America Tonight: Amber Lenore Weaver, “Into The Hands of Strangers: An Autopsy Embalmer’s Tale”

The book Into The Hands of Strangers: An Autopsy Embalmer’s Tale by Amber Lenore Weaver may seem like a typical exposé of highly stressful workplaces and unhealthy, confining office cultures. However, hers was no white-collar corporate job. Amber is actually a licensed funeral director and mortician whose book gives a visceral portrayal of how even those same professional problems are just as prevalent in the death care space.

On “America Tonight with Kate Delaney,” Amber talked about her career and how she went about turning her experiences into these immersive, fascinating reads.

The Beginning After the End

What’s interesting is that Amber wrote her book right after she had ended her career at the San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office.

At the time, she could hardly even process the dynamics that led to her departure. What she was sure of doing, however, was to still journal her thoughts like she always did.

It was just that after this pivotal point in her life, she decided to take all the entries she had written and transform them into a gripping work of fiction.

Publishing an Embalmer’s Life Story

Of course, her journaling habit was something that she practiced even long before she started working at the Medical Examiner. One of her other books, The Final Bath, actually chronicles her apprenticeship years sometime during her twenties.

And true to her age back then, she was full of both naivety and confidence. The escapades she narrates in this other book proved to be such funny yet guttural reads that it remains her best-selling work. To this day, she still sees plenty of apprentice embalmers read it. The fondness she has had for those years has never really faded (and her house still even has a couple of the older embalming machines they trained on back in those days).

Suffocating Workplace in Extraordinary Environments

In contrast, her career at the Medical Examiner was both the most turbulent yet also most stifling years she had spent as an embalmer.

Into the Hands of Strangers is simply packed with details on how an ambitious mortician like her landed a job at something straight out of crime investigation thrillers. The book demonstrates how her knowledge of vascular anatomy as well as procedures like artery injection have aided in investigations for bullet wounds and other crime-related causes of death. It had her working alongside a wide cast of incredible people, including detectives, doctors, technicians, and more. Compared to the friendly, family mortuary she came from, her colleagues were some of the toughest, grittiest people she ever knew.

Despite this exciting backdrop, however, Into the Hands of Strangers reveals the immense tension of the staff, the harshness of the work culture as well as the draconic restrictions imposed upon her when on the job.

Future Works and Themes

The experiences that Amber went through at the Medical Examiner didn’t make much sense until long after she had left. Looking back, she realized that she had at least accurately captured not just her own feelings about her workplace but those of other colleagues as well as many workers in the mortuary business. A couple of the investigators she worked with had even sent her their thanks for helping them process their own traumas.

Having also been a manager herself at one point, she knows that such safeguards are viable for those in the business (if not necessary). The emotional toll of having to help grieving families while having to be comfortable around dead bodies can sometimes take an entire month to decompress from.

On the upside, they certainly gave her much material to work with, even serving as enough fuel for another upcoming book (which will explore the more spiritual dimensions and struggles of people working in the mortuary).

Because at the end of the day, despite the heart-pounding backdrop of autopsy tables, fluid machines, and body bags, Amber wants to let readers know that death care workers are all just as human as the rest. You can check out the full interview over at the ReadersMagnet YouTube channel. Into The Hands of Strangers: An Autopsy Embalmer’s Tale by Amber Lenore Weaver is available on Amazon.