Caleb Wilde is a sixth-generation funeral director who wants to reacquaint us all with the uncomfortable, eye-opening realities of death. It’ll make us more human, he says. If it doesn’t kill him first.

By Eric Puchner
Photographs by Matt Eich

I was in the crematory with two fresh deliveries when my host, a mortician named Caleb Wilde, opened the bag containing one of the bodies and began to massage its chest. The body was the color of an uncooked hot dog. It was also obese, and rubbery, and had what I was slow to recognize as breasts. Caleb explained that he was feeling for a pacemaker. Pacemakers tend to explode at high temperatures, and any damage to one of the crematory’s quarter-million-dollar ovens would be on the Wilde Funeral Home. Even with the ovens set to “slow roast,” as the cremator put it, the buggers could go off.

Caleb stopped, massaged, then stopped again, as though he felt something under the skin. “Too big to be a morphine pump,” he said cheerfully. At 32 years old, fresh-faced and boyishly handsome, he looks less like an undertaker than like the member of an a cappella group. He strapped on some gloves and asked the cremator for a scalpel. It’s hard for me to describe what happened next. Do you know the scene in Indiana Jones and the…