Grave Undertakings

by Mosca, Alexandra K.

• ISBN13: 9780882822235
• ISBN10: 0882822233
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: New Horizon Press

Summary

When strangers meet beautiful, personable Alexandra Mosca and learn what she does, at first they ask, Is this some kind of joke? But they soon find out she is dead serious and committed to her profession. Most people have difficulties believing it, but Alexandra Mosca is a funeral director and she has posed for Playboy.

With the recent scandal over bodies discovered at a Georgia crematorium, politicians and news-casters are asking if funeral businesses should be regulated more strictly. Here is an insider, a female funeral director with provocative answers. Alexandra Mosca's questions about the business began when she attended a funeral director's institute and found only 13 percent of the students in the industry were women and gender discrimination was rampant. Nevertheless, she became a pioneering female in the funeral business.

Mosca fascinates readers with firsthand insights and unforgettable anecdotes, shocked reactions when people learn what she does, the "Embalmer's 28 Commandments, " how she deals with the emotional side of coping with death on a d

Table of Contents

Prologue	1	(10)
Grim Ambitions	11	(18)
A Hypochondriac's Worst Nightmare	29	(18)
Gender and Other Differences	47	(10)
You Don't Look Like an Undertaker	57	(22)
It's a Tough Job, But Somebody's Got to Do It	79	(22)
A Woman to Die For	101	(18)
People Are Dying to Meet Me	119	(20)
Dead Ends	139	(18)
Promise Them Anything	157	(18)
Death Takes a Holiday	175	(22)
``Do You Embalm in the Nude?''	197	(12)
Buried in My Work	209	(12)
Only the Dead Know Brooklyn	221	(14)
It's a Dying Business	235	(14)
Days of Joy, Days of Grief	249	(18)
Flight 587	267	(12)
The Funeral of John Gotti	279	(12)
Epilogue	291	(6)
Appendix: Funeral Arrangement Tips	297