The Taproot Podcast - ⚰️🧠💀The Psychology of Death with Kearney Smith RN and Alice Hawley LPC

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

Wishing everyone a spooky Halloween! 🎃👻🕷️🕸️Welcome to 'Beyond the Veil: Exploring the Psychology of Death' 🎙️. In this episode of the depth psychology podcast, we delve into the complex intersections of death, spirituality, and society. Join us as we navigate the profound concepts of mortality, drawing insights from Hinduism and Buddhism, examining modern burial practices, scrutinizing the impact of capitalism, all while drawing unexpected parallels from the cyberpunk world of 'Cyberpunk 2077' and the beloved nostalgia of 'Saved by the Bell' 🕉️☸️💀💰🕹️🔔. Hashtags: #BeyondTheVeil #PsychologyOfDeath #HinduPerspectives #BuddhistInsights #ModernBurialPractices #CapitalismAndMortality #Cyberpunk2077Analysis #SpiritualityInGaming #LifeAndDeath #ExistentialJourney #EternalCycle #SoulfulConversations #CulturalDimensions #NostalgiaRevisited #TranscendingMortality   yGPZC5anOrng7MFc0lKn

They say he's been dead a long time Come let us go to the sepulcher To put me out here for I'm scared Bring me to nobody's grave Kevin now watch how you open the coffin now. He's been dead 300 years wait You know me honey boom These children to me

Wait now wait wait wait Wait, wait, see? He winking when I hide. He livin', he livin' in Lesseran. Hey, this is Joel with the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. Today we're going to talk about the psychology of death, which we'll get into in a minute. I'm here with Alice, co-host and Taproot therapist, and then Kearney Smith. And Kearney is appearing actually because he is dead. Like a while ago, he was declared legally dead. And then since then, he's been able to see through the veil to the other side.

Not really. Just kidding. I don't know. I sort of relate to that. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe, maybe. Actually, you know, one of the problems with death is that we don't know what happens. You can't really see past it. You know, there's some good guesses that people have made. Until now, Kearney actually has a 12-step program that he's selling. It's pretty expensive, you know, but for knowledge like that, that's pretty valuable. So I'm only, I'm just an adeptus praetorium, like I'm on level three and the orange belt. So anyway, he's going to tell us about that. And we're going to be disbanding our business to follow him across the country as he seeks converts.

Well, I mean, taproot necromancy is going to be nice. Just kidding. He's a nurse. He's one of the smartest guys that I know. He also will get into his story, but he is very interested in to, you know, death as a symbol and death as a practical reality. And I'm really glad that there are people cut out to be friends with me. So thank you for sharing on our podcast um and i mean i think like when we talking about this you know like you know the practical realities of the the funeral

situations of our current times and then a lot of different traditions of the past of just practical what do you do when somebody dies um and then also death is kind of like a symbol or you know psychological reality so i don't know where the discussion will go. For people who are tuning in on the podcast and not on the video, to really get into this episode, I'm wearing black lipstick. I also have a t-shirt with a tire track down it and some 2004 jeans with lots of zippers that are black and a Nightmare Before Christmas branded fedora.

So I really went all out to get ready for it. Courtney's eyeballs are popping out like a wolf. So his tongue's on the table and he's clapping. He's clapping as he sees. I'm slamming my fist on the table and going to the WUGA. I'm just long. His bow tie is spinning around. Yeah, my bow tie is spinning.

There was a rug under him just a minute ago. Now it's shot behind him all right okay kerny so uh i'll start with when me and my wife went to louisiana um we were looking at the beautiful like above ground cemeteries that are so affecting and interesting as your counter practical reality that there's flooding so you have to keep the bodies in a box because if you just bury them they'll float back up to the top and we were coming back and we were like how does this work like what do you keep putting new ones in or like okay how many can you stack it i was like i bet kerny knows the answer to this question and um we called kerny and about an hour

