HW 50 First Third of Care of the Dead Book Post

Jokinen, Tom. Curtains Adventures of an Undertaker-In-Training.

Precis

I have begun to explore the life of an undertaker since I quit my government job. I'm trying to place myself in the culture of the care of the dead with my new job. Fortunately I still have some old tricks and prior knowledge from my past job experience.  While becoming so intimate with care of the dead I really am learning to take a look in the mirror and understand my own thoughts on the matter, as well as societies take on things. I'm finding myself unable to adapt to the smell of all the chemicals used on the dead  who already smell bad if you ask me. To help protect the innocence of the dead we whisk them away to the next life in  extravagant caskets, and  use pink and purple lipstick to give them more of a lifelike feel.

Quotes

• "In my head, it sounds like a fairy-tale: the dead come from a magic place called the Silver Doors, from which they are whisked into boxes or made to drink potions that turn them from yellow to green, then they're painted pink and purple and powdered, and some are baked in an oven where they are turned into flour by special death-fairies" (Jokinen 19).
• "In the office, Richard's quick estimate, not including cemetery expenses, comes to $7,680, which he rounds up to $7,900 to provide wiggle room. Then if the final bill is less than the estimate, they'll feel like they got a deal" (Jokinen 39).
• "To me, the heart of the debate she left behind is a nagging question: what is the body, anyway?Is it charged,mystical, something to be marked and honored with ceremony and balm, or is it "discarded clothing"?(Jokinen 33)

Analysis

After reading  the first third of Curtains, I have literally been able to picture everything I've read. It's basically the book's plot colliding with my own experiences at a funeral home. I find myself saying " I don't remember that", I wonder what that's like in person."  Similar to all of our previous units there are the clear dominant social practices, some being nightmarish atrociously industrialized . Tom really uses his humor and real life experience to show me what its like to be a undertaker. He doesn't really use historical information and this saddens me a lot because I'm one of the people who like to see how these systems evolved.The most interesting part of the first third of the book is the part where he mentions the many techniques that he and his staff use when selling coffins. The author also stated one line that really caught my attention was " Mitford saw embalming as a way to "make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container. And only North Americans still did it."This specific line really gave me more of an understanding of the funeral homes jobs and responsibilities no matter how silly or absurd they may be.