There is an immediate fascination with the title of Kate Mayfield’s memoir. Who has not wondered what it would be like to be a member of the undertaker’s brood? The funeral business used to be, and often still is, a secretive family concern. Mayfield has pulled back the curtain.

Co-author of two earlier nonfiction books (10 STEPS TO FASHION FREEDOM and ELLIE HART GOES TO WORK), Mayfield finds her stride in this evocative return to the 1960s, to a society that dared not speak of disease, disability or difference to a South not yet liberated from racism, despite the public face of integration and to a home dominated by dead bodies. Her undertaker father Frank was a bon vivant whose lugubrious respect for the departed seemed at odds with his attractive sociability. He opened the door for her to his inner chamber --- the embalming room. She learned its arcana early on: “People wanted their loved ones to look good and smell nice,” and that was the magic her father could do for the dead.

"Mayfield finds her stride in this evocative return to the 1960s, to a society that dared not speak of disease, disability or difference to a South not yet liberated from racism, despite the public face of integration and to a home dominated by dead bodies."

Though not always mired in morbidity, it was hardly a regular upbringing --- the family could be called back from anywhere, even a vacation in Florida, for a death in Jubilee, Kentucky. For several days then, there would be no shouting, laughing, television or music upstairs, where the family resided, while the rites of death proceeded downstairs. Frank was known for womanizing and he drank too much, while his wife, Lily, suffered in mostly silent sacrifice. Mayfield found the local cemetery a place of solitary solace and, indeed, happy childhood play. Choosing a black boyfriend in high school in that hypocritical era all but destroyed her social life.

One sister was bipolar at a time when mental illness was not spoken of, and it was later learned that Frank suffered from PTSD, rarely discussed and little understood, as the only survivor when his entire platoon was killed during World War II. Frank was the best, maybe the only, friend of Miss Agnes, ancient occupant of the town’s gothic mansion and often took his daughter to visit her. The grande dame, dressed in red down to her underwear, introduced the girl to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. 

If anyone had a childhood worth fleeing, it was Kate Mayfield, and going away to college was the first step in that process. Frank’s death brought her back. The account of the last rites of “the undertaker in the casket” is something of a dark highlight, though, as if, in preparation, the book is interspersed with vivid descriptions of the funerals her father orchestrated --- from a drowned 11-year-old classmate to the town reprobate, whose wife did not recognize him after Frank’s thorough ministrations (“for the first time in his career, my father bought scouring powder”).

Though richly redolent of an earlier era, THE UNDERTAKER’S DAUGHTER inevitably raises questions about what we all must face when loved ones pass and everything usual and bright in our lives must be set aside, as it was for Mayfield, while rituals of death hold sway. Looking back, Mayfield feels fortunate to have had the experience of her youth among the departed, believing that it gave her “an eagerness to test the thumping breast of life.”