and 20 minutes later uh we knew a lot of things about that but one of the things i didn't know about you that came up in that conversation is that you wanted to be a mortician you can talk about your your journey and fascination with with death yeah um i think i mean just ever since i was little i think um i want to say my first encounters with death when i was little honestly scared the bejesus out of me um i remember going to a funeral for a distant relative and just finding the whole thing. Of course, at the time, I didn't think this, but looking back, it was this very weird Kubrickian moment of walking into this room with this bizarre lighting

and just barely seeing this dead guy's nose just poking up over the rim of the casket and just thinking, this is so weird and uncomfortable. And then when it happened to close relatives, of course, that was super upsetting, but I think part of my defense mechanism to that was just turning into an interest instead. So there was a little while where I was going to,

I was going to go to school, be a mortician. And the thing that stopped it for me is honestly, I'm just, I don't know. I don't think I'm a ruthless enough salesman to be a good like funeral director. A lot of that, you do have to basically just like own and operate business that or get involved with a corporate you know funeral home business and that gets yeah i find it all very predatory and i mean to to be granted like modern medicine is also kind of predatory in some ways but but but it is very very much particularly in the funeral

industry there is there is a very big big financial incentive to kind of screw you over. Yeah. When people are at their worst time, too. Yeah. That's the thing I can't do. I can't. I can't. I can't.

That's the idea of like someone who's just lost their parent and me just like Big Lebowski style being like it's modestly priced receptacle. I was thinking about dropping that in right there, that clip. Just because we're bereaved doesn't make us sad! Sir, please lower your voices. Man, don't you have something else we can put them in?

That's an exact thing. And that's just sick. At least as a nurse, I that like i'm trying to help people get better um and i don't know like who knows down the down the line like i don't know if they ever start really getting big into like eco burials like i could see myself retraining to maybe do eco-friendly embalmings that would be a lot of fun and the process like i already got kind of a leg up on it. Yeah, that was the original,

that was the genesis for this, is we wanted to interview the author, and she wasn't available. But there's a lot of critique now. Caitlin Doughty? Yeah, yeah, she's so good. And if you can't get a hold of her, like, she's got... She's on sabbatical. So we'll try again next year. Ah, yeah. Well, I mean, I will be honest. A lot of stuff I know has also been from like watching.

And her book, From Here to Eternity, is fantastic. Like she does a lot of good stuff. And it's also in very much into the like the eco burial movement which i think is really cool because i mean much like everything else like the modern american funeral industry is not sustainable and and it's um yeah between it not being sustainable and also just by its nature kind of being predatory it's like look we kind of we need to shift the system around i mean like most things but and i think you mean by not sustainable not that it's like total zero carbon or or you know totally green or something you mean like it is something excuse me i need a cough button um not possible to do

probably for another 20 years probably a company like the expenditure of resources plus like, yeah, particularly in the United States. I mean, we have so much land that, you know, you can get away with like opening up a whole big cemetery and still have plots like in Europe. They don't do that in Germany, for example. Like when you buy a plot, you rent that plot for a period of, I want to say, 15 to 20 years. Don't quote me on that, but it's just long enough for whoever's in there to break down and decompose fully. And then it's open to new arrivals. Germany is a small country. They're not using it anymore.

Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Do they stack them? How does that work? Do they stack baskets? How do they let somebody else use the plot? I think part of it is they also dig deep. Typically, I think at least some European cemeteries, they also will have a general ossuary where they'll contain the bone remains.

They'll exhume the bones, put them in the general ossuary. So your loved one's still in the cemetery. They're just in, like, the communal living space of the cemetery that's kind of how a memorial garden is that you have a tile you know commemorating the person but the ashes are scattered into the garden yeah well it's and again it's just it's a thing of we we are very fortunate now that we have like enough land to honestly be fairly wasteful with it but it's like that's not probably long term you can't keep doing that. So you're going to have to find something new. I mean, a great fictional example recently, because

I've watched Jenny play through a fair bit of, this is going to be a weird digression, but I swear it relates to this. You like those on here? I've been watching Jenny play Cyberpunk 2077, and she specifically, I remember, called me in at one point.

