At forty-four, Tom Jokinen decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker, setting out to ask the questions: What is the right thing to do when someone dies? With the marketplace offering new options (go green, go anti-corporate, go Disney, be packed into an artificial reef and dropped in the Atlantic...), is there still room for tradition? In a year of adventures both hair-raising and hilarious, Jokinen finds a world that is radically changed since Jessica Mitford revised The American Way of Death , more surprising than Six Feet Under , and even funnier and more illuminating than Stiff . If Bill Bryson were to apprentice at a funeral home, searching for the meaning of life and death, you'd have Curtains .