Preparation for a Long Review: Confessions of a Funeral Director
Death is a normal part of life, especially if you grew playing Hide and Go Seek in a casket room.
Introduction
I had been exposed to death a lot as a kid. I don’t think my parents tried to hide it from me one bit. The first loved one that I remember dying was my Great-Grandpa Dixon. He died when I was 4 years old, and my parents didn’t try to soften the blow. They just came right out and said it.
“Grandpa Dixon passed away this morning.”
Even at 4 years old, I knew what that meant. I wouldn’t be seeing Great-Grandpa Dixon anymore, at least not on this side of Heaven.
My grandfather is a preacher, and every time he had to go to a visitation or give the sermon or eulogy at a funeral, I went with him and my grandmother since I stayed with them a lot of the time. Their generation didn’t believe in calling in strange babysitters that they didn’t know or just putting me in front of a screen and abdicating their roles as my care givers to some impersonal piece of technology. As a result, if they had to go somewhere, I went with them and I behaved. My grandma always carried around a notepad and pen that I draw with if I got bored, but I had to stay quiet and still, and I did.
My parents divorced when I was 6 and I don’t have many memories of my childhood before their separation, but I distinctly remember sitting in the living room floor, in the house which my wife and I now live in, having a mock funeral with some old dominoes and playing cards. I stood the dominoes up to resemble head stones and I used face cards to indicate dead people. I would lay them face up for an open casket service or I would lay them face down for a closed casket service. I would give the eulogy and since I didn’t really know what else to do I just started it off with “he was a good man…” and I would just make up some good sounding memories for my imaginary deceased person. Some might say that was a bit morbid for a 6 year old, but I wouldn’t have even known what the word ‘morbid’ meant. I was just imitating what I saw. It’s like kids playing house or playing church. They’re just playing, but some times there’s more to their play than meets the eye. Kids don’t realize it in the moment, but in some cases, when they partake of these roleplaying activities they’re actually acting out what the trajectory of their life is putting them on a path to become.
I bring all of this up because until I read Caleb Wilde’s Confessions of a Funeral Home Director, I thought no average American kid had been exposed to more death than I had. From playing Hide and Go Seek with his cousins in the casket room of his Pop-Pop Brown’s funeral home (pg. 16) to sharing holiday family meals in the same room that was often used to console families seeking to make arragements for their loved one who has recently passed (pg. 17), the author clearly had the more death-centric upbringing than I. I understand that it’s not a contest, but I really thought I had the high score on this one. In a way, it’s refreshing to see that I don’t. Reading about Wilde’s upbringing helped me to see that I wasn’t alone or even all that weird as a kid for always having death in the back of my mind. As Wilde even says in his book, “death is a normal part of life.”
My Rhyme & Reason
I want to review Wilde’s work in such great detail because I think it’s a book everyone should read, especially clergymen who have to do hard business of comforting families and giving funeral sermons and eulogies when their parishioners pass. However, I can’t just give it up wholesale without some warnings. So, if my blog is a trafflic light, imagine that this three part review series is a bright yellow light. Please don’t disregard this book, but don’t just buy everything the author says wholesale either.
I thought about doing a Douglas Wilson-style chapter-by-chapter review, but this kind of book doesn’t lend itself to theology and philosophy books that have arguments that differ and build on one another chapter by chapter. Most of the book is stories, and you can’t really dialogue with stories. You can glean from them. You can talk about the themes that you see in the stories, but these stories, these flesh and blood experiences aren’t meant to be dialogued with, they’re simply meant to be told by the teller and heard by the audience.
I could have also done a standard book report. Book, author, summary, thumbs up or down. But that’s boring, and I don’t really think I can get everything I want to say about this book out in one post. It would just be incredibly long. So, here’s the plan: I’m going to break this down into three parts.
Part 1 will consist of a rigid review of Wilde’s theology that he presents in the book. We’ll be delving into Heaven, Hell, impassibility, sovereignty, and all that other fun stuff.
Part 2 will be a glowing review of all of the helpful insights that Wilde has to offer concerning grief, death, and what he presents as a death-positive narrative.
Finally, Part 3 will get a bit personal as I share how the book affected me personally and why it will be one of the few books that gets played several times over on my Audible app.