I was like, hey, Kearney, come take a look at this. And she was showing me the cemetery that they have in-game. And it is very cool because it's like you don't have enough room to bury everyone in the future. So it's all just one gigantic, like, columbarium. It's little slots where people's ashes get. That's for everyone. It's just these stretching, like, monoliths of columbariums going off to the distance really cool image and also just a very creative way of like yeah that is probably how you're gonna have to deal with this

there was a there was a week where i was doing brain spotting at the clinic and um one of the resourcing things we don't use all the time is the brain spotting music that david grand made where it slowly goes back and forth between year to year, but at a kind of rate, your brain can't predict and it changes. And, um, I had a wrong button on the device.

And so there was like a week where I played the cyberpunk 2770, uh, soundtrack for everybody doing brain spotting. And, uh, people were being like, this music's pretty weird. It's like,

yeah, David's an odd guy. You know, he played guitar. He wrote those songs but it was like keanu reeves singing rock so i clarified it later got a kick out of that alice you have uh any kind of first experience with death or thoughts on death funeral story any i don't know to kind of kick off your perspective i don't it the first experience with death or thoughts on death, funeral story? I don't know. To kind of kick off your perspective.

I don't. The first experience is it's sort of like it doesn't. Like, I remember being really little. Or, I mean, maybe up until, like, middle school or something, feeling like it was weird that grownups made such a big deal out of death. Like, at those ages, I was like, what's the big deal? You're just not here anymore. And I somehow had some sense that it was like I wasn't here five you just you're just not here anymore and i somehow had some sense that it was like i wasn't here five years ago or you know yesterday not a big deal

yeah um and i'm not sure if that's a common common feeling or if that was like in children but um my theory is that children react to adults emotion around things more than they endogenously just kind of learn they come into the world reacting these things in a vacuum i mean everyone's different but and i think a lot of the i mean why would culture be different in another place you know you're learning how people react to these things and what their role in your life is you know like a myth or you know whatever you know based on how people talk about something or don't talk about it. Yeah. I had, I knew my great grandparents and they lived way out in the country and were kind of,

I guess like Southern Baptist sort of background. And I remember each of those grandparents dying around when I was like sixth grade or fifth or fourth grade. So old enough for me to really remember. But I, but what I, what I remember the hymns that we sang. I remember what hymn we sang at my great-grandmother's funeral. And then I remember

whether or not the caskets were open or not, which was sort of funny because it was like my grandmother, their daughter, really wanted an open casket for their funerals because it was what the communities would expect but it was like our generation and my or my parents generation like my mother who it was her grandmother who had died and her sister they were sort of mortified about it and felt and we're always and we're kind of talking sideways in the family about how tacky it was to have an open casket you know so they're just like this very weird kind of conversations that would go on like as to whether that's i mean whether something to do with death is tacky or not i don't yeah yeah i that was kind of my experience was i remember um when i was a kid

like just kind of liminality and was always sort of interested in that and also just irony when things was like oh we have to pretend like this makes sense but we all know it doesn't i was always kind of like wait a minute you know as a kid and and probably still am you know a lot of that trickster archetype but my great great grandmother died the day before her 100th birthday and so we were gonna go uh to bury her and the um she was i think half gypsy and half uh native american i'm full of cherokee and so her parents or her mother i don't think she knew her father her mother was like very uh transient and kind of like came to town and fix pots and stuff. Like she came from poverty on that side.

And then she married the guy who owned, he was the son of the church of Christ priest, um, my great, great grandfather. And then also his family on the grist mill in this town that is not there anymore, but it was like the biggest like upgrade ever.

Like she made whatever you, you know, wanted out of life in 1920. And, um, like they, uh, there,

so there's a family cemetery up there, but the town's gone. So it's like, we had to pay to clear it and then no one's ever seen it. And we had to drive up there probably the last, I mean, I could, I guess I could be buried there if I wanted to.

