Taphophile Book Review: Mortician Diaries
Shanna Riley March 23rd, 2010
I do not know exactly what I was expecting from 80 year-old June Nadle's memoirs about her decades in the funeral business, Mortician Diaries:The Dead-Honest Truth from a Life Spent with Death, but I was charmed to find her a tender yet strong, sensible, and introspective woman who - rather than be made cynical by her daily dances with death or seeing human tragedy (like the death of young people or babies) constantly - used her experiences to make her a more compassionate, life-affirming person. I finished this book wanting to meet June Nadle and have her over for tea. She is simply an intelligent, strong, and endearing woman that you feel privileged to have met as you turn the last page of her memoir.
She has managed to write about what some would consider an - at best, undesirable, and to most, a disturbing - job in a beautiful, uplifting way. There is little that is dismal in this book; quite a profound statement for a work that is almost exclusively about death and dying. Even when Nadle is retelling the most tragic stories, she always finds and shares a silver lining or muses that, at the very least, we must remember never to take life for granted; indeed, she reminds us that life is a beautiful, precious, fleeting thing.
In this way, June Nadle's treatise on working as an undertaker was, surprisingly, much more an affirmation of life than a narrative on death.
- Taphophile Book Review
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