A great characterization of the industry and of the faces behind it. Modern society is oddly sequestered from the reality of death. The thought of death in the concrete sense only strikes most of us unbidden in sharp, unsettling reminders. The author of the article doesn't seem to assert a strong position on whether we ought to become more familiarly acquainted with death; he describes Caleb's serenity, but also the horror of the job:

Some things we see will remain with us forever, Caleb admits on his blog. They are so disturbing, so terrible, that we do the world a favor by not sharing them. Maybe there was no winning the staring contest with death.

Here's a poem by Philip Larkin that describes that moment of knowing death whole:

  Ambulances

  Closed like confessionals, they thread
  Loud noons of cities, giving back
  None of the glances they absorb.
  Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
  They come to rest at any kerb:
  All streets in time are visited.

  Then children strewn on steps or road,
  Or women coming from the shops
  Past smells of different dinners, see
  A wild white face that overtops
  Red stretcher-blankets momently
  As it is carried in and stowed,

  And sense the solving emptiness
  That lies just under all we do,
  And for a second get it whole,
  So permanent and blank and true.
  The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
  They whisper at their own distress;

  For borne away in deadened air
  May go the sudden shut of loss
  Round something nearly at an end,
  And what cohered in it across
  The years, the unique random blend
  Of families and fashions, there

  At last begin to loosen. Far
  From the exchange of love to lie
  Unreachable inside a room
  The traffic parts to let go by
  Brings closer what is left to come,
  And dulls to distance all we are.