The Mortuary Show
Alternative Death Care š«Ø
Episode 117:Ā We're taking a closer look at the community death care movement with funeral director and advocate William Turner Heath. From the growing shift towards personalized, alternative end-of-life practices to the role of death doulas, weāre diving into how the funeral industry is changingāand why it needs to.
We'll talk about how funeral homes can better serve diverse communities, adapt to modern consumer needs, and why some death doulas are steering clear of becoming funeral directors (hint: itās got a lot to do with industry toxicity). Oh, and did we mention psychedelics in end-of-life care? Yeah, we're going there too.
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation thatās anything but business as usual.
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Show Notes:
(07:45) ā End of life doulas.
(15:32) ā Can bridges be built?
(21:06) ā What are some of the most adaptive things out there?
(38:08) ā Psychedelics.
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Takeaways
- The community death care movement advocates for personalized and alternative end-of-life practices.
- End-of-life doulas play a crucial role in providing holistic care and support during the dying process.
- Funeral homes need to adapt to changing consumer preferences and modernize their services.
- There is a need for better communication and collaboration between funeral directors and end-of-life doulas.
- The traditional funeral industry is facing challenges due to staff shortages and resistance to change. Funeral homes need to be more flexible and adaptable to different types of services
- Cultural humility is important in serving diverse communities
- The community death movement is growing, and there is a need for legal support and guidance
- Death doulas are reluctant to become licensed funeral directors due to the sexism and toxicity in the industry
- Psychedelics are being explored for their therapeutic value in end-of-life care
- Broadcast on:
- 17 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) - William, you gotta give me the rundown. What is the community death care movement? It's something that I'm not too familiar with and I would love an expert to give me the high level of what that means and then let's get deep and figure out what it is and what's the movement that's going on that you're seeing. - Absolutely. My name is William Turner Heath and I soon will be William Turner Vonesh. I am about to get married this year. My background is in our history and I am claiming this term and maybe inventing this term but also this term exists way before me because we've been taking care of the dead before funeral homes existed and before big funeral was even the thing. So community death care for me is the third wave of the death positive movement. For me, Jessica Mifford is our OG. She came and rumbled and she critiqued the industry and it created a lot of people who were angry and frustrated but that book is really an important book and we all learned about it when we go to school. Next, we have an important person who many funeral directors aren't the hugest fan of. Caitlin Doherty, Ask Mortician on YouTube is a really important intellectual. She comes out of art and that was a really big deal for me. She gave me a space to bring my practice as a curator and an art historian to bring it into death care work because I've been studying churches, shamanic practices, spiritual practices and artifacts for decades because that's the work I used to do. And when I happened upon her book one day when I was in Miami at the Yacht Club and I found, get smoke in your eyes, it blew my mind. And for me, I had already been thinking of death care work and it was a divine kind of God-wink that said, you need to do this and go and do it. As you were saying, this Elizabeth Fonieri just started following me, the green reaper who I'm obsessed with and love with and she's on the advisory board for Miami Day College and I'm so excited that to be able to just rep elbows with her, she's such a great resource. There's so many amazing people in the industry who I feel like I stand on the shoulders of or I'm able to do the work I do because they've been doing this work. Amy Cunningham in New York, Elizabeth Fonier and the West Coast, all the end of life duelers who have been around since ages ago and then all the grandmas who 100, 200 years ago, they were just doing this, like they didn't. We don't give them credit for this but like we've been taking care of the dead before they were funeral homes forever. It's not a big deal. - Yeah, so the movement I guess itself is taking care of your loved ones personally and not going through a funeral home. Is that the overarching theme of what it is a little bit? - I think there can be a way the last seven weeks I've been traveling all over the United States trying to observe different communities doing this. There's no one way to this but up in the Northwest towards Francesca Arnaldi up in Vermont and then upstate New York we have Omega houses which are a beautiful thing which are homes in which people go and are able to pass away in a domestic and tranquil space and I was in Kingston, New York two years ago 'cause I'm shooting a documentary and I'm the main character in the documentary and I'm learning about this practice in Kingston, Florida which is kind of the New Brooklyn of New York after COVID everyone's skadabled upstate and Kingston is blowing up and is really hot and Woodstock is cool as hell. I don't know if you're allowed to cuss on this website. - Bring