Confessions of a Mortuary Attendant

Philemon has spent twenty-one years preparing the dead. Not haunted by the work, but shaped by it. He speaks without self-pity about cold rooms and paperwork, about families who arrive carrying impossible weight, about the dark, sustaining humour that keeps professionals whole. He coins his own vocabulary for experiences no dictionary has thought to name: mortsilence, vellorith, threnating, morturance.
He nearly loses his marriage, cries once at a folded letter. He laughs more than people expect and defends the laughter. Confessions of a Mortuary Attendant is a rare and honest book about a profession society depends on and keeps at arm's length, about what death teaches the living, and about a man who still cannot file his retirement papers.