Mortician Diaries: The Dead-Honest Truth from a Life Spent with Death

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.

• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
• Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt
• Does This Mean You'll See Me Naked?: Field Notes from a Funeral Director
• Down Among the Dead Men
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
• From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
• Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
• Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training
• The Upside of Undertaking
• Over Our Dead Bodies:: Undertakers Lift the Lid