it on. - We have people kind of accessing the old wisdom and people who have intentional community around death care and it doesn't mean we're in opposition to funeral homes but quite frankly, we have the largest history of the generation of our country coming to end of life and we do not have the staff to handle this period. We have crazy workplace shortages right now by work for the independent directors, the IFDF, independent funeral directors of Florida and my job is to help students navigate school, getting licensed and then the interpersonal conflicts that happen when you work for a silent Jen, angry, angry funeral home owner who doesn't want you to have hot pink hair and care of hair sings and like doesn't like that you have this different belief around what end of life should look like because the traditions that they behold dear to them are Victorian Edwardian, they're all European sensibilities and they think that if you have a way about doing things that isn't that, you are rude, disrespectful and you're there to create disruption and they're the old way and we have three years before basically the entire industry implodes. We are right now in the shift which is the issue of the magazine that just came out from the NFD 'cause we're in the shift right now. We're about to go from silent Jen running the show to maybe Jen X funeral home owners and those are very different people. Think about the kind of media silent Jen was watching and then think about Jen X is watching married with children they cause like sailors, they don't give a damn about change, they want it and I'm so excited to be in this storm that's happening right now which is huge earth shaking paradigm shifts are happening right now in death care. - Yeah, there's definitely a lot of changes on the cost and everyone can kind of sense it. I totally agree with what you say that the shortage of staff is massive so we have to figure out ways that we're gonna be able to serve all of our families and our loved ones. - We can't, there's not enough people and so what I've been doing the last few years is trying to get funeral directors to be friends with end of life doulas. There is an army of largely women with high emotional intelligence that used to be hospice workers, nurses, social workers are in like massage and all of these kind of healing arts and I've been begging, begging, begging for funeral homeowners to consider these folks as auxiliary staff, begging. I am on the board of directors of the Florida end of life doula alliance. We're about to launch our directory and that directory is going to have a robust directory of end of life doulas from the keys to Panama City and all the way down. We have doulas who are active doulas who are ready to sit vigil and then we have passive doulas that are grief educators or they do some special focus and have sort of end of life services. Funeral directors would be really wise to figure out who they have in their community because you quite frankly don't have the staff. You're angry that 20 year olds who are coming into the industry have hot pink hair and nose piercings and are kind of goth or kind of a little eccentric. Like you're not always going to have a me, me, my fan, me, me, the mortician who is an influencer online. You're not all going to have these kind of like dream boat presenting to the public in this way that you want to have and you better just learn to deal with the next generation because you don't have the staff and right now you're burnt out, you're angry and I see a lot of workplace bullying. I see a lot of melting down. I have had conversations in which people's co-workers have slashed their tires. They have assaulted co-workers. We are in a dangerous place right now and I am setting up a hot line, a crisis hot line for funeral directors right now. - Yeah, it is tough and I've been there myself just that burnout is real 'cause you're working overtime, you're working constant just to keep up with and we're doing the job of probably what a person and a half was doing maybe back in the day when there was way more volume of people coming into the industry. So we have to figure out ways that how are we going to be able to do this? I'd love to talk about a couple of things that you said. First off, I would love to hear more about what these mega houses are that's really intriguing to me and so it's sort of like a replacement-ish to a hospice center but more of a communal base. What is that exactly? - I mean, look, I'm not an authority on this but this is a model that exists and I think you see places like Asheville which has like the Olympic duolas of death duolas or end of life, duolas and Asheville where they're basically this model of a mega house is like the most gorgeous and beautiful kind of space in which a home domestic setting exists. It's a place for people to pass but they actually have palliative care or they have medical integrated into the system. That is the dream of dreams and there's a film called The Last Extatic Days that I'm helping to promote and tour in September about this model. So you can observe this model in this film, The Last Extatic Days and I can send you a link and people can pay you to watch this film but why just back to like a hundred years ago their house is throughout the New England areas and it's simply a home where someone can go and be because you know what? A few people want to go and die in a hospital. That is not a death that as many people want to have but the medicalized death is, it's alienating. We saw a lot of people during COVID have to pass away