In Wake-Up Calls, Lisa Baue reflects on a lifetime in funeral service, beginning with the shattering 2 a.m. phone call announcing her father’s sudden death and moving through her transformation from grieving daughter and uncertain young funeral director into owner, mentor, coach, and advocate for women in deathcare. The book is both memoir and leadership meditation, shaped around the hard-earned triad of “head, heart, and grit.” Baue writes about inheriting responsibility before she felt ready, learning from mentors, failing in painful ways, changing the culture at Baue Funeral Homes, and finally widening her mission to support a profession that, in her view, must learn to care for its own people as tenderly as it cares for grieving families.

What struck me most was the honesty of Baue’s self-portrait. She doesn’t polish herself into an emblem of effortless resilience. She lets us see the woman sitting in her father’s office, overwhelmed by the smell of his pipe tobacco and cologne, asking aloud what she’s supposed to do now. She lets us see the absurd human details too, such as the roll of toilet paper trailing behind her as she collapses into the arms of her managers. The writing is plainspoken rather than ornate, but it often lands with quiet force because Baue trusts lived experience over performance. I found her strongest when she stays close to memory: her grandfather teaching grit through the bucking ponies Thunder and Lightning, the letter from her father urging the family to sell the business, the professional gatherings where she learned to hold her place in a man’s world, and the aching recognition that leadership can cost a family more than anyone admits in the moment.

I also appreciated the complexity of the ideas. Baue’s insistence on “head, heart, and grit” could have become a slogan, but the best chapters deepen it into something sturdier. Grit is not merely endurance. Heart is not softness. Head is not cold calculation. Together, they become a philosophy of humane leadership, one tested through grief, staffing challenges, business mistakes, work-life imbalance, and the painful 360-degree evaluation that forced her to confront how her own team felt unseen. I was especially moved by the later material on burnout and emotional boundaries, including her distinction between sympathy and empathy while serving the family of a boy whose face so closely resembled her son’s. That scene unsettled me in the best way. It reminded me that funeral service asks people to stand at the edge of other people’s devastation and remain both present and intact. Baue’s larger argument, that the deathcare profession must offer mentorship, fairer conditions, and real leadership development, especially for women entering the field, feels not abstract but embodied.

Wake-Up Calls felt to me like a book born from bruises, not theory. I closed the book with respect for Baue’s candor, her grief, her stubborn tenderness, and her refusal to separate business excellence from emotional responsibility. This is a thoughtful and affecting read for funeral directors, deathcare professionals, women in leadership, family business owners, mentors, and anyone trying to lead with both competence and a living, listening heart.

Pages: 199 | ASIN: B0FMH2SS7B