Word: mortician
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...welladjusted mid-twentieth century man, beautifully trained to a high level of mass consumption. This man is extremely difficult to describe as one who finds his ultimate concern in death, let alone God. Death tends to become a technical matter, representing more the struggle between the physician and the mortician than between life and death. He is anxious, disquieted and often desperate, but his anxieties seem oriented around his professional and social status, his sexual relations, and the dislocations of a revolutionary world...
...recent de parture from Hollywood, explains the aging matinee idol, was an example of "the sinking ship leaving the rats." Like Jean Kerr, a third character is full of electric shock: "A lawyer," he says, "is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, any more than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table...
Colleagues sometimes tease Astronomer Willem J. Luyten of the University of Minnesota by calling him a "stellar mortician" because of his passionate interest in dying stars. Luyten does not mind the ribbing; the faint pinpoints of light that he studies are the end products of stellar evolution and hold many secrets of the universe. Recently, Astronomer Luyten found the dimmest star yet: a minuscule "white dwarf that emits 50,000 times less light than the sun, yet probably contains an equal or greater mass. "This one," he says, "looks to be at the end of the line...
Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse. A young mortician's clerk in Yorkshire dreams of London but succeeds, in this slightly muddled comic novel, only in losing his head while all about him are keeping theirs...
Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse. The highly comic tale of a Yorkshire mortician's clerk who, Dick Whittington fashion, dreams of London but misplaces his cat and never gets there...