Understanding the Funeral Industry

00:02 - Speaker 1 Hi, I am here today with Josh Slocum, who is the former executive director for the Funeral Consumers Alliance, and Josh is so gracious to spend a little time with me today so I can share this recording with you and he's going to share his experience of being a part of the Funeral Consumers Alliance and why he is no longer the executive director. So I am excited and prayerful that this conversation will impact us as Christians who are training to be in the end of life doula movement. So, Josh, thank you again for being here, and I may stop you and ask questions if something comes up. 00:46 But to start, I'm just going to let you introduce yourself and share. Just begin to share about you know, your experience and what you're doing now and why, and all of those things. 01:00 - Speaker 2 Well, thank you, Laurel. My experience. So I got interested in funerals as a topic when I was a newspaper reporter. In the late 90s and around the turn of the century were large corporations, wall Street-traded corporations, that had bought up hundreds, thousands of funeral homes and cemeteries around the country and that they'd raised their prices to really astronomical levels and that most people didn't know that this was the case. They didn't know that McGillicuddy Funeral Home was no longer owned by the McGillicuddy family. So I tried to put together an investigative consumer story for the paper that I was working on that would look at what had happened to the prices and sales practices at these formerly family-owned funeral homes. Long story short, I discovered a great deal of collusion between the Virginia State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors I was living and working in Virginia and the industry itself. So what ended up happening is that they denied me the state regulatory board denied me documents that were releasable under freedom of information law that were releasable under freedom of information law. I was unable to fight that successfully and I was unable to write that story. So I quickly got a taste of how the industry and the government could collude together against the interests of consumers, and that just sparked my interest more and I ended up. 02:42 The former executive director of funeral consumers alliance, my friend and mentor, the late lisa carlson uh, hired me and that became 20 years of of working with the organization and the volunteers on everything from protecting the right of families to have home funerals, family directed funerals, educating them about it. 03:02 But, um and and that was one of the hardest that was one of the hardest parts of the job and one of the most satisfying parts of the job. It really energized me because I find it philosophically offensive for the state to tell individuals what they may and may not do, unless we're talking about circumstances of imminent danger, right. So it upsets me to see the state trying to interfere in the private actions of families and try to force them to do business with an industry that they don't wish to do business with. But the majority of time at Funeral Consumers Alliance was talking to people and consumer lobbying at the state and federal level. For the great majority of the public who was going to use a commercial funeral home, they were not going to do a home funeral, but they didn't want to get ripped off doing it. 03:58 So, that was the mainstay there. 04:00 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm just going to interject. A personal experience is, yes, you know, watching family members fork out $10,000, $20,000 for a funeral can majorly increase the grief and the say lack for a better word buyer's remorse. Right, it all seems right in the moment. We want to give this family member, the one that we loved, this wonderful send-off burial, all of those things. You go to the funeral agency and ching, ching, ching, it's just adding up. And then you see a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars and big gulp, I don't know how we're going to do this. And then, as the days go by and that person's gone you know that I think I've just watched, particularly with you know, my mother, the loss of her mother was. Do you think she would have even liked that funeral? And here I am out. You know all these thousands of dollars. It can be very confusing. 04:59 - Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah, and most people you know, and you know this, you know this very well, working in the field what most people think they know about funerals is wrong. Most of what we think we know is information that comes from funeral homes, so we don't usually get an outside look. What does the law actually require? What does it not require? What's a reasonable price for this casket or this cremation? What's a reasonable price for this casket or this cremation? 05:24 Most people don't, because the death transaction it's not only often unexpected we don't know exactly when it's going to happen but it's also something we're not looking forward to. I know it's very, very cliche, but it is still true that in a lot of ways, we're a death-denying culture, so we put off having to plan for the inevitable and then we find ourselves having to make confusing and often expensive decisions when we're in the worst frame of mind that we could be in. Going into planning a funeral in the middle of grief is quite literally as debilitating as doing it. If you were drunk, you're drunk on emotion, right as doing it if you were drunk. 06:04 You're drunk on emotion, right. 06:06 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I wanna say one thing. 06:08 I'm calling a woman whose brother committed suicide in a church where I worked, and this was in New York, and she wanted him to be buried with the family in Half Moon Bay near San Francisco, which is a really cool idea. 06:25 But the amount of things that had to happen for her to get it the way that she wanted it was a lot and it was very expensive. 06:33 But the funeral director, you know, did make a way forward for her, and so I just share this little bit to say I wonder, even in this death, you know, denying culture, where we struggle with our grief, that we even actually, you know, are willing to go this far with burial arrangements as a, as a, as part of that denial, you know, is that, well, if I can just do it right, then things will be okay. Where we, you know the industry knows that, you know the industry knows that they're going to pull at our heartstrings through and help us maybe avoid grief through doing it just right. Or, as one of my doulas have said, you know, promise you that this casket is airtight, right, you know? Or whatever these things are. That it's not not, it is actually getting in the way of our of of grief, and that we we are delaying facing the fact that our person has died I think that's right and I I don't think the majority of funeral directors are not, um, bad people. 