NOW DEPARTING

The sentimental education of a rural undertaker in all things mortuary.

“I wear many hats—ad hoc grave digger, obituary draftsman, liturgy organizer, headstone designer, community death mentor,” writes Sweeney. Young, pious, sober-minded, he opens on a rather unsettling note: the acts of embalming, sewing, applying makeup, and rendering a corpse to look as if in peaceful repose when, in fact, the death may have been quite grisly. “Half of my chosen profession is unseen,” Sweeney notes. All happens behind closed doors, in this case in a little farm town in northwestern Minnesota, where everyone knows everyone else and where a death goes noticed. Some of Sweeney’s narrative takes the form of a leisurely memoir, its pace befitting the rural setting; some of it reads like notes for a newcomer to the field: Use an “eye cap,” a contact lens–like thing with little burrs, to keep a customer’s eyelids from popping open—disconcerting indeed during a viewing—and keep the corpse’s mouth closed, against the old custom of leaving it open for a “natural, rested look”; if need be, suture the jaws or tie teeth together. Sweeney is candid about what brought him into the funeral business: He had good people skills (to communicate with the living, that is), he wanted meaningful work, and “he wanted a job that scratched the clerical itch, but also provided an income.” Bingo. Sometimes tending toward the preachy but seldom going far over the line, Sweeney writes of his work as a way of helping the web of life during “one final last moment of beauty before the thing held in its center fades from view,” which seems a noble thing indeed. Sweeney’s prose is pedestrian, but his account will satisfy the curiosity of anyone who wonders just what goes on beyond those closed doors.

Morbid, occasionally unpleasant, and a touch too earnest, but an evenhanded look at the end of life.