Silent Siren

Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician

By: Matthew Franklin Sias

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Paramedics save lives. Morticians bury their mistakes.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

Often intense, at times gruesome, and frequently humorous, this memoir takes you from the back seat of the medic unit racing to the hospital with a trauma patient, to the brightly lit embalming room of a funeral home, and everywhere in between. Having the ability to calmly assist a person in crisis is, perhaps, one of life's most awesome privileges.

©2018 Matthew Franklin Silas (P)2019 Tantor

Most informative

Great detail in the workings of being a doctor, EMT and Funeral Director. Now I know how an autopsy is done and how someone is embalmed. A better understanding of a friends’ job, who is a pathologist that does autopsies. This book is not for someone who is squeamish.

Good Book

I enjoyed listening to this book. I personally know Matt and I think he did a great job writing this book. The downside is the reader. he doesn't know how to say a lot of the words in the book and instead of finding out just guessed. Still a good book and worth a read or listen.

Best book ever!

This book accurately portrays the experiences in life and death of 3 phases of care. Prehospital, coroner and funeral home. It is very precise with the actual details and if you have ever served in any one of these three capacities you will be able to identify with his descriptions. Thihs is by far one of the best audible books I have ever listened to. I have served and am still serving as a paramedic (40 years now) and as a Coroner (12 years now). Amazing listen!!

Informative. Compassionate.

I love how this author has such a passion for compassion. There are many stories of patients, both here and gone-all told with brilliant observation to each one in order to handle them with such compassion.
It amazes me that a person is compelled to serve the dead with the utmost dignity and respect, even when nobody, including the patient (?) is looking.

Well written book

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book telling the stories of a young boy turned paramedic in the Pacific Northwest. His writing portrayed the scenes vividly and I felt like I was standing in the room. While many stories ended sadly there were plenty of happy outcomes as well. Later in the book he talks about his transition to undertaker and that was interesting how he combined the two jobs for a short time. What I didn't appreciate was his incessant fat-shaming of clients while he went to scenes as a paramedic. Once I could maybe tolerate but clearly he had an issue with overweight people or as he called them, morbidly obese. He talked a lot about how compassionate he was in his job. But his compassion clearly wasn't available for the overweight population. For this I took off one star. Maybe I should have taken off two. It just wasn't necessary. It didn't add anything to the book at all.