral director, and mortician. The definition for mortician is somewhat ambiguous but connotes someone who works at a mortuary, in both the business and scientific aspects. If you actually break the word down the exact definition would be: a person who has skill or art with the dead. The words funeral director and undertaker are interchangeable, and I’ll use them as such throughout the book. Funeral director is the modern, P.C. description of the job title, while undertaker is an old vestige of a term dating back to the colonial period. Either name you use, an undertaker or funeral director is a professional, licensed by the state he practices in to conduct funerals and manage all the details that accompany a death.

So what does an undertaker do?

To put it simply: we care for the dead. To some it might seem an extraordinary profession, macabre even, but one measure of a society is in how it honors its dead. Obviously, the dead don’t care—they’re dead after all, right?—so the question remains, why should we? The answer is that we, as a society, must uphold a basic principle of humanity, the sanctity of life, through reverence for the dead. As undertakers we’re charged with seeing to it that each person who comes through our door is treated with respect and given a dignified funeral. It’s a task that has been honed through thousands of years of history.