07:42 - Speaker 2 that's. That's not the uh. That's not the message that funeral consumers alliance tried to get across. It's not the message that Funeral Consumers Alliance tried to get across. It's not the message that I want to get across. 07:50 There are, of course, as in every industry, rapacious people who are there only for the money and will do anything they can to increase their sale, even at well, obviously at the expense of the family, but that's not the majority of what goes wrong in funerals. 08:08 I think the majority of what goes wrong is really what we've normalized and we've normalized outsourcing what used to be a family-centered activity to a commercial sector, and what you're talking about in terms of, you know, people wanting to. 08:25 We often want to make up for what we believe that we didn't do for the deceased during life by giving them a very to us memorable funeral. And some of these death is always going to bring up regrets and sadness, always going to bring up regrets and sadness. But I think if we were more involved in the entire process, spending time with and caring for that person while they're with us, but declining and then also carrying that care through handling the body, putting mom in the dress that she wanted, allowing the family, if they wish, to have a private wake at home in a comfortable environment, not a very dressy sort of commercial environment. If we were involved in this process, I believe that would give us a natural and normal outlet for grieving but also continuing to live, and I think we would be less inclined to try to salve our feelings and regrets through commercial expenditure. 09:35 - Speaker 1 I agree 100%. And what this takes is education. Right To go the other direction is education. To go the other direction is education, and we are coming into an era where people are wanting that education. There's a crowd of doulas wanting to be educators, making elaborate relationships with others in the industry, so we are seeing a turn in the tide. For sure it's going to take time, I think, but we are. We are seeing this change. So it'll be. It'll be cool to see, to see, to see what the future holds. But you've been working on this for a very, very long time. Do you want to share with us a little bit about it? So I don't know exactly how many years you've not been the executive director at the Funeral Consumers Alliance, but you were there 20 years and you want to share maybe some of the shifts that you've seen, maybe even prior to this end of life doula role emerging. 10:40 - Speaker 2 Things move more slowly in funerals than they do in other industries. Change does not happen quickly. The most significant change but this isn't, you know, this has been going on for many decades before I was doing this is the move toward cremation and away from burial. You know it was just a couple of years ago that cremation overtook burial as the most common choice in America at death, and some of that has to do with cost, because generally it's less costly to do a cremation than a funeral that includes. I mean, the cremation can be just as expensive as a funeral. You can do all the things. You can do embalming, you can do a viewing of the body, you can buy an ornate casket, you can do all those things, but generally do embalming. You can do a viewing of the body, you can buy an ornate casket, you can do all those things. But generally speaking, cremation does tend to be less in the end. 11:33 Some of it is cost sensitivity, but I think that more of it is driven by the change in the way we actually live, geographically and in terms of how we see our family connections. So we no longer are a society where you grow up you go to the local high school, you go to the local technical college, you get a job at the local IBM plant and then you're buried in the town or church cemetery where you grew up. That's not the reality for a lot of people anymore, so we feel less connected to that physical land where our ancestors are buried. By the time mom or dad dies in the family, the children may be living in the four corners of the globe, or at least the four corners of the United States. So you know, the idea of doing things the way we've always done in the old hometown is neither practical nor, to some people, as appealing. And so they say well, I'm just going to go for cremation. So I think that's probably the larger driver over cost savings. 12:31 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I work in a church that has a cemetery and part of my role there is to speak with people who are, you know. They either know they have family lost there or they're anticipating a death and they want to buy them. Or I see a lot of people. They have a box of remains that are 10 years old and they just haven't wanted to part with them and they finally made a place in their heart that they can part with them and have them buried. So I guess cremation does allow people to hold on to that body a little bit longer too, versus put it in a casket, see it into the ground. 13:12 We did a direct burial. I mean it was three days after the death. I don't know, it's been two months probably now. And it's interesting because we remarked on staff at how we were running around like crazy people trying to get prepared for it, because we're actually out of practice from doing a three-day turnaround. We were very out of practice. They wanted a ceremony in the church, graveside rites for the burial and then a reception, and it took the entire staff to get that turned around for three days. So it may be, people just can't handle that when someone has died. They take their time a lot. I've seen. 13:59 Yeah, so very interesting, but that's not a shift that something's better than what it was or not. It's just, that's what we've become accustomed to. 14:08 - Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I think that's the story of the American funeral, writ large. It's just what we've become accustomed to. You know the you say that education is necessary. You're right about that, but you know you really have to start at the basics. We're so far removed from what we used to do. The very fact the fact that we have something called the funeral industry, the fact that we have businesses that we call funeral homes, uh, that are specifically and only dedicated to, uh, memorializing and burying our dead, and that we can call somebody at four in the morning if we want and have people come and whisk the body out of the home, is actually an incredible luxury. That is very recent. This did not exist before the last part of the 19th century. 