All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak: A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter

Written 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ChristianAudio.com
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781545920671

Caleb Wilde

Caleb Wilde is a partner at his family’s business, Wilde Funeral Home, in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania. He writes the popular blog Confessions of a Funeral Director and recently completed postgraduate work at Winchester University, England, in the program, “Death, Religion and Culture.” He has been featured in top media outlets, including The Huntington Post, The Atlantic, and TIME magazine, and on NPR, NBC, and ABC’s 20/20.

Reviews for All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak

[Caroline Page · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was good but a little too Christian/Godly for me

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Broadleaf Books asked for a "progressive" take on life after death, and Caleb Wilde, a sixth-generation funeral home director and graduate student in theology, delivered. Wilde fills his book with fictionalized anecdotes about helping clients cope with loss, thoughts about therapy, and musings about anti-racism and the limitations of Enlightenment-influenced (read: white) ways of thinking about life. On top of all that, Wilde, a self-described "skeptic", ponders the existence of an afterlife, and concludes that "eternal life is love in process". The text is moving in some places and too preachy in others. Still, Wilde’s observations are well worth considering.