Interestingly, both sides of Wilde's family were in the funeral home business. Based in Parkesburg, PA (roughly an hour outside Philadelphia), both of Caleb's grandfathers were funeral home directors, and his father became the fifth-generation director of the Wilde Funeral Home. In fact, Wilde's grandfathers were competitors in the Parkesburg region before his mother and father met. Wilde's maternal grandfather was director of the Brown Funeral Home. Despite the business competition, everything worked fine between the families.
Wilde details his struggles in coming to grips with joining the family business. Throughout Confessions Of A Funeral Director he mentions many times that he’d wondered whether or not it was the right decision for him.
The accounts of growing up around death recall how death has drastically shaped Wilde's life. These few sentences capture why this is true: "Two of my closest middle school friends lost family members, a father for one, a sister for the other. But I didn't lose my father. I didn't lose my sister to death. For me, death was work. Death care was the family tradition ... Even though death wasn't personal, the idea of death saturated my youth. And the thought of what might come after death consumed me, and eventually broke me".
Wilde became aware, even at a young age, that death was all around him, and that his own death could come at any moment. Which led Wilde to develop a philosophy of death around two central concepts: "death negative" and "death positive". These are essentially two methods of viewing and thinking about death. He asserts that much of our society revolves around the death negative narrative. "Even though I grew up around death", he writes, "I was just as susceptible as anyone to what I call the 'death negative narrative' that so many of us have come to believe". Wilde continues to say how most people only see tragic and horrific deaths on TV and in the media. Bad deaths become the norm, so people only associate death with something terrible. He also writes of how fearing death is part of our biology, so it should seem natural that people think of death as bad. "We fear death because we don't know it, we don't see it, and we don't touch it", he writes. "And what we don't know, we've painted in broad strokes of darkness and negativity." Wilde had the same perspective of death when he was younger. And he found that he needed to change that viewpoint, to tell himself a new story of death. This idea is what ultimately led him to pursue the family business of funeral directing: To find a death positive narrative.
"Death is like mud; it's dirty, messy, and incredibly tough to walk through", he writes, "but, surprisingly, it holds vital ingredients to life, and when seeds are planted, it can help sprout new life". Wilde is not trying to say that death is easy. He says that death is probably the hardest thing we have to deal with. But he is saying that we've heard an incomplete narrative.
And that is what most of Confessions Of A Funeral Director is about. It's stories of families and people Wilde has worked with that taught him about positive and even good deaths. "Good" in the sense that they created strong communities, taught people to live life to the fullest and even helped to erase the fear of death in others.
At once sad, funny, witty, but one of the best personal accounts about the death industry I've ever read. Its stories are very moving, particularly in how death has a way of bringing people together in a culture that so wants to keep us apart. I was most intrigued by his notions about "death negative" and "death positive". It confirms so much of my experience as a pastor: We fear death mostly because we never see it, or touch it, and keep dead bodies so far removed from our experiences of grieving. I don't think this a book for everyone, but it really is one of the best books I've ever seen about how being around death as often as our funeral directors are brings so much more "death positive" -- and therefore psychologically, emotionally and spiritually healthy -- views. It's an easy read, even if parts are tough for "death negative" folks to handle.
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I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.