14:59 - Speaker 1 That's a great point. 15:03 - Speaker 2 We've gotten very used to this, but in historical terms, this is one second on the clock of recent history. It's not, you know, it's not years and years and years. 15:13 - Speaker 1 Right, that's fascinating, you know well and I'm tongue tied here for a minute, but yes, I often think about you know, going into a public restroom you don't have to touch anything. But they've realized that actually being germ free on everything really isn't good for us. 15:35 - Speaker 2 It's not good for our immune systems correct, Right but we don't stop. 15:40 - Speaker 1 But the same thing with death is that we can never see someone once we heard they were sick, or maybe we're going to go to a viewing, maybe. But if we see them embalmed, I mean I've seen family members embalmed and it's not a pretty. You know people that I've known so well for a long period of time not a pretty it's. You know people that I've, you know, known so well for a long period of time it's. It's not something you want to really hold onto and remember what they look like in bomb, to see them one more time. But they don't really look like the person that you knew your whole life. 16:16 - Speaker 2 Yes, this is. This is so interesting. It's a long, ongoing sort of multi-party conversation I've had with people, including funeral directors, over the years about. You know, because for a long time and I think there are a lot of funeral directors who believe this you know, embalming and viewing the body is not the standard common majority practice that it used to be 50 years ago. It's still. We still do a lot of it, but not nearly as much as we used to. America is really the place where that started out. Chemical, cosmetic embalming, you know to to. You know, using tinted dye injected into the body to make them, you know, look a little bit less dead, is a very American idea A little less dead, a little less dead. 17:04 There were actually, I mean, some of the. Just the funeral industry is so fascinating. If you read trade magazines, especially the old ones, you look at all the names for the formaldehyde products. There was a brand my favorite name was called Life Like Tint, and it reminds me. 17:24 A lot of funeral directors do believe genuinely that the so-called memory picture of the preserved body is a balm to the grief that people are going to carry forward. And for some people yes, I mean I have spoken to people who said, yes, it was very nice to see my mother, who'd been ravaged by cancer, look a little bit more peaceful and less sick. That absolutely happens. But the opposite happens a lot too, and I remember this from when I was 16 years old, when my grandmother died. We had seen her. She died of congestive heart failure, which is a pretty gentle way to go. She spent the last week of her life in a hospital way to go. She spent the last week of her life in a hospital, unconscious, and the family spent time with her. My cousins curled her hair and did her nails and all these sorts of things. We ended up, unfortunately, cutting her hair way too short. So my grandmother became a butch lesbian for her funeral. I love my butch lesbian friends, but you have a very distinctive haircut. So we had some fun times. 18:31 But the last time I saw my grandmother she looked like my grandmother. She's a very tired old woman. And then a couple of days later we went to the funeral home to see how they had prepared her. And there she was, and I'm up next to the funeral home to see how they had prepared her Right. And there she was, and I'm up next to the casket and she's got almost no wrinkles on her face and she's wearing much more makeup than she ever did in life. You know, her lipstick was really obvious and my personal reaction was I was creeped out, and creeped out the way you're creeped out in a horror movie. 19:08 - Speaker 1 Yes. 19:09 - Speaker 2 And I remember kneeling in prayer by the casket and I could smell the formaldehyde and the entire. For me, that experience was disturbing. Right, I still remember it. I can still see it. I would prefer not to, but that's a permanent memory now. 19:29 So you know, and I have seen, as you have, Laurel, I have seen dead people au naturel and, with the exception of traumatic deaths, I think a misconception people have is that most dead bodies are really scary, like there's something out of the Walking Dead or you know, the decomposition starts immediately, and so you come back a few minutes later and you've got this horrible, you know nightmare. That isn't true Most of the time. You know, yeah, people do look dead. Um, they're lying on their back, their blood drains from their face, they become ghastly white. That's normal. Sometimes their eyes are open a little bit, their mouth is open a little bit. So if you're doing home care, funeral care, you're going to need to prop up the chin and close the eyes, but they're not. The dead that, you know, are not nearly as frightening as people imagine in their heads. 20:25 - Speaker 1 I agree. So just keeping this to family, my, you know bad memories of seeing, you know, my grandfather. I was 10, right, and I was like you know, I'd encourage you to go see him, right, that's what we do, right? And you're like, oh, I don't really know about that, not what I expected. Then you know my grandmother some years later like, oh, she would have been really upset if she knew that you looked like this, right. So a whole different spectrum of emotion. And then, but then thinking about my father, and we did not have him involved and just we just did a family viewing. 21:03 He looked wonderful. 21:04 - Speaker 2 You know he definitely looked dead. 21:06 - Speaker 1 But, um, he, he, you know he looked like he was sleeping and it brought a lot of peace to me. It made me understand because we kept it. You know he was in that state. It was a wonderful funeral home, um, that I I like very much here locally and they, they did, they did a wonderful job and the way he was wrapped, his eyes were closed, it was great and I felt peace because I knew my dad wasn't in that body anymore. 