in hospitals and not have anything out of your family and that was devastating for our country. That was a traumatic event for our country and baby boomers who are coming up next to the end of life end zone, they have zero desire to die in this way. They want to be home. But it depends on the resources you have to do that. In many instances, women outlive the kind of people in their family and are often left at end of life with no one to take care of them even though they have taken care of anyone else. So the Omega House for the research I've done is a rebuttal is an answer to this situation in which community helps you in end of life and that means many things but it means physically being able to go somewhere and hospice to serve you. And so you become a surrogate family and the people who run these spaces are your surrogate family. They don't become like doulas or never medical. A lot of doulas have medical backgrounds but they cannot touch that stuff because they do not have a license or that allows them to. And so they are facilitators who quite frankly, typically do have medical backgrounds and they help people at the end of life have the best death they can have. They can have the good death which is a privileged and beautiful thing that people can have agency and autonomy to die in the way they want to. And that can touch on a variety of things of legacy work. Maybe that means they have control over their body depending upon the medical aid and dying conversation per state and some states that don't have that then V said can be enacted which is voluntary stopping and eating and drinking but also they can control the flow of people coming in and out of the room. They can do all the things and Francesca Arnaldi is a brilliant thinker around this topic and I highly recommend you interview her. She's been my mentor through the University of Vermont program that I did along with Dr. Chang who's in New York City. - Interesting. So when someone is opting for this choice how far along are they or how close are they typically to I suppose you would say the other side because as we know when you are to that state a lot of times you're not in the physical or mental space to be able to make those decisions. So is that something you talk about prior to? - Yeah, getting your fears. - How does it happen? - Getting your fears in longer for the end which is a phrase that I steal from Karen Martinu from bevival.com. The death literacy and preparing long before the end is essential. We must stop this insane cycle in which we're dealing with end of like affairs as death is literally happening. You can't roll into the end zone with no game plan. It's just not gonna go well. - Yeah, that's super interesting. And how long are typically people there? Is it people that live there for a quite a long period of time and who are the, is it mostly death doulas that are working at these spaces or? - This is, I'm trying to wrap, you know. - This is cutting a hell of a roof. Like this is the old way. This is the old way, but we have not formalized what this means. We have, I basically am traveling from village to village to village trying to find the people doing this work. And we're scattered all over the United States. Like there's doulas in Chicago that are really organized. There's doulas in Colorado that they're quite organized. We have doulas in the Pacific Northwest. We just have all these clusters. And these clusters they a little bit know about each other, but because I'm getting a state association organized and we just got rid of the word association and became an alliance as we became a nonprofit because we've been looking around to see who is doing this work. We're starting to kind of put a pins in the board and figure out where these communities are organizing. In my own state, well, we have a state association. We have clusters of people in Sarasota that are very organized and they're a team of people. They're like quite frankly, they're like the local volunteer firefighters in the town. Like they just said, I care about this topic. Let's have meetings and then suddenly now they're having like death overdrafts and they're hanging out like Lynne Principe out in Dunedin, Tampa area. And she's just like a one-woman universe who is just doing this work and doing national speaking. We've got Ashley Johnson over at Orlando, who's the president of NEDA. We have Enilda, which is international. NEDA, which is national. And then we're seeing collectives all over the United States. And basically because funeral homes are so resistant to change, the public is just taking it in their own hands. And I am a funeral director who believes in all the things because my job is to hold space for whatever people want and not to push my agenda. That's the key. That's what we do. Our job is to hold space for the public and what they want. The problem is that there's all this fighting because the business model of traditional funeral homes is exploding right now. Yeah, it's a tough time to be, you know, a funeral home. There's a lot of changes and there's so much overhead to that traditional model that the most there has needs to be. I've been with a friend of mine who had been working on a pilot pitch to Netflix in which I queer eye funeral homes and I roll in with 30K and I help funeral homes free jigger their business because quite frankly, most funeral homes, unless they're doing over 150 cases a year, they need smaller footprints. They need less cars, less staff, more automation and more leveraging the resources they have because they cannot continue