I just finished watching the Frontline show, "Undertaking," about a family-run undertaking business in Milford, Michigan. But this show is much, much more than a simple look behind the doors.
For anyone with a son, daughter, father, mother, niece, nephew, aunt or uncle, this is an hour or so of your time well spent. For me, watching this show -- and you'll have to watch it on your computer -- watching this show I couldn't help but think about my own father and mother passing on. Of course since the focus is on a family run funeral home I couldn't help but think of the hundreds of calls that once came into this apartment that is now our home in Providence, calls asking the family who owned and operated the Prata Funeral Home to please send someone to come and pick up a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, who had just passed away.
No melancholia here, though.
After listening to Thomas Lynch, one of the funeral directors, read from his essays and poetry about the dead and their relationship to the living, and the importance of how we, the living, deal with death and those who have passed on, I found to be truly a revelation and inspirational. And if you know of someone who has ever lost a child, hearing the Verrino story and listening to the young mother talk with such candor and in such lucid terms of her own son's passing is profound beyond belief.
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