21:38 And I think that sometimes something that can happen is that our minds can be a little bit confused when we see them like halfway brought back to life. So it's it's, it's, it's a. I think that we do well to see someone who's died who is not, you know, involved in in. In that there's a critical period that you know, even three days, I guess it was the third day after he had died. We saw him, you know, in his days. I guess it was the third day after he had died. We saw him, you know, in his suit before he was buried, and I thought, you know, I really enjoyed seeing him a little bit more yesterday than I did today, and so you know, even knowing these types of things can be good for us. 22:19 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and I had a friend who told me a story of her friend. Her friend had died in a motorcycle accident or a car accident, I can't remember which one, and he, um, in life was one of those incredibly good looking, sexy men, you know, like just a head turner, right. He died young, I think he was like 26 years old, and they had an open casket funeral and my friend told me that she found it incredibly disturbing because they had done such a good job on him that he these are her words he looked hot, he looked just as attractive and fetching as he did in life, and she found that extremely off-putting and very jarring, trying to negotiate that line between living in life and death. So this can affect people very differently and most people part of our pathological fear of death, which leads us to neglect taking part in family ceremonies that might actually be healing and can lead us to spend money on ceremonies that end up leaving us feeling empty, our pathological fear of death. A lot of it comes from the fact that we just don't see it. Many adults have never, ever in their entire lives, seen a corpse. They're 70 or 80 years old. They've never seen a dead body. Or if they've seen a dead body, they've only seen the embalmed version at the funeral home. So people end up what people think dead people are like comes from horror movies and crime shows. Mm-hmm, think dead people are like comes from horror movies and crime shows. 24:11 And this goes into the question that people so frequently ask. They say, well, should we let the kids go to the funeral? Yes, in fact, you probably would not have asked that question if we were living in 1860. It would have just been considered normal because the funeral was happening at home. And this and I say this, this is a critique, but it's a, it's a gentle and understanding critique. Adults, please, please, hear me about this. 24:38 If you have children and you are asking, you're asking your husband or wife, well, should we let the kids go? What you're doing is actually, it's not about your kid. What you're doing is trying to soothe your own fears. That's what you're doing and I don't. You know I'm not trying to be dictatorial, but you know, I think we need to sort of lift the veil off what's really going on here. It's you, mr Adult, who is worried, nervous, grief-stricken, terrified. It's your neurosis about death that you're trying to manage through saying, well, maybe I shouldn't let my child be there. It is the mystery and the hiddenness and the misinformation that ends up creating a neurotic response to death. Neurotic response to death. Allowing the children to see that this is a normal and natural part of life is the best way to inoculate them against morbid rumination. 25:35 - Speaker 1 I do believe and I've got this included in one of the introductory documents for our course, for module one is that I think our decline in mental health has something to do with our denial of death. I mean, I think they cannot be they can't be unattached from one another. 25:52 But so one thing I think about the end of life doula movement and I believe that it is, you know, it's just, it's the next facet of this whole idea bringing death back home. Right, we've outsourced it for way too long. It is detrimental emotionally, financially I was gonna say physically, but you know, I wanna say psychologically, let's say that it is detrimental. So there's a movement that's been going on for decades. Even the hostess movement itself is aimed to bring death home. And I just want to tag on to something you said earlier. Right, you know, there's like to have a group of, you know, people that now form an industry though, that are there to help those who need help burying their dead. That's a good thing, right it's. It's that it's gone now to this place, where it actually can be a harmful thing if done improperly. And we're all very fragile at death. We're more vulnerable when someone that we love has died. You know there's a door open there for, you know, for deception, and then that's just how life is right. You know, hospice, the wonderful program that it is, is now an industry, and there is a lot of really you know, unfavorable profits that are made and that turn people into, you know, profit mongers. And then you know those who need hospice care suffer, right. So this is how the world works. Is it a really great thing? Then becomes, you know, a big industry and these things always begin to happen. So you know, the death care industry as a whole has a lot of problems and we're going to talk a little bit more about those here shortly. 27:39 But this idea of bringing it home, so to speak, is popular. People want to get involved. Baby boomers say I want to die at home. End-of-life doulas say I want to help people die at home. You know the Funeral Consumers Alliance, you know, wants to help people understand. You know how we can make this possible. Here are your rights. You know what state are you in. Here are your rights. All of that is a great movement. It really is. 28:07 We are unfamiliar with it, sadly. We're unfamiliar with what the dying process looks like, as you've clearly showed us. We're unfamiliar with what a dead person looks like, all of these things. So we have a great challenge in front of us. It's a good challenge and one to be excited about and engaged in. So all of this is really, really wonderful. One little bit I know about you and I'm very much looking forward to learning more, is how has it been for you? You've seen the funeral industry become political and I think I'm saying this right from the little bits of conversation we've had together and personally. It's upended your life with your disagreements about some of it, and when I look at upheaval in my own life, I like to think that while it was really uncomfortable and may still be uncomfortable, good things come from it. 29:04 - Speaker 2 New directions. I see it the same way. Yeah, it's not major. Major upheavals in our lives, rifts within our families, the end of a job or a segment of a career, these are all they suck when you're going through them. It just sucks. Yes, it's depressing. It leaves you feeling insecure, frightened all the. You know that's normal. It? It leaves you feeling insecure, uh, frightened all the. You know that's normal. That's, that's part of life. 29:30 Yeah, um, I wouldn't say the funeral industry. Well, is it so much that? The? Well, every industry is political in some ways. It's a. 29:39 You know the one thing you know, the large project I was working on, um, I ended at Funeral Consumers Alliance at the end of 2022. 