doing what they've been doing because people don't want $12,000 funeral homes anymore. Nobody wants them and they're angry that people don't want this. And so they're just running around sulking and scolding because people don't want what they got. Right, and I think it's good because I think a lot of us do our very best to try to give back like we were saying to the individuals and try to make whatever service that they want and make it to the best of ability and really cater to the individual as opposed to forcing things upon making it really about who they are as a person or what the family's wishes are. And I think as long as we're doing that, that's we're serving as best as we can. I think that's really what it comes down to is the most important and not forcing anything out of anyone and giving people options when the time does come. I think that's how we can continue to grow and to help more and more people. It's absolutely imperative to do those sorts of things. - It's so imperative, but unfortunately we have all these funeral homes, these bloated properties. They've got too many vehicles. Their chapel sits empty too frequently. The decor of the space is so depressing. I feel like I walk into funeral homes and the tears of thousands of people are in the carpet. And I'm like, can we get some new carpet here? Can we have some new wallpaper? Can we have a little bit of a reef-ish? I feel like I'm in the psychic energy of grief from thousands and thousands of people in this room because these rooms are so dated and so oppressive and they feel like man-cave space and like they don't resonate with people anymore. And I'm like, can we just do a refresh? Can we go like funeral home by funeral home and just give them a little bit of a refresh because they're so dated, they're not willing to change. And when people who can see the future, 'cause I am one of those people, I try and watch for funeral industry, they get so angry at me. I am so frequently attacked on the internet. I have people sending me hate mail. I've been a funeral director for three years. I have hate mail, I have bullying online and I'm a really tough person, I can take it. But these people are seething with rage because the new generation is here and they're quite frankly not gonna be able to get out of their funeral home and sort of get what they want out of it financially because no one wants these dinosaur buildings with these infrastructure that's breaking down. The prep room needs to be completely overhauled because blood's coming out of the floor. It's like a horror movie, these funeral homes and they need to be smaller and more concise because consumers more often than not are going to direct disposers and they no longer want anything to do with you and you're gonna go have a pout over there? No, go get a catering people, go have a cocktail, go bring in interesting people. Let's have new music come in. Let's get our streaming services in order. Let's have some morifolders that don't look like 1985. Like let's modernize ceremony and make space for people who do not have religious practices that are dominant. Like millennials are shifting off the charts. They do not want dogma. They do not want the Christian church. They want more open-ended things. They want celebrants. The number one thing if you know a home can do is to start bringing celebrants or training their staff to be celebrants. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a lot of funeral homes that are on the cutting edge and they want to do these things in their junior district. The general director of the year, Quinn is in Florida. That woman is brilliant. I just placed a student fingers crossed. Mott, one of my mentees is going to be working with Quinn and she's in the cover of the magazine. She is doing everything. She's doing pet cremation and that's driving her business. She has therapy miniature ponies. She has, I think, like a grief support dog. She's leveraging technology. She has like fun Gen X energy. She's like clearly spiritual, but also like it's okay if she cusses once in a while and listens to some music that's a little bit less traditional. She has like fresh energy. I'm so proud that Quinn, who's in our association, the IFDF, is like showing people the way. It's just like so clear. Go look and figure out who's figured it out because it's not that hard. You just have to be willing to embrace new things and be an early adopter, but funeral homes, quite honestly, are the last adopters. They never early adopt. And so the people who've grown up in the industry who are second or third gen have the support from their parents to do things that most funeral homes will not experiment with. - Mm, interesting. Yeah, and it's hard. I mean, coming from myself, I come from a family business and I found it very hard because you're pushing against 100 years of the way things were done. But thankfully, like my father, for example, is very open and willing to understand, like, hey, we need to adapt and grow. And that's the only way that we're gonna be able to continue to succeed is by revamping and growing with and just offering people the different options. I don't think there's anything wrong with traditional side. I don't think there's anything wrong with super new sort of funeral type of service, but it's finding that ability for your funeral home or whatever your practice is to offer all of those things to families. So that way everyone has an opportunity to go through this experience and make the most out of it. I think that's really, really crucial. And there are a lot of people. - We