Grave Undertakings

Grave Undertakings by Mosca, Alexandra K.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780882822235.

These days, with enrollment in mortuary schools equally divided between men and women,. most forget that female funeral directors were once a rarity. While the public face of funeral service was slow to change, when it did there was nobody more public than Alexandra Kathryn Mosca. Detouring from her chosen path to become a writer, Mosca found funeral service. Or, more accurately, funeral service found her. Grave Undertakings is a memoir of Moscas singularly unique career. As a beautiful young woman immersed in a male dominated, mostly family-owned industry, she also kept a foot in the glamorous worlds of acting and modeling. Her ultimate experience as a model --a pictorial in Playboy--set the industry abuzz and seemed to spell doom for her career. Instead, her career continued to flourish, and her writing career was born. The book traces Moscas career path from her earliest days in funeral service: working as a receptionist in a funeral home in Queens, New York, while attending college. It was there that she witnessed her first embalming, an experience she chronicled in great detail. Heres an excerpt: "On what seemed an endless row of old, cracked, discolored porcelain tables lay dead bodies in varying degrees of preparation. Embalming machines whirred around me. I would have thought the gray-haired woman on the table nearest to me as sleeping, if it werent for the inch-long incision I saw in her neck. Lying on the table next to her was a dark-haired man who had been autopsied. His chest cavity was completely open and an embalmer was reaching in with his hands and removing the deceaseds internal organs one by one, tossing them in a nearby bucket filled with formalin. The cadavers skull plate had been removed as well, and was now resting on the sink. With his scalp pulled over his face, the dead man looked as though he was wearing a ghoulish Halloween mask. An even more gruesome sight caught my attention at another table." Her experiences in a New York City mortuary school --where the class practiced embalming on the unclaimed bodies in Bellevue Hospitals morgue --is equally comprehensive. Included are accounts of the dark days of the tragedies of Sept. 11th and Flight 587, balanced by the spectacle that was the funeral of Mob boss John Gotti. Mosca also shares a rare entrée into the private world of Playboy magazine. Grave Undertakings is as relevant today as it was when it was first published.For those interested in learning about a career as a funeral director, this book is a "must read."