Funeral Services Books

The book is beautiful quite complete. English and Spanish texts are side by and the translations are acceptable.

I bought this book with the goal to review current mortuary science information. Since I have graduated from a mortuary sciences program many years ago, I found this book was an overall worthwhile review with a few updates for me. It is basic enough and covers relevant material and I can see why it would be used as a text for entry level mortuary science students. My two reservations are: 1. The text is only a basic survey level book. (Having recently taken a 5 unit college course in Microbiology, I quickly realized it is not even close to breadth or depth in comparison to texts for college level Microbiology.) Therefore, I concluded this text can't be used as a significant or a complete resource, to aid those already in the field, or those who may need more knowledge. 2. The book is lacking in the aspect of bridging the material to direct application for funeral home employees and embalmers; the few random mentions of such could be greatly improved and would make the book far more useful to all level of readers. What few "connections" that were there, I did find helpful, but I found wanting far more that this book offered.

There are only a few items in this book that I think could be appropriately read at a funeral or memorial service.

This book offers the widest variety of all possible sentiments one would care to use at a memorial or funeral service, with quotes from Yeats, Joyce, Dante, St. Augustine, Lao-Tzu, Praxilla of Sicyon, Rilke, Ovid, Virgil, Tolstoy, the Papago, the Aztec, the Maya, the priest Fujiwara No Toshinari, a Buddhist aphorism, a Hindu teaching, Homer, Sophocles, Proust, to name but a few. The book is arranged in sections, each section addressing a different aspect of grief: Why We Gather; Raw Grief and Bitter Mourning; Mysteries: What is Death? What Are Time and Space?; Transformations; Heroes and Heroines, Great and Simple; Timeless Praise in Scripture and Verse; Meditations on Wisdom Coming Slowly; Healing, Changing, Moving On. In the back of the book is a list of music suggestions for the service. I found the book to be not only wonderful for its stated purpose but also as an ideal gift to give on the anniversary date of a loved one's death. Also, I have used quotes from the book in condolence letters. In times of grief we are asked to be our most eloquent, when really, we have been rendered incapacitated, the headless body, with "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." (Wordsworth)

This is the true story of the relationship between a middle-aged English publisher (Athill herself) and a young Egyptian writer. Its narrative concerns the disintegration of the writer's state of mind and, with it, of his relationship with Athill; it ends with the writer's suicide. As has been remarked about Athill's other books, this account is remarkable for its honesty. Athill is an unusually aware and articulate woman in whom the faculties of imaginative sympathy and of dispassionate appraisal are both extraordinarily strong as well as more or less equivalent (these gifts have presumably contributed towards her successful career as a publisher). I read the book as a 'debate' between two ways of existing: on the one hand the egocentric, relentless, consuming passion of the young writer; Athill's moderate, self-restraining but not unemotional rationality on the other. It is an important debate and has made for great writing before (Hamlet versus Horatio?) - partly because it is so complex: both ways of living overlap with each other and also in some way depend upon each other for definition. Each way of living, too, has something the other cannot have (abandoned emotion's intensity; rationality's ability to survive). In its own very modest way, then, this book felt to me like a classic account of life at its most real.

Unfortunately this book falls short of the promise of its' title. I ordered this book hoping for practical information about creating a funeral service for my mother-in-law, for whom we were providing hospice care in our home.

Disappointingly this book did not inspire my creative process. The material was dry and read like a research paper. If I'd been writing a class paper, it would have been a good resource, but its' helpfulness in creating a ceremoney was nil. The use of the "mourning needs" list, as an organzing force for the different elements of a ceremony stifled creative process. This book would have been more useful if it had included actual ideas and resources for readings, music, eulogies and perhaps outlines of what other people have put together.