29:49 So December 31st 2022. 29:51 So it's a year and a half ago now, a little more, and I'd been there for 20 years at that point and there was always a political aspect because we had to do lobbying for consumers, because there were trade organizations for funeral directors and we were the voice of the consumer. 30:09 So the big project I was working on at the end there was getting the Federal Trade Commission, which has something called the funeral rule, that that governs funeral homes and says you have to give consumers honest prices over the phone when they ask, you have to hand them a printed price list. You have to allow them to pick item by item. You can't compel families to buy an entire package of goods and services and you can't lie to them about non-existent legal requirements, such as the claim that embalming is required by law if you're going to view the body. That's not true. So the funeral rule governs these portions of the transaction. Our project and I think I'm not as closely connected anymore, obviously, but I think this fall we're probably going to hear from the Federal Trade Commission that funeral homes will be required now by the funeral rule to put their prices on their websites to facilitate consumer shopping ahead of time. That was a project that I was working on when, I left there, but internally I think we're talking about activist politics. 31:14 - Speaker 1 Yes, yes, that's what I'm talking about. 31:18 - Speaker 2 So, yeah, I mean let me do this in a really condensed way so I spent 20 years at Funeral Consumers Alliance and I spent most of my adult life. Funeral Consumers Alliance is a nonpartisan organization on paper but, like almost all human service nonprofits these days, in fact, in actual practice, in fact, they are a leftist organization. Yes, I was a leftist and a card-carrying Democrat and a progressive most of my life. I am not now. Over the past eight years, I have shifted my views. I'm a conservative now. I no longer agree with most of the things that I used to agitate for, so I've had a very big change of mind and philosophy. But it wasn't clear to me how leftist the organization was until I started to change my mind. 32:17 And then, three and a half years ago, along with a friend, a friend and I started a weekly show, a podcast video show, that comments on culture, politics, family relationships, using the lens of narcissism and unstable personalities, and what we do on the show is connect the domestic abuse and child abuse which was my experience growing up, and the kind of psychology that animates, um that kind of abuse. The thesis of our show is that what happens in the home has now exploded into society. We are living in a narcissistic society, uh. That's full of misrepresentation and reputation smearing and and all these nasty things right. But part of that show was and I'm very candid on the show, I mean, we're speaking sort of in a low key way. I'm kind of a firebrand on the show. I swear a lot. I'm very straightforward about my political opinions, I don't sugarcoat anything, and I knew that that was probably going to ruffle some feathers and it did, and it ended up putting me at odds with a lot of people in the organization and eventually, what happened in 2022, was that I'm explicitly anti-woke, okay, and what I mean by woke is far leftism. You know the idea that we're living in a patriarchal, racist KKK society that queer people are are dying in droves every day. And then you know I'm sorry, I'll try to remember I'm on your show, not mine, the I don't believe in any of that nonsense because it isn't true. I used to believe in this stuff and I think now we as a society are very much in danger of becoming an actual repressive communist society if we do not stop this stuff. The kinds of things, the kinds of things. 34:24 I am responsible for some of this. I helped make this happen. Uh, as a hardcore leftist and I feel a duty um to speak out about the kinds of things I did before that I wouldn't do now and where I think we're going um. So what ended up happening was when enough people within FCA, the volunteer corps and the affiliated groups around the country, when they discovered my show, they were very offended and they organized internally a reputation smearing campaign against me and pressured the board of Funeral Consumers Alliance to fire me through extortionary means. Our largest single funder said we're pulling all funding from you if you don't fire Slocum. And it was very difficult, I was canceled. I was, I was canceled. So that that's what happened, and it isn't surprising, but it is unfortunate because organizations that do good work, like Funeral Consumers Alliance, like many other organizations that really should be above the political fray, are not. 35:36 - Speaker 1 Thank you for sharing that and being brave in many ways. I went through a 12-step recovery program and found my only way forward is going to be to actually say I did this. 35:49 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm a former drunk too. I get it Right. 35:52 - Speaker 1 That's my only way forward, is my only way towards healing is to expose myself. As you know, someone who, who makes the wrong choice uh, you know, or is know, or is unable to make a better choice. So I really appreciate your integrity and honesty. But, you know, I knew when I was jumping into this end-of-life doula leadership. I didn't know this when I first joined a training program. It was interesting I joined in 2019, right before the pandemic and right before George Floyd. 36:28 - Speaker 2 Yeah. 36:28 - Speaker 1 So I've seen, just, let's say, 2020, start 2020. Okay, so I've seen in the past three and a half years, if my math is correct, a huge change in the industry. I didn't know in the end of life. Doula industry. 