need to be more flexible. We need to be more flexible funeral directors that are gonna close in the next few years are rigid, judgy bitches. They're so, they think they're like the pastor of the town. Like, they're usually the most wealthy people in the town. They think they have the right to gee, keep culture and death. And quite frankly, they don't. Like, if someone wants to do a service that is non-traditional, who are they to say no? And the reason why they're gonna close down is because you know what? I'm all for whatever kind of service you wanna have my job as a funeral director is to be there to give you choices. Not to sort of be like, this is what I want you to do. I'm super out there. Like, I do really strange funerals because that's my public. And I'm inspired like people like Kim Bregriffen than Australia, who's the last to raw, who if you're on Instagram, please do yourself a favor and follow them. They're doing some of the most interesting funerals in the world. - Yeah. And I think that's what it all comes down to is offering those things and, you know, just operating from your heart and just being-- - Yeah, and having some cultural humility to not be so arrogant to think that you know the only way. I frequently work at Black funeral homes and it is an honor to be in the space where I'm the only white person in that funeral home. Traditionally, African American and Black funeral homes only have services on Saturdays. I don't know how that community does what they do. I see funeral homes have seven funerals in one day. Hell no, I do not want to live in that world, but also. Bring the bling, I want the doves, I want the matching airbrush t-shirts, I want all the cars, I want all the luxury. I am a natural burial. Like, I am so country and simple and like, I'm like spraying everyone with spray so they're not getting ticks. And at the end, I'm like, tick-checking all of my guests. And like, the sensibility of natural burial people couldn't be further from an African American praise and worship service. But I love both of those places. And I'm from Miami, Florida. I grew up not being around a lot of white people. I was a Jewish butler. I worked in Jamaican neighborhoods. My cultural humility is big. And that makes me adaptable. And it makes other funeral directors respect the fact that I can step into a space and check my preferences and biases and prejudices at the door because I am there to serve the family, period. - That's what it all comes down to. And I think that, you know, the vast, vast majority of us, that's why we get into this, is so that we can help people no matter what situation or circumstance and it's not becoming well-rounded and able to help out in any situation. And I think that is growing a lot. And it's a beautiful thing to see. - It's really beautiful. And quite frankly, the people who are unwilling to change, I'm gonna sing and dance on their graves when their funeral home closes because they are arrogant. They're so arrogant. And I don't care that they're gonna close. - Yeah, so did you work at one of, like an old school funeral home that you're talking about? - No, I worked at a funeral home that was like secretly crazy progressive. But also, like I frequently was abled with country folk, but I am super city. But like the way that I rock the appearance that I do is because I want my community to feel comfortable with me. And so I shape shift into whatever my community needs to me to be. So if you wanna drag me and celebrate, I can be that. But if you want someone who feels kind of country, maybe you might own a gun and drive a pickup, which I do, all of those things, I can be any of those things for you because my job is to be invisible. - That's the key. I think you gotta make it about the family and the food that they want. It's about us being the center. We're there to do the job and handle their love on with respect and dignity, perform the service that they need because it's not something that everyone is able to do or the 99% of people don't want to. And that's what we're here to do is to take care of something that's really delicate but very important at the same time. - It's really, and it's a hard thing to do to be both invisible and run in the show. That is a crazy, strong emotional. And so when I'm recruiting for funeral directors, I quite frankly, I'm looking for bartenders. I'm looking for veterans. I'm looking for people with extraordinary emotional intelligence, people who have emotional resilience. This job is not for the faint of hearts. If you shut up, if you, Becky, come in here for a second. You're gonna be, you're gonna get in it just then. - I mean, hello. - Say hi to cows. - Hello. - Yes, hello. - I'm staying with Becky May, who's a funeral director who I'm trying to get her jobs today and I get out of here. - Well, I just got off the phone with someone who likes me, but it's a whole different thing. - Okay, great. Get out of here. - So I'm frequently trying to find people who have the emotional resilience to do this work. - Yeah, and it's not for everyone. And that's why it is a tough thing because we're trying to get people to come and help in these circumstances. And it's not for everyone and it's not for someone that isn't able to handle some very challenging, physically and emotionally on a daily basis over and over again, it takes a toll. So you need to be strong and tough and focus on what's important and what you're doing to help other people. - Yeah, if your father or mother was a narcissist, please come on down. You are the perfect funeral director. (laughing) My