Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

If you could study a subject that you’ve never had the opportunity to learn, what would you choose? This could be an academic class or the study of a specific skill or art. Tell us your passion about it!
I chose the perfect field of study: history. I can’t imagine having devoted my life, my heart, to a different area of study. Not only does it make me great at Jeopardy, but it always gives me an interesting fact to spew or a tie-in to make at any given moment. And when there is no one around to listen to me ramble on, I just go through it in my own head and entertain myself. Though, I can’t say that history is my only subject of interest. I don’t think that history is the only thing that I could be good at, or happy to make my career/life’s work.

I would have loved (maybe using past tense is incorrect because I still would love to, I just feel like I am to old and missed my chance) to study Mortuary Science and become a Mortician. I’m not ghoulish, I swear! And I don’t wear black lipstick and recite the black mass. I dress in sweater vests and have a personal notebook that is pink with flowers on it. Yet I admit that I do have my own gargoyle, I decorate my room with coffins, and my curtains are black spider web design. Both parts of me aren’t sell outs of the other part at all, I promise.

I don’t romanticize the profession, either. I realize the dangers. I know that some students become desensitized to the dead and become a little cold-hearted– they begin to see the human bodies as objects and nothing more. I know that morticians see some pretty gruesome stuff. I also know that there is a chance of infectious disease contraction. With the proper precautions and safety measures in place, the issue of disease shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Let me tell you why I have always wanted to be a Mortician. It’s not because I love death and morbidity (okay, I DO love morbidity, but that has nothing to do in this case), or that I enjoy looking at dead bodies. There’s nothing pleasant about death, not for the person who might have suffered and for the family still around who continue to suffer.

The job of the Mortician, aside from preparing a body properly for burial, is to treat the family and the body with the last bit of kindness they will experience. The least someone can do for a dead person is treat them with the utmost kindness and respect. It will surely ease some of the stress on the family, too, to know that their loved one is in good, caring, kind hands. The end result, while by no means a substitution for the person they lost, will at least take some of the shock of death away as family says their last goodbye.

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