Anybody in the family could be, um, but it's just on a mountain where there used to be a town that's gone. And so the irony of that was really neat, where it was just like, this was the most important thing ever in the cemetery. It's supposed to last forever. And then it's wilderness. It's gone. It's been reclaimed.

And then going there, carving it out. And everyone had grown up hearing stories. We don't know whose uncle he was or whatever, but Uncle Charlie was running along a train when he was a kid in 1918 or something and fell and then had his arm cut off by the train, which is a problem because for that branch of Church of Christ, the resurrection of the flesh means that you need your meat body. It's not just your soul,

that the resurrection you get up out of the ground somehow. And so you have to have your arm. the arm was buried before charlie was buried by you know a couple decades and so we were looking for it and we found like a cemetery of charlie somebody and there was a little tombstone next to it that had marked where the arm was where they put it down and so just being and then you know just like my grandmother, my aunt was kind of complaining about having to spend money on my grandmother. She was kind of older and neurotic when she was older.

She was like, oh, look at the suit. She would have loved that suit. I've got her the one she wanted. She's dead. All of it was just kind of going around in my brain. It's just kind of a wild concept. Irving Jollim says, staring at the sun, it's kind of affecting everything, but you can't look right at it. just kind of a wild concept. Irving Jollim says staring at the sun. It's kind of affecting everything, but you can't look right at it.

You can't really see it. Going back actually to Alice's point about I really laughed at people throwing shade and oh, it's tacky to have an open test.

That's so wonderfully human. You can't help but still be gossipy and flippy at someone's funeral. That is a funny point, though, regarding people that changing over time or more people are having closed casket funerals

because there is a debate surrounding whether actually viewing a body like that is psychologically healthy or not. Whether that, what the funeral industry claims is a memory picture that you get. Is that actually helpful for you? Or would it be more helpful to see this person in a more natural state of death where they have the power of death, where they do look slack? Like, does that help more simply because that allows you to kind of decouple and realize, like, yes, this person

is gone. They are now just the physical meat left. And, of course, the way they do it in a lot of modern funerals is they make you look for it. They make you look as lifelike as possible. They have specifically lights right above the caskets

that shine down these very nice little pink lights that saw nature tremendously. I actually had a recent experience with it because my grandmother very recently passed away from a long, long illness. And it was the kind of thing where I was not there when she passed. And for me, it was actually very helpful to go see her one last time. Like, to be able to... And it was just a private view. It was literally where I went in there. I was just like, yeah, they have the casket open for me.

I could see Sandra real quick. And that helped bring me some closure. I know that helped me, but I do know it's also... It is an interesting open debate as to the way that we do it. It's so dolled up and stylized, whether that's actually helpful or not. And when we had called you to ask about how those scripts functioned, I mean, you started basically with the Civil War. You were like, well, the beginning of the funeral industry in America was the Civil War because there are all these bodies that had to be shipped across the country and that had never been seen before.

So they started to fill them up with poison, which was really bad to get them back home. I mean, not to do a huge history lesson, but can you give us like a little bit of the practical realities of the birth of the funeral industry? OK, so and I don't know this history backwards and forwards. So any any viewers, if you want to call me out, please do. I can't guarantee my accuracy, but yeah, it did start. File a complaint with the nursing board. Don't viewers, if you want to call me out, please do. I can't guarantee my accuracy, but yeah, it did start. File a complaint with the nursing board. Don't send me an email. Yeah, please, please don't at me, please.

But yeah, it did start more or less because during the Civil War, there were so many bodies on the battlefield that it was like the only practical thing you could do really was just bury them right practical thing you could do, really, was just bury them right there if you had the resources. Because, yeah,

particularly in the campaigns here in the South, like, I'm sorry, in the midst of summer, like, bodies are going to start going, they're going to start decomposing, like, immediately in that country. And there was a tremendous problem also trying to ship bodies home on trains. Trains started to be like, no, we're not taking

any more rotting corpses. I'm sorry, it's nasty. Yeah, we're not handling this thing. So eventually, I think, what was his name? I can't remember. The father of embalming,

I'll look it up on the side while we're talking. But they began embalming corpses using an arsenic solution, which, of course, is very effective, but it's also very easy to make yourself sick with arsenic. Not against the ground either? Yeah, yeah. Ground water. Yes. And I mean, same thing to a certain degree with with modern embalming chemicals like flameldehyde formula is I mean, they are generally pretty carcinogenic. And but but yeah, old styles of embalming used arsenic, which is pretty nasty.