dad was a narcissist. It's why I'm able to have so much resilience. - Yeah, yeah. So I guess I'd like to know more about like the community death movement. You know, what does that actually look like and what are people doing? And what are the legality behind that? Because obviously that's something that needs to be taken with a lot of care. - Oh, front and center. - The statutes, the statutes are front and center for me. So right now I have been in Tallahassee, Florida and I am helping a community that is trying to open up a natural barrel cemetery. My partner, Matthew and I drove up. We interviewed nine different people and created a promotional video that is about to launch in like a week. I'd love for some support and press going out for that. I need 100 people to pre-need to a cooperative of people. And so what that means is they're gonna spend $4,000 and they're gonna lock in their cemetery space. They're gonna, included in that is, will be discussed in the video essentially. And whether they work with a funeral home or not, we're gonna be able to provide what they need to do. I want people to work with funeral homes. I'm not someone who's trying to sort of like, I'm not a this or that person. Like I'm a whatever needs to be done person. And so like I'm a funeral director and when I work with funeral homes that get it, I want them to get as much business as I can get them. But a lot of funeral homes only wanna do things the way they wanna do things and natural burial communities, quite frankly, don't need what most of the things they offer. They need a death certificate, they need transport, they need refrigeration. That's it. Can you price me and package me something that's worth my time? Because you're giving me prices for the old system and I don't need to be paying $6,000 to get a death certificate and some refrigeration. I just don't. I live in a community in Gainesville where there are like renegade, like renegade people who started an organization called Final Friends. And I think very highly of them, they're very controversial, but they legally know that if they don't charge money, they can do everything that funeral directors do, everything. They're friends of the medical examiner, they're friends of the sheriff, they know the people who release the bodies at all the hospitals, they go pick people up, they take them to the cemetery at Puerto Rico Conservation Cemetery, and we're done. No money changes hands. I need to make a living, so that's not really gonna work for me. (laughs) But so I've been researching ways in which I can make a living and do this. And one of the ways I can do this is by being hired as a cemetery executive director. And so I'm looking for work in which someone would hire me as an executive director. And because I'm this hybrid thing, I can help people learn the rules, find the laws, and do what they wanna do. But if funeral homes would be more flexible to design packages for this public, they can make money, and they can do a pretty in-and-out kind of thing. We need some paperwork. That's it. We need you to go pick up, transport from the morgue, from the nursing home, and most traditionally from the home. And I'm gonna tell you, if they're stairs, I'm gonna tell you how much they weigh in, it's not gonna be a lie. I'm gonna give you the things you need, and I'm gonna basically have all the information you need ready for your desk certificate, and you can cut and paste that right into EDRS. We can call it a day because I just need paperwork from you. You are a legal check-in balance to make sure criminal activity doesn't happen, and that is sacred to me. - Yeah, that's right, it was gonna go next. - I've done home burials. It's legal. I've done home burials. I came and rolled into the house. They had an earth mover. I wished we had given them more guidelines because they digged a hole in the ground inside of a pool, and it was really dangerous kind of bringing the decedent into there. We tucked in his bushlight. I tucked in all of his sports hats. - Now we're talking. - The family smoked some weed. We had a little ceremony. It was badass. - Yeah. - I'm gonna need to make some guidelines for people, and also, I want GPS coordinates on the desk certificate. I wanna reach out to the medical examiner. I wanna reach out to the forensic anthropologist. I want the GPS coordinates where they need to be, and you better put this on the deed of your property because if someone goes to put a pool in and they find you, I'm gonna have a lawsuit on my hands, and I don't need that 'cause I don't have that kind of money to sort of battle those kinds of things. But again, a hundred years ago, this was no big deal. Like everyone's like, "How are we gonna do this?" And I was like, "Dude, we used to do this. "It wasn't that long ago." - Right, yeah. - It wasn't that long ago that we were doing this, and there are communities like in North Carolina where they never stopped doing this. There are six states where we cannot do this because kind of laws have been put into place, and those are the states where the lawsuits against death duels are happening. Or we have places like California, which is traditionally a pretty progressive state around end-of-life topics, sued a bunch of doulas and tried to take them out. But there's just no way we're gonna be able to stop this because we do not have the staff. And quite frankly, I don't want everyone just to go to direct cremation because that's the efficient way to go. I don't, I think ceremony is really sacred important. I think families need more than direct