"Confessions of a Mortician | Matter | Medium"

"He watched me for a second to see how I’d react, his eyes sort of twinkling and abashed at the same time, as if he were asking me to dance. Before I could formulate a response, his attention had moved on to lunch.

“Have you tried them Pogs down in Coatesville?” he asked Caleb while they heaved the woman’s body off its gurney. “P-O-G-S. Hot dog wrapped in a slice of pizza. Best thing you’ll ever eat, I tell you.”"

https://medium.com/matter/confessions-of-a-mortician-7a8c061bbda3

This is a tremendous, beautiful introspective semi-longread on death and the funerary industry. The quote I pulled isn't really a summary, it's just a moment that felt really vivid to me for some reason. 

Better summary: "It’s what I longed to be, of course: comfortable in silence. Not just God’s silence, but the pungent silence emanating from the back of the [hearse]. And the truth is, Caleb did seem comfortable. It was rare enough to meet an American who’d talk earnestly about death without sounding like a Hallmark card; rarer still, I suspected, was the utter lack of fear in his eyes. There was something almost spooky about it — a monkish sort of calm. The overall impression was of someone who’d had a long staring contest with Death, and had won. As Caleb put it, you have to pass through death in order to get to Eden."

It makes me think about death differently, and our weird rituals around it and how genuinely strange the things we do with loved ones' bodies are. We all have individual relationships to our love ones, shouldn't we have individual ways we treat their bodies after death? But I imagine that something out-of- the-box would genuinely horrify and offend strangers, would almost be perceived criminally, because that's how we are with death. We just aren't, with death; let's not have to think about it too much.

**Sort of slightly related to: what makes you you. (I just happened to read them I the same siting and they were intersting to think about together). And the NYT piece by the doctor who just wrote a book about mortality.