They they quickly began to realize, like, this is not really a safe way to do this. Let's try something different. And there have been many different styles of embalming, not only throughout history, but even in modern embalming. There were, I think, a couple of different takes on how you could do this until kind of the modern method of arterial embalming where you basically have an end point and an exit point and you're trying to pump in embalming through it, pump out one, and clear out everything as much as possible so the body is preserved for generally about a week. Modern embalming is not meant to be permanent either, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

A week? I didn't know. That's very short. Yes, yeah, no, it is. Thomas Holmes. That was him. That was considered the father of modern embalming. And yeah, he was one of the early people in the Civil War who started setting up their embalming tents and offering to embalm people. There were also some controversies about particularly unscrupulous embalmers that would be like, hey, I embalmed your son. I'm not releasing the body until you pay me the fee. And the family being, we didn't pay. We didn't want you to embalm them.

We will come collect the remains another time. It got a little nasty at a certain point. But yeah, modern embalming is not really meant to last more than a week. Now, if it's stronger embalming, because they can change the ratios of formalin to water and if the body needs to be shipped across the country, they'll typically do

stronger embalming, but there are examples of when a body has had to be exhumed for one reason or another, they've discovered like, oh, this embalming took pretty hard, actually. It's not always the case, but sometimes they will find like, yeah, let's see, I know there was a, I know that one was It's not always the case, but sometimes they will find like, yeah.

Let's see. I know there was a, I know that one was, that's another one I got to go look up. But yeah, there's been several, there's been several examples of where they, they, they, uh, particularly like murder investigations, like, uh, exhume someone popped up to the casket and be like, we can do a normal autopsy. Like this, this body is actually well preserved enough for that. So that's as a rule a week, but not always. Alice, do you have anything about the spiritual or psychological role of death you see in your practice? You know, currently it's kind of the practical existential part of this, but I don't know. Do you have any thoughts? I mean, the juxtaposition

between kind of the role death plays in religion and psychology that we kind of sanitize and then just the realities of what happens are just kind of interesting. I thought sitting with that would make for a neat discussion. Yeah. Nothing off the top of my head from my practice. One thing you were making me think about is um i had heard or there's a guru in india who talks about how the body takes it takes 13 days for all of herself sorry he's fine if he wants to say he's welcome to say violet will pop in sometimes Sometimes it takes, but supposedly it takes 13 days for all of the cells to die. And so they don't want to bury the bodies before it's been 13 days because they still see it as the spirit still there in the body. But I'm not sure. I don't know.

I mean, I think, you know know there's a lot of ancient science that actually ends up being you know if we studied it now it's actually pretty accurate but i'm not sure how how true that is or a lot of the grieving periods like a different sex of judaism have those too i mean a lot of it served kind of a practical role too of that you know pre-scientific medicine you don't you couldn't always tell if somebody was dead you know there are some conditions that can be premature burial was actually a risk at one time uh because he had the modern understanding of how to actually determine whether someone was dead or not was was very shaky during the victorian era they actually developed

early resuscitation kits ways to revive people people from them being drowned. And the thing is, they didn't take off immediately because that idea freaked people out so much that you could appear dead and not be dead. That was a nightmare for some people. That's why you saw the advent in Germany towards the end of the 1800s of waiting mortuaries, which were basically these big mortuaries that you left your family member out to effectively begin

decomposing. Once those signs appeared, you could safely bury them. Not too long. And it's the same thing. There was technology like coffins that you could bury and have a bell set up above them where if the body twitched, like,

