"We've got a body"

“From the time I entered the world there were always dead bodies,” relates Kate Mayfield in The Undertaker’s Daughter, her memoir of growing up in a funeral home in the small Southern town of Jubilee, Kentucky. Downstairs meant cloying flowers, solemn hymns and tearful mourners as Jubilee’s deceased made their short journey from embalming room to the chapel. Upstairs the family lived in quiet consideration of the dead and those who mourned them.

Profoundly respectful of the dead, Kate’s father still found ways to involve his children in his trade. Kate played with casket boxes, helped choose exquisite handmade shrouds from the Shroud Lady (and secretly longed to wear one herself), dusted the caskets and wandered with her father through the cemetery. But Kate also saw tiny baby caskets being delivered, shuddered at the horrors of the embalming room and sometimes felt a lingering presence beside the open caskets.

Of course oftentimes the living were more terrifying than the dead. With its strict social hierarchy and racial segregation, Jubilee could be difficult for both father and daughter to navigate. Equally difficult for Kate were the family secrets and demons that haunted her father and followed him to his grave. Either way, both the living and the dead have something interesting to say in The Undertaker’s Daughter.