The obituaries shot up to the top of my list when I discovered Robert McG. Thomas, the 'Times' obit writer who redesigned its traditional form and added a measure of stylistic elegance.
There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
I'll tell you what makes my blood boil?... Crematoriums.
If you love helping people, and you love trying to bring comfort and peace to their life at a very, very difficult time, you're going to have to look pretty hard to find a profession that gives you more opportunities than the funeral business.
It was plain to see the Hollywood undertakers take care of everything. If you die you don't have to lift a finger.
To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.
I work with the dead, but I am working for the living.
You can't just plain die. You got to do it by the book.
I take classes to be a mortician.
Each family of the United States military now attends to their loved ones funeral with a wrenching worry that it will be met possibly with a protest or a demonstration.
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
For a while under Donald Trump, it was possible to believe that we could go back to a more functional, less rancorous time. This desire was expressed most eloquently at John McCain's funeral services.
I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.
Services were held today for Ken Lay - convicted thief and crook Ken Lay.They folded his arms across his chest and sowed his sleeves together so he couldn't put his hands in anyone's pockets when they walked by. You know when they say in a eulogy, "You're all richer for having known him." I don't think they're going to hear that.
If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.
I once got sacked for laughing ... mind you, I was driving a hearse at the time.
If you're so pro-life, do me a favour: don't lock arms and block medical clinics. If you're so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.
CINCINNATI MORGUE, AN EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY SERVICE SINCE 1966.
Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.
The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look 'natural,' but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.
Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.
I am a mortician who tells you that you don't necessarily need a mortician.
I grew up in a funeral home, born and raised, and everyone was always like, 'Well, what was that like?' and I was like, 'It was normal', because it's all I knew.
People ask me what makes a good funeral, and I tell them the most important thing is your man in the casket. If you have a man of substance in there, you have the makings of a first-class funeral.
For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.