oh, they're alive, it'll ring the bell. Not actually the original safe of the bell, even though people sometimes talk about that. There was also, like, spring-loaded... Insert clip here. Yeah, insert clip here. It's alright Cause I'm safe out of It's alright Cause I'm safe out of there But yeah, that was a true fear for a long time

until we were able to establish more modern medical methods of verifying someone is dead. Yeah, people were very scared of the concept of being buried alive. I still am, to be honest. It is terrifying. That's

absolutely horrifying. There's famous individuals in American history. I think Washington said, leave out my body for four days before burying me. There are multiple examples of that sort of thing. I don't do a ton of hypnotic suggestion and guided imagery. It's not what most people need, but the people that I have done it with, that is a pretty

reoccurring image that they feel like they are buried, like they are in a box and they need to break through and somehow get out and engage with their life i think it's kind of interesting that's come up yeah that is yeah um you it's just this is kind of a pivot but um you had asked about in in my practice what experience i have and i was something just popped in my head when we were talking about children and how they see death. I remember that little children talking about death is, is very fascinating. There was a, there was a, maybe like a four-year-old little boy who was coming at, his parents had brought him in. I can't remember what it was. It might've even been a court ordered thing, but his parents brought him in for assessment. I don't usually work with kids that little. So

by themselves, I would work with them generally with a family, but it was just me and him. And so I was trying to, you know, do some art therapy and, and he said something about how he talks. He said, Oh, my friend, you know, I talked to my friend, Matt, when I play outside. And I was like, Oh, that's nice. Is that who is that? And, and he said, he's a bird. And I was, and I was like, Oh, okay. And, you know, got some, you know, talk to him about the bird that he talks to outside, who's a cardinal. And then I brought this up to his parents and they said, wait, who? And whatever the name was, it was specific enough that they were like, that's somebody who was our neighbor, who's friends with our son, who got killed in a car crash a few months ago. And they were like, we didn't even know that he knew that that had happened like it wasn't somebody that they thought you know it wasn't somebody that they the family had been talking about having passed away and um but he knew somehow he picked up he picked up on some kind of energy that this yeah you know just the way adults avoid something i think a lot of times

gives kids information yeah yeah um i think that's and i i'll have people who've had like very like spiritual experiences like that where they've seen loved ones who pass on and and things like that and kind of but people don't want to tell you that stuff like i i would guess you think they think the therapist is uncomfortable with it or i think they think the therapist is going to think they're crazy, which is a no, no word. But I think I think there's this sense of because I would occasionally get someone who this would sort of come up like maybe they had what they felt like they were premonitions about things and they wouldn't they it was it was like they really didn't want to crack into talking about that until i took until i normalized it for them like experiences of loved ones after deaths but yeah it's something that people do not want to

talk about with therapists i think i mean unless you're really put yourself out there as a death um kind of death and dying expert but i don't know if is there is there such a thing you know i mean you can probably find researchers that technically fill that that niche but yeah i don't know if there's there's anyone i don't know how much like actual serious study has been put into i mean i'm sure it's it's scattered about but not being kind of like centralized study of this sort of it's they go back to death in a lot of different um uh scientific soft sciences anthropology sociology a ton like um one of the ways that when they're looking at evolution and they're like when is the brain that is developing and the evolving human not an animal you know when is there some kind of awareness of something else? And the

thing that they look for is when do we start to bury people or do something? We didn't have to bury them. When grandma just falls over and everyone keeps walking on to eat the apple, that's not human in our mind. And then it is human when we stop and boot and wink or some kind of ritual that recognizes this. That's what they're looking for a ton of the time. And I don't know, we still have those rituals. You know, it was the beginning of our humanity. Robert Pogue Harrison, who I'd love to have on here, but he's not interested in my email so far.

