Table of Contents

Prologue
 
1. The Factory
2. A Way of Life Like Any Other
3. “All That Malarkey”
4. I’m Sorry for Your Loss, but You’ve Mistaken Me for Someone Who Knows What He’s Doing
5. Love Your Hair, Who’s Your Embalmer?
6. Funeral Family Values
7. To Keep Things the Way They Are, We Have to Change
8. Respect, Dignity and Black Underpants
9. Grief Sneaks Past
10. Two Hundred Cubic Inches of You
11. Turn That Frown Upside Down: The “Celebration of Life”
12. Contributing to Shareholder Values, One Corpse at a Time
13. “Shall We Gather at the River?”
14. The Storm
15. Death in Venice Beach
16. The Myth of Permanence
17. The Spookiest Trade Show in America
18. One Less Undertaker
 
Acknowledgements

About the Author

TOM JOKINEN is a radio producer and video-journalist who has worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera as well as many other CBC shows. In 2006 he took a job as an apprentice undertaker at a Winnipeg funeral home. He has also worked as a railroad operator, an editorial cartoonist and spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto. He dropped out, but not before dissecting two human cadavers.

Reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
“You’d hardly expect a book about the disposal of the dead to be funny, but . . . [Jokinen] manages to inject plenty of humour into his examination of a service we’ll all be needing one of these days.”
 — Times Colonist

"What [Jokinen] has produced is absorbing, at times cringe-inducing, thought-provoking and illuminating. In other words, a great read." 
 — Ottawa Citizen

"[A] revealing and respectful book." 
 — Winnipeg Free Press

"Curtains is a frequently amusing book. The death business requires a sense of humour . . . and Jokinen has a deft comic touch." 
 — National Post

"Lively and literate. . . . a book about . . . the pleasures of good writing, close observation, a thoughtful voice, a well-told story, a loving if skeptical take on reality, a detailed sense of irony and humour, a thirst for exploration. In all, it is a fine piece of work." 
 — The Globe and Mail

“Intuitively answers all the questions that you’d never ask aloud. . . . It’s great reading.”
 — The Coast (Halifax)