All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak

A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter

By: Caleb Wilde

Narrated by: Kyle Tait

What if our dead remain with us? What if closure is not the goal? No matter what you believe about the afterlife, what if the hereafter intersects with the here and now?

Caleb Wilde, author of the acclaimed memoir Confessions of a Funeral Director, was a skeptic. The baffling stories people told him—deathbed visions of long-dead parents, visits from the other side—must be hallucinations or wishful thinking, he thought. But the more stories he heard, and the more he learned about non-Western understandings of body and spirit, the less sure he was.

All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak takes listeners on a lyrical and tender quest to encounter the hereafter. As Wilde picks up bodies, organizes funerals, and meets with grieving families in a small town in Pennsylvania, those who remain share with him—and us—what they experience in the thin places between life and death. Entwining these stories with his own as a sixth-generation funeral director, and with the findings of neuroscience and the solace of faith, Wilde creates a searching, reverent inquiry into all the ways our dead remain with us. In the process, he takes on prevailing dogmas about death: from a narrow Christian view of heaven and hell, to secular assumptions that death is the end, to pop-psychology maxims that say we all need "closure" after our loved ones die.

©2022 Caleb Wilde (P)2022 eChristian

Challenging, insightful, & entertaining.

the reader sounded a bit "wooden" but the content was so engaging that I got used to it quickly. Oddly the "performance" eventually even added to add to the topic & the book.

An Interesting story with good narrative

I thought that for the most part this was an interesting book and story, however, it had very slow parts which made me wonder why I choose to read it.

Enjoyable!

Good story with open thoughts on the way our dead still speak from the afterlife.
Read it. You just might open yourself to new exciting thoughts on the mystery of love’s continuation.

Disappointed

The few good parts were drowned out by using the book as a political and social justice platform.

Death & life

What an awesome book. It would change from facts combined with a stories, theories. I initially was bored but as normal but the author slowly pulled me in with small details until I couldn’t wait for what was next. I was disappointed when the book ended as I could have been happy to listen longer.