cremation. But also, like I said, I'm just a vessel. If direct cremation's your jam, have at it. It's a thousand dollars or less. And quite a lot of baby boomers are bored to tears with the kind of cookie cutter funerals that they have. Like it's like a joke at this point. - Yeah, I guess what I would say, so you're saying a thousand dollars less for cremation, obviously, you have those options for sure. How about the survival of these? Because it does, we need to be paying our individuals to be able to staff and transfer and all of that stuff. And all of it does add up. And it's not just like, that's what sometimes when people think it's so expensive. It's like, well, there is a lot of work that goes behind the scenes. So you have to try to find happiness. - But funeral homes need to sell cremations for three grand. And we all need to just get used to that as a price point. But that also means we need to shrink the overhead because quite frankly, unless you're the top tier and you're working with Walton Hong and like you're the number one or two because you're in a wealthy neighborhood, you've got a beautiful funeral home and people actually want to use your space. - Most funeral homes need to take a chainsaw to their buildings and shrink. They need to shrink or they need to just straight up sell the property, make a bunch of money because they're quite large properties and start a new funeral home. That is this fraction of the size. They need to shrink to the scale of what consumers want because consumers don't want what they got. - Yeah, I think I've been saying that for quite some time that the storefront properties that's going to be eventually the new way because we don't need the giant properties anymore. And it just, you have to adapt. - And before the commercial real estate collapses, please go and sell this property. You're gonna make a ton of money, make that money and start re-imagining what funeral homes are gonna look like. I truly think a television, a reality TV show in which people go and flip funeral homes and have really hard conversations would be a brilliant, brilliant idea. - People are always fascinated by what we do on a day-to-day basis, that's for sure. - Yeah. - You guys could totally property brother this and just be like, no, no, no, no, no. That would be hot, I would love it. - Maybe, I'll put that in the burger. I would definitely like to make some videos, a parody videos of that. I'll tell you that one. - Oh, that would be amazing, amazing. I wanna go in and be like, well, you've got a date tonight. We're gonna get you a new outfit. And then like, your consumer walks into the funeral home and they're like, it's like a date parody of something. - That's funny. - Wedding singer vibes, it would be hilarious. - Definitely. I have a question about like, the death duelist. So, you know, I understand what they do and the value of it. What is like the primary reason that maybe a death dueler wouldn't want to become a licensed funeral director? You know, they want to be able to do and handle this kind of thing. - I can answer that really easily. The funeral industry is crazy sexist. - Okay. - But it's obnoxious, the industry. I have so many young women who are being physically assaulted, sexually assaulted, toxically harassed, stalk. - Which is not okay, of course. - It's not okay. And I wanna do a panel discussion about how toxic the funeral industry is for people coming into the industry. Death duelers already know that this is what the industry is like and they don't want any part of it. I have friends who've tires been that slashed. I personally, as an intern, someone went into my computer and took a ram out of my computer so I would look less efficient as an employee. Little did they know I had requested a camera be installed to sort of watch my desk because I was experiencing constant and pervasive bullying by my manager. - That's terrible, I'm sorry. - I know multiple women who've been sexually assaulted in their internships. I know men who've been assaulted in their internships. I've heard so many stories about workplace bullying that quite frankly, death duelers are not interested in going through this. They're already professional women who do not need this license. - Right. - Now, I do know quite a few people. - I'm more talking about being able to do all the things that a female gets from a legal standpoint as far as, you know, making transfers, whether depending on the state's eating with families. - That's how obviously, all of that stuff. - But a dueler can just be hired as an associate and do this work. We have tons of people support stuff at funeral homes. They don't have licenses. It's not a big deal. - Right. But I guess like to make, like for most states, like to make the transfers or to meet with families or whatever else, like. - Every state is different. Every state, the California stuff they do in California is spending on us. What state are you guys in? - I'm in Chicago, so I'm in Illinois. - Okay. You're probably in a little bit of a heart of state. I always call my clean dowars when I want to know what the rules and limits of the state are. She is my legal, legal, who I check in wants to find out what's possible. And I think y'all recently had a conversation. She is a borillion and we business partner a lot. (coughing) - So it just depends. But honestly, there's so many funeral associates that are smart and they don't have a degree and they don't need a degree. They just don't. We have so much support staff. But if funeral homes are willing to bring funeral and a life duel