36:45 Yeah so so I so. So the woman who trained me, she has I keep an eye on what she's doing. She, you know, really, and I actually didn't even recertify with her, but she, she has really focused on the new age spirituality. So I'd actually find her to be my biggest competitor, more so than some of the other doula training programs, because we're both looking at the work that we do from the aspect of healing, uh and and and. Then the other end of life doula training programs. Well, I can't speak for all of them because I know there's a lot of small wins in there that have. You know, they're like $500 and they're very, you know, study by yourself. But the bigger groups that funnel their doulas into NIDA, national Intellect, doula Alliance. 37:37 I've seen this kind of wedded, enmeshed relationship going on. That does have to do with identity politics and you know, I even know a woman who is trained by them. She, I met her through a church thing and I've said to her well, you know, she's got a website and she promotes where she was trained and I know that that place is is very thick on identity politics. Nita is the same. I mean, it's all over their website. It's all diversity, equity, inclusion. So I said to her well, you know thinking, well, maybe she would like to promote my ministry on her site. Well, she said, she said no, and she said there are. She didn't use, but she used the word. I can't remember the word she used, but she gave me a reason and I thought really, and and so. 38:33 So then, the more I think about it is, I really think that the doula movement itself is now like it says, it's centered on the welfare of everybody, is now like it says, it's centered on the welfare of everybody, and and in some ways I think it is, you know, we, everyone who decides to be a doula, they do want the best for the people that they're serving, but it's a little bit misguided, in my opinion, is that they're so focused on the identity of that person that that actual, all the other things that need to go on with end-of-life care, maybe you're taking a second rank to making sure that they're promoting whatever that identity is. And so I think too, to make this end of life doula movement go and to make the role to be one of integrity. I even see it the way that they band together on social media. You know, you go, look at the funeral consumers Alliance. Well, all the doulas are liked by them and they follow them. 39:30 And then you look in, oh okay, well then there's Nita, you know it's all in there together and and I found that I'm you know, I'm really out outside of that, and I think that there's this, this, this idea that if they all band together, you know it's going to set off something, and so they've wedded together all of their initiatives together, and so I'm even seeing people that I know that I'm very surprised they've gone that direction, go that direction. 39:57 So I think it's out of fear on one level. And another level is that the industry itself, or the doula I'm gonna call the doula industry, this group of programs you know, springing up the alliance which is, you know, supposed to funnel everyone in together, into into one big group, is like they don't know how to spread and grow without hitching itself to this. So that's really what I've seen happen. Because when I got started I'm like, wow, this is going to be really great. I'm just going to learn the skill, I'm going to market myself, I am going to be an independent contractor, going and work with families. I thought it was that simple. But what I've seen over three and a half years is that there's actually an undercurrent to it, and I think it's less about actually the people that you serve, as it is about promoting a propaganda. 40:55 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree with you and it's dispiriting, but it isn't new. I hear you when you say you saw this big change over the past three and a half to four years. Basically any segment of American life we can look at and say, Ooh, there was a big change in these past. Yeah, so I know that you're right about that. But I will go back further and say the seeds were. Were were always there. 41:22 I remember when I first I want to tell people I'll just illustrate this you know, really, one of the four mothers of the home funeral movement was my friend and mentor, lisa Carlson, um, who died last year. Um, her husband, steve, just died a couple of months ago. Um, she was the executive director of funeral consumers alliance in the 90s. She's the one who hired me and she groomed me to replace her. I know that that word has taken on another connotation these days, but I mean just in the ordinary apprenticeship sense and, uh, a fireball of a woman and sometimes very difficult to get along with, very mercurial. She had a, but she was honest, as the day is long, and she was genuine and caring. She put her foot in her mouth a lot, but she was also an incredibly generous, genuine person and she started. She wrote about doing a home funeral first when her husband committed suicide in 1981, I believe 80 or 81. And she was forced into doing a home funeral for lack of money. But she quickly discovered the emotional and spiritual benefit so she wrote a book about it. Then she became involved with Funeral Consumers Alliance and decided to advocate for all people who needed funeral services, not just the home funeral people. 42:54 And I remember when we first met in the late nineties, around 2000, and I over the phone, and then I I came up here to Vermont to take the job in 20, uh, excuse me, 2002. And she warned me about because Lisa was very much into the home funeral thing. But she really took it seriously and she said it is not my job, it's not your job to pass judgment on what people do in funeral rituals. Our job is to empower them to do it for themselves or to make the right commercial choices that fit their circumstances. She really meant that Very fair Right. But she warned me about some of the home funeral people and she said a lot of them are in it because they need to be needed. It's more about their own ego than it is about serving the families and she had already had some disagreements with some of the home funeral people 20 years ago because already then it was all Northern California new age hippie people. 43:58 This is not a criticism of that. I'm just saying Lisa would say to people you are going to severely restrict your audience, the people who are willing to hear your message and learn from you is going to be very small If you continue to brand yourself. You know she didn't use these words, but basically with leftist lifestyle identity politics, I said the same things throughout my career at Funeral Consumers Alliance. I'm not surprised anymore, but it didn't do a damn bit of good. That's what happened. 