Daily Inspiration Quote by Jessica Mitford

A polite disclaimer detonates into an accusation: Mitford opens with the social lubricant of “nothing against... personally,” then yanks it away with the brutally specific “bury my sister.” The comedy is surgical. She’s not attacking an individual undertaker’s character; she’s indicting an industry whose incentives go sour the moment grief walks in the door. The line works because it mimics the tone of genteel fairness while smuggling in moral revulsion. It’s the kind of sentence you could say at a dinner party and still watch the table freeze.

The subtext is class critique disguised as manners. “Undertakers” aren’t merely workers here; they’re gatekeepers of a ritual that families feel they can’t refuse. By naming “my sister,” Mitford personalizes what is usually treated as tasteful, private business. Death care sells itself as compassion, but the quote suggests a transactional intimacy: they touch your loved one, manage your last images, and send the bill. The unease isn’t about death; it’s about being vulnerable in a marketplace.

Context matters: Mitford’s journalism, especially The American Way of Death, exposed funeral practices as a kind of high-pressure retail, draped in velvet and euphemism. This line compresses her whole project into a single jab. It’s witty, but the wit is doing work: puncturing the taboo that protects profiteering. By refusing the respectful distance we’re trained to keep around funerals, she makes the reader feel the scam where it actually lives - in the moment a family is too sad to bargain.