as into funeral spaces, they would just have these people who have the deep understanding of people. And those duelists would go out and spread the gospel of your funeral home as a good funeral home. - Right. You know what directors had a brain in their head? They would hire a duel as like crazy. - Yeah. - 'Cause there's hundreds of duelists across America. - Yeah, we need all the help we can get. So I think it's a good thing to have that in that circumstance. That's for sure. - Yeah, yeah. - Great. I guess lastly, I know we talked about something a little bit interesting that you also do is the end of life psychedelics. You gotta give me the rundown of what it's before. - Yeah. - What is that? - That is very new index. Like I pretty much only hang in the new index spaces and when stuff gets mainstreamed, I'm like, goodbye. I'm off to the next thing. - Get back. - I sit on the board of directors for a psychedelic non-profit based set of Sarasota, Florida. Our board of directors is national and they're all over the place. Chris Caldwell is our executive director. So we look at training people around psychedelics at end of life and the therapeutic values of ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin. Psilocybin is typically about brain. MDMA is about heart and there's conversations about PTSD and then ketamine is war and sexual violence. And so when you reach the end of life and you kinda wanna process all your stuff and look at your end of life, there are some people who believe that plant medicine is a place that can be explored. Somewhere in the last five years, the war on drugs just like went to bed and suddenly everything's cool. I go to the mall and I'm like, every store has skeletons and mushrooms and is telling young people to do the drugs and be cool about death. It's like every single storm at Hot Topic, I'm at Pac Sun, like we are just pumping this message into the brains of young people that this is where we're going. And it's not surprising, baby boomers in 1969 were hiring birth doulas, they were doing the psychedelics, they were tuning in and turning out and all of the books that I was obsessed with were about Timothy Leary and about consciousness and about space aliens. Like that's the stuff that I liked reading when I was in middle school. And here we are at end of life and roaring in is enormous change about is it okay and legal to do this. It's completely in underground. And I feel very fortunate to be a really young person kind of looking around and figuring out one day how I might do this. I do not do this, have I done psychedelics? Yes, I have. I haven't done ketamine or MDMA. My kind of recreational college art school life was pretty, pretty modest. A little bit of weed, a little bit of psychedelics, no big deal. But I do think that there are long traditions of plant medicine in many cultures and there's organizations like, I think I never say this right, Chicuna, which talk about indigenous practices around psychedelics. There's like a college association of like 20 year olds who were doing like groundbreaking psychedelic research all over the country. And there's a huge industry coming about 'cause there's so much money to be made. So I went to Wonderland with Mykaline Dowers this last year and I was probably the strangest conference I've ever been to in my entire life. It was One Part Tech Row, One Part Rich Wu Wu, Guru, Lady, who was dripping in jewelry. It was like One Part PTSD, four veterans and one part just anarchist wild. We're gonna make this happen no matter what. And it was a phenomenal conference in which I got all the swag, took all of these mushroom tinctures home and sleep aids home and THC beverages and just like all the things. And I just kind of set them out for like six months and I just studied them and looked at them and like, what's happening here? This is a culture shift happening here. And as a curator in my old life, my job was to just kind of look and process and think about objects and consider the ramifications of what this is. And so there's a lot of things happening during COVID, DC made legal psychedelics. And that was a really big deal because a lot of people weren't in DC. They weren't physically in DC. They made that happen for a reason. The war on drugs is over. But all these people are in prison and all these lives were destroyed. And now a bunch of white people are gonna make a bunch of money. - Yeah, that's for sure. Well, William, thanks so much for taking the time and giving us some very, very cool perspectives. And we wish you all the best and hope that all of your projects to keep coming to fruition and that you're able to help a lot of people out there that whoever that might be looking for different things and progressing as well and trying to help our workforce, especially 'cause that's an admirable task you're doing there too. - We do, we need to protect. We need to protect our people. It's incredibly important. We are going to see burnout and it's gonna be really painful and we need to protect each other. - Sure do. We're all on the same teamwork for the same thing. - We are on the same team. As much as people don't think that, we are on the same team. - And it's all about doing that for the families and helping and keeping care of each other. So we appreciate you and let us know where can we follow you? Where can we go to find more of your stuff? - I'll send you like 5,000 hyperlinks coming down. - Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time, William. - Awesome, talk to you soon. 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