44:33 - Speaker 1 Yeah, and I don't know if my eyes have just been opened, as a lot of people's, majority of our eyes have been open and we're surprised and, and you know, even I think a lot. I, being in New York, a very liberal state, I was in New York. I've watched, you know, myself and friends very, very much pivot through COVID-19 and the things that have been ensued since that point, and so we can say I think our eyes have been opened. So, as I entered something naively, what could be better than an end-of-life doula role? I typically work in a church. I work around people who are facing death or someone in their family is facing death. That's what I do. So why would an end of life doula education not just you know really, really benefit that? And so I think the role is so wonderful, like I believe in it. 45:32 I even took me a while to get my first client. That was because COVID hit and then we all had to be separated. I did make newsletters and tried to market on social media, but I wasn't able to get any traction. So basically, after the end of that year I thought, well, maybe this isn't going to become anything. And so I was in a master's degree program, just kind of put my heart into that. And then I got a, I got a client and it was the the. It went just like it should. 46:07 What I was trained at an end of life like doula can, how an end of life doula can help. And I thought I'm back on board, like this is excellent, right. And and then I had another client you know went, went really well, I made a big impact. Yeah, he, he went to my church and we, you know I made a big impact. Yeah, he went to my church and and we, you know that, made a big impact in the church community on um, yeah, I don't think they really cared, I was a doula, but the fact that I brought together the dying person in the community, right, so it was, it was, it was a success and that and that way. 46:38 So I was, you know, really decided gosh, you know, really decided gosh. You know this, this has got to be something. We don't want to let this role go away. And but but I also fear at the same time that there's two parts I fear, and one is that the good stuff about a doula, a good stuff about a home funeral, the good stuff about, you know, all these things we want to bring back home may be confiscated by a leftist movement, like people you know, like you, and I may say well, I'm going to stay as far away from that as possible, because it's taken on this idea where we want to make sure people understand no, no, no. This is really really good. Even though they're doing that, let them do it right you can still use all of these benefits and and get and get, you know, completely involved, without falling into that trap, whether it's a new age, whether it be? 47:36 - Speaker 2 yes, that's. That's the frustration. This is because this is not a partisan issue. It's not. This is a human issue. We all are born, we all die, we all have to be buried or cremated or something right. This grief is we're humans. It's. 47:59 The degree of polarization and politicization of every facet of our lives is more than disheartening. It's soul crushing. I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but what we're talking about here has nothing to do with whether you vote Democrat, republican, libertarian, right-wing candidate. It has nothing to do with what you think about tax policy or abortion policy or any of these other things. It's nothing to do with that. But there is no area of life, it seems, in America and in the West generally. Point is, people need to be able to sort themselves into the tracks that make sense to them. So the people who want a Christian-focused way of learning about how to care for the dead are going to sort themselves into what you do. The people who have New Age beliefs are going to sort themselves into the larger end of life movements within that community. But I haven't been able to figure out a way that this idea can be marketed or educated about in a completely non-political, non-partisan way that will be appealing to everybody and maybe that doesn't exist. 49:50 - Speaker 1 I've been thinking a lot about that actually since you and I got connected last week, or about a week and a half or so ago. That, yeah, is the mainstream way that we're seeing through social media, through trying to get caught up on the algorithms and getting all the likes. Is that really the way to get this message out? I don't think so. I think all of that is trendy and I fear at some points that the fervor with which the end of life doula movement has gained speed over leftist ideals makes me wonder. You know what's the longevity? Um, because I I just think that that and that brings ends up bringing more harm. Right? Remember the end of life doula movement. 50:48 - Speaker 2 So it brings more harm. Here's what I think is going to happen. So Between 15 and 20 years ago I got involved with what was then known as the New Atheist Movement. Centered around well-known people like biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Sam Harris, journalist and commentator Christopher Hitchens, and it was a whole new identity. And this happened. I mean, I look back on it now and I see so many excesses that I indulged in and that other people indulged in there. 51:38 But there was actually there was a reasonable justification for why that agitation first started. Because back then there was a problem in the United States of certain extreme fundamentalist Christian sects were having some success or appeared to be having some success in trying to get young earth creationism taught in science class in public schools. You know very clearly very religious, partisan, religious way of doing this, and so the new atheist movement was in some senses a justifiable reaction movement to that. But it took on a life of its own and became a monster of its own. And it became, it was taken over by. I mean I say taken over. 52:23 It probably always started there, but it became more explicitly woke, leftist Before we had the word woke. We still had the same things, and I was one of the big. I mean not I wasn't, you know, obviously a leader or anything. I was one of the rabble, but I was one of the loudmouths and I went to the conferences and I pulled away from that when I finally realized how toxic all of it was as my belief system started changing and it burned out. I mean, there are still people who are involved with them, they still hang around the same blogs and stuff, but it is no cultural force to be reckoned with. I suspect something like that may happen with some of the more identitarian ends of the end of life thing, because really these communities psychologically can be characterized as an expression of communal narcissism. This is self-regarding, self-aggrandizing thinking A lot of people don't. They don't necessarily mean it to be. They really do believe their own publicity, they think that they're helping other people, but what they're really doing is glorifying themselves. 