Face by Sherman Alexie

I often like the poetry written by prose writers that I admire, Margaret Atwood and Terry Tempest Williams, for instance, but this collection by Sherman Alexie has totally blown me away. Alexie plays with words, stanzas, and ancient poetic forms in ways that make me wish I knew more about poetry. However, the real power in this work is not in exploring sonnets or villanelles, but in mining deeply personal stories and emotions.

The overriding themes of death and god and love are woven together with the more mundane, like being insecure about love handles and creating an iPod playlist. The poems dealing with the death of his father are raw and honest and talk about loss and grief in a real way, without using watered down platitudes or sentimentality. Every day we are asked to consume death as entertainment - television is a revolving line up cops, crime labs, and hospitals, bestselling novels are all about finding the killer, and do we really even need to talk about the way that death is covered by news agencies? Even though we are bombarded with images of "corpses" being analyzed and attractively earnest young doctors breaking the news to overwrought families that their loved one didn't pull through, the subject of death and dying and grief is generally to be avoided on a personal level.

In his poem, "Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World" Alexie tells of calling home and asking his mother if he can speak to "Poppa" only to remember that his father has been dead for nearly a year. His mother responds with: " 'I made him a cup of instant coffee / This morning and left it on the table - / Like I have, for what, twenty-seven years - / And I didn't realize my mistake / Until this afternoon.' My mother laughs / At the angels that wait for us to pause / During the most ordinary of days / And sing our praise to forgetfulness / Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Grave Matters by Mark Harris

This book made me cry. Not tears of sadness thinking about death and dying - but tears of joy for the beautiful ways that families have found to care for and memorialize their beloved dead.

Like Jessica Mitford (see previous post), Mark Harris is a journalist who happened upon the subject of the modern American funeral industry and has become something of a spokesman and expert in green alternatives to "traditional" burial practices. His website is amazing source of information on the subject, the blog in particular. I love when authors provide rich websites and blogs to go along with their books. It is wonderful to be able to keep following a subject even after I've sadly finished reading the last page.

Harris takes us on a journey starting in a typical American funeral home and ending in a memorial forest. Along the way we learn about The Memorial Reef, family burial plots, and alternatives to cremation. There is plenty of practical information interwoven with personal stories of the families and the folks in all walks of the funeral industry. The balance of information, even difficult to read descriptions of embalming procedures, with emotional stories of coming to grips with loss was really well done in this book. The tone is affirming and educational in a way that ties death care to the greater environmental movement, showing how you can make a difference for the planet, even as a final act.

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford

It may be helpful to note before I even get into this review - or this project for that matter - that I am currently studying and starting to pursue a career in the area of death care, specifically alternative death care guidance. Many of the books that I will be reviewing will be in this area of study. I thought I would behoove me to start with the updated version of "the book" that had the North American funeral industry quivering in their shiny black shoes when it was first published in 1963: The American Way of Death Revisited.

Jessica Mitford, a self-proclaimed muckraker set about to uncover some of the dirty secrets behind the polished veneer of the modern funeral industry in the middle of the last century. Mitford's expose made huge waves throughout the world when it came out and was an enormous best-seller. The version that I read, which she completed just shortly before her own death in 1996, was interesting because she was able to compare and contrast industry changes over the 30 intervening years between versions.

The New York Post said that this book is a "must-read for anyone planning to throw a funeral in their lifetime" and I believe that is still the case - even 15 years after the revisions. Since I am just embarking on my journey into the realm of death care I have been talking to a lot of folks and doing a lot of reading about funerals. This is the book that websites, other books, and random people that I talk to reference as the book that changed everything. I was surprised to learn that my mom and dad both read the original in high school in their Sociology classes. I think it's pretty telling that research done in 1961 could still be relevant today, owing to Mitford's style and the thoroughness of the study.

Mitford, with the aid of at least one full time research assistant, uncovered practices, pricing, and truly abhorrent behavior in the related post-death fields of Funeral Directors and homes, cemeteries, crematoriums, funeral related merchandise and funeral insurance. Peppered amongst the figures and facts are personal stories of folks and their experiences at the hands of corporate or private funeral directors. Speaking of "corporate", that is one of Mitford's overriding themes - the corporatization of the industry is when things went horribly awry. When the 1996 version came out two large companies, Loewen Group and SCI owned 30% of all funeral homes in the country and I wouldn't be surprised if it was more now. Our food, our water, our schools are all commodified, why should our death care be any different?

Since I'm just getting started down this road of study I can not, with any confidence, state whether or not this is the best or only book to read on the subject. However, I am confidant that if you do choose to read it you will enjoy Mitford's style and will benefit from an exercise in examining an industry that grew too fat, too fast. Perhaps you may even be like many thousands of folks so moved that they set about writing their elected officials demanding reform, or joining together and forming cooperative memorial societies.

A Proper Diversion

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up
its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
~ Joseph Addison ~

Even though I've always been a gluttonous little bookworm I've never really written about my passion. My friend James is part of a group that is reading 52 books in 52 weeks, and reviewing them via blog. I didn't make the 2009 enrollment date so I'm not officially in the Cannonball Read, but I'm going to read and review throughout the year.