Confessions of a Funeral Director: How Death Saved My Life by Caleb Wilde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Caleb Wilde has written a very accessible, poignant short book on his life, mainly relying on his experience as the 6th generation funeral director of Wilde Funeral Home in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania. As a resident of Chester County in Pennsylvania myself, it was pretty cool to hear so many towns mentioned that I know of or live near myself.
I enjoyed hearing about Caleb as a young man with desires to become a priest or evangelist in locations all over the world for people who otherwise would not have access to the religion he wanted to share with people, as a way to serve people well outside of his family’s business. When he went on a mission, the mission was to set up a “pop-up” medical clinic and treat as many people in the remote Madagascar village and surrounding area as possible, instead of the evangelizing he was hoping for–he had a great experience which did eventually lead him back to realizing there were all different ways to live a meaningful life and help people, including returning home to eventually become licensed as a funeral director.
He had a deep-seated fear of the ever-present death he lived with throughout his childhood, with the kitchen in his family’s home traditionally serving double duty as a family gathering place and an embalming place until they had another room built for that purpose. We saw straight into fascinating memories of frequently being warned about doing something improperly, that his father or grandfather had seen lead to the death of another child or young person–like when he rode in a car and was told to make sure the seat’s headrest matched up with the height of his head to prevent a nasty death in a car accident due to insufficient head support, or when he rocked back in his chair at the dinner table, like so many kids do, until he was warned to put the chair back on its feet, as another death they had taken care of was due to a simple fall back from an unstable chair.
Experiences like this made death an ever-present thing in his life, and after seeing a few too many tragic deaths–an infant choking on a candy wrapper careless left on the floor after a Christmas party and dying, a young man cut down early in life due to a motorcycle accident and how hard they worked to try to put his head back together after the crash to allow a viewing, but they couldn’t get him looking “as normal” as they’d like, but the mother moved forward with an open casket at the viewing anyway, he had signed up to what he refers to as the “death negative narrative”.
But with other transcendent experiences, he was able to slowly move from that very common “death negative” viewpoint to a more “death positive narrative”. He saw the death of a young man from an overdose and met his mother, who said she was sleeping the best she had in weeks, now that she had closure with her son and was no longer in a constant state of worry and anxiety over his life choices and safety. Another story about an adult woman with a disability (maybe down syndrome? I don’t recall) who lived with her parents died in her sleep due to sleep apnea caused by asphyxiation, and her parents felt adrift without her and they set up a little shrine at her place at the dining room table and told Caleb all about the different objects there and their meaning. Their daughter was so kind that she changed her parents to be more kind and loving as well, and Caleb had rarely seen such a positive example of active remembrance of a loved one–this being such a healthy way to incorporate the dead into our day-to-day lives, as there really may never truly be closure after the death of a loved one. But that does not have to be a negative thing, as we remember our loved ones after they pass, they live on in us and in the love we share with the living.
These experiences all deeply affected Caleb, and he has always had an especially tough time around the death of young children and infants, as he and his wife are infertile. They eventually got to a point in their relationship, and in his experience after rejoining the family business as a funeral director, where they felt they could be good parents, but could not have their own children. Instead, they were able to work with an adoption agency and a pregnant woman who had the son that became Caleb and Nic’s son Jeremiah. There was a beautiful letter Caleb wrote to the mother of their child about how much they love, honor and appreciate her impossibly generous gift, and would teach Jeremiah to do the same.
I would definitely recommend this book. I listened to it over a few days easily, as it was about 4 or 4 1/2 hours. A warning I’ll give is that spirituality and a belief in God and a religious bent is definitely present, but I feel Caleb treats these subjects respectfully and has a healthy questioning of his beliefs throughout the book, and especially as he struggles to reconcile ideas of hell and heaven and a loving God, and struggled to see the beauty of this world in the now, in the present, and in death after as a result. In fact, near the beginning of the book, I thought he did not believe in God due to the way he talked about it. This struggle with reconciling his own personal religious beliefs with his experiences with death is a core thread throughout the book, but I enjoyed hearing the author work through these struggles, and never felt that he was proselytizing.
A last vignette to leave you with–there was a nursing home who bucked the trend of most nursing homes and hospitals with a “back door policy” with dead bodies, hiding the dead bodies of residents and patients and sneaking them out to the waiting hearse or another similar vehicle with a big space in the back. Caleb always feels nervous and anxious in these situations, forced to feel shame with his role in the process. This one nursing home had a “front door policy” for their dead residents, with all the staff forming an honor guard along each wall to honor the resident who passed away and acknowledge them, at any time of day and night, for every resident who passed. This really touched Caleb’s heart and my own.
I definitely teared up a few times while listening to this book, especially when he talked about grief that frequently gets downplayed or ignored–like the grief of one miscarriage, or more, or the grief of infertility as a couple for the children that you cannot create. He says some beautiful things about grief, and it was interesting to hear him develop as a funeral director as more of a natural introvert who worked to be social and worked to find the right words for different grieving people, while his grandfather was social and magnanimous and always made friends easily, which was his gift.
The conclusion of the book is that the more you embrace and lean into death, the more you can embrace and appreciate life. It is important to remember and reflect on this ourselves as death waits for us all, but it doesn’t have to be a disconnected shameful thing, it can be beautiful, freeing, and transcendent, experienced together with the community of people around the dying or deceased person in their life and in their death. And there is nothing like death to remind you to live in the present, and forget the small annoyances, and live a meaningful life–whatever that means to you!
Maggie Cann Can Do It! 