53:35 - Speaker 1 It's true, the virtue virtue signaling is very, very strong. You know, when I was in getting my master's degree, I started out at a not in seminary for it, but I was getting a theological degree through a really cool university over in England, remotely. And then, because COVID it, I couldn't do the you know one time the annual meeting with my professor and other students in England, remotely. And then, because COVID hit, I couldn't do the you know one time the annual meeting with my professor and other students. So I took my credits I had earned and went into a seminary to finish it and it was very, very interesting because I did know before I went there that it was. It was progressive on LGBTQ issues, but it changed dynamically between the well, I guess when I entered in I was like whoa, I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle this and I was very upset about it. But it really was my only option of schools because of the campus and I could have a three-bedroom apartment with my children, which is almost impossible for a single mom in the city. Right, and they accepted all my credits and it was just like you know. Okay, it was in my neighborhood, I couldn't pass it up, but I knew it was more progressive than I was used to. 54:46 I grew up in the fundamentalist Christianity and so here I am on the you know, opposite spectrum of you know being in completely full progressive Protestantism. 54:59 And so I think of my time there and I actually really did learn a lot, even though I didn't enjoy my time. 55:06 But I had a black woman under my care, a doula care, and I had a gay man with HIV under my doula care during my time there and it was so funny to me because I also got called out as a racist homophobe while I was there, because it's something I put in the discussion board about. I wasn't ashamed that I grew up in the Southeast because God has, you know, done wonderful things in my life, like why am I going to be ashamed of where you know my family lives when I was born and that I live there, like you know, like people have to look deeper into my story right Than to just categorize me as a person who grew up in the Southeast and like that. Like to me that wasn't fair. So I pushed back on this discussion board and said you know, my mother worked in prisons as a volunteer with prison fellowship. My father is a physician and spent, you know, many years working on an. 56:07 Indian reservation. Like don't just come to me because I said I grew up in Alabama, and make you know and create my identity for me right and yeah I got a lot of blowback on that, and so anyway I got this. 56:19 You know, the girl perceived me as a racist and a and a homophobe and I don't even know where the home of a park came in. But uh, but is, and so anyway, it's just because they're slinging. They're slinging like defamations at anybody that they can right, and so I pretty much kept it quiet that I had, you know, these two clients, like nobody really wanted to get to know me. So I pretty much kept it quiet that I had, you know, these two clients, like nobody really wanted to get to know me. So I wasn't going to share any of this. 56:41 But but the reason I'm making you know this into a point here is that here I was by love and, you know, God's call on my life in service to to these two demographics that you know had me under such scrutiny that I was a bigot where everybody else was spending their time not actually serving but coming to find what my shortcomings were. And so it just to me really elevated what the point in the narcissistic future of that movement is, because they're not really looking at real life, they're looking at what they want to look at and going through and just lumping criticism on people. So it, and you know, say, I decided, you know, not to do those two jobs, for whatever reason you know, those people may have gone without the level of care that I was able to give them. So so, all of this just lumping things into, you know, certain categories, it's just not going to actually get us the results that we want with making sure that people have the care that they need. 57:51 And I, you know, really pay attention to you know why is this doula movement necessary is because we have so many perils around end of life care and, yes, poor communities may hit perils that wealthier communities, you know, may not have. But that I don't think that our answer to fixing it is going to be through the activism that everybody is so caught up in, because then we can't even communicate. And then they're saying that, well, just because maybe he's over there in that community, she doesn't care about the other community, and so the whole thing is just one big lie. It really is. 58:35 - Speaker 2 I know it's sad. Yeah, it really is. I know. 58:37 - Speaker 1 Well, I want to say thank you. I want to come to a closure here on this part. Thank you for being open and sharing your experience. 58:46 - Speaker 2 Well, thank you for doing the work you do and thank you for being one of the people in end of life, death doula, home, funeral guide care who will talk about the reality of this issue. There aren't enough, so I'm glad that you will. 59:04 - Speaker 1 Yes, no, I don't think we live in a time that we can be shy about what we believe to be the truth, and I want to say so. What do we do next? Right, so you are coming back on another video with me that we're going to. 59:20 - Speaker 2 Yes to, you know, have students and I actually, yeah, I'm really looking forward to it a wider announcement, um you know. 59:25 - Speaker 1 So hopefully there'll be some people who aren't in the training program. That just yeah learn and we're going to say let's talk about it. You know, what is a funeral. What can you do? What are your rights? So I'm very excited about this. This was a little introduction to to you know you and your work and your passion and the. You know the uh where we're headed. So I'm, I'm very grateful, Josh. I'm going to end the recording.