But he wrote The Dominion of the Dead. And one of the points he makes in there is that social animals are the most vocal when something dies. And so when you're looking at when did we have kind of the dead. And one of the points he makes in there is that social animals are the most vocal when something dies. And so when you're looking at, when did we have kind of the synesthetic connection between sound and meaning? When did we say like, Oh wait,

my mouth can make these noises, but I could fit little meanings in here. I could make this into a code, you know, differentiating between different things. It probably was around death because you have animals like an animal dies. The lion mom roars, you know, certain vocalization dies the lion mom roars you know certain vocalization for the baby and you know and maybe calling it to come back or whatever you know when the people are around in their you know mourning slowly these noises start to mean different things

and yeah and particularly throughout human history there's been tradition of like vocal mourning not not not necessarily in... Rome had paid mourners. You had to pay people to scream. The ancient Egyptians paid mourners of Irish keening. Like, yeah, there's lots of ways that people have turned their grief into these very loud vocal expressions,

which is not as common, particularly I think the modern West, but I mean, you still see it. And it certainly is something that has occurred in the past. I think, I mean, it might be Alan Wolfe. I don't know if you, do you know him, Joel? He's an expert in grief and loss. And, oh, she, well, I was going to say, he talks,

I just lost my point that I was going to say, what did you. I was talking about burial, Kearney. Yeah. More morning. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Grieving grief and loss in that way. Vocal grieving. That, that it's people adjust way more to have better adjustment to death death in the psychological world and how in kind of modern society we've oh we do funerals but i mean modern western society we do funerals but um we've really stripped away a lot of the ritual you know we don't and in jewish funerals you know you have several days of sh ritual, you know, we don't, and in Jewish funerals, you know, you have several days of Shiva that you sit and more if it's depending on who the person was and what the role is and where people come and gather at the house. And, and it's like an open house for people to come grieve and come by.

And people in Jewish faith do a lot better with death than in other, than in other cultures, just because of these kind of traditions and rituals that actually... Because it's not only a transition. We talk about whatever we think about the spirituality of death, but like a transition from being alive to not being here anymore whatever that transition is um but um well it's also kind of a death of the participant in the ritual too you know if my parents die that means that i'm something different part of me has died and i'm in a new role you know so it is a transition on two levels yeah yeah that yeah that transition and, exactly. Kind of the transition of the family, like letting the person go and everyone getting to have the moment of kind of reckoning of, you know, coming over to the house and they're not there anymore. for me after my grandmother passed away, who is my very closest relative. And I was at her house when, you know, she was in the hospital. It was just kind of out of the blue. So everything in the house was, it wasn't like a sick person's house. It was all, you know, where I usually

would have spent the night and, and stuff. And so I was still spending, you know, I'd gone up to see her and was spending the night in my bed where I would usually stay. And then there were people at the house and it sort of felt, it was very comforting to be able to be there in her house and like where I, where is one of the most comforting places to me, but be in that environment and really, yeah, kind of, I mean, it just, those types of experiences can be, can be stealing. Yeah. Well, I think the good points made there is like when, when the transition of death becomes almost entirely transactional, which it is in, in the modern American funeral industry

in particular, like, yeah, that strips out all the ritualism. It feels very hollow when you're just paying some dude in a bad suit to put on, like, just that CD of very obnoxious, sad, twinkly piano music and shine a pink light on your relative. Like, yeah, that feels incredibly hollow and empty. Like, I can imagine that, yeah, people can walk away from funerals,

like feeling very unfulfilled because of that. How old? Oh, I'm sorry. Well, that was like when, when my grandmother passed away, we actually very deliberately like, we actually avoided almost all the traps in the funeral. I was the only one that saw her in the casket. casket not just because i hadn't seen her when she passed um after that we did a

crypt side service like she was already uh she was already in the crypt put away like we just we pulled up photos and just had a good reminiscing session and that was that felt really really good because yeah i think it is i think honestly the healthiest way to deal with death is having the family involved. Like, as much as you can take care of your disease, rather than not hand it off entirely to some other group of people, probably the better you're going to feel psychologically at the end, I would think. Alice, how old did you say the child was that was talking to the cardinal that you had? Four. Four, yeah. yeah alice how old did you say the child was that was talking to the cardinal that you had four four yeah um there's a part in yalom where he gets a little bit more speculative

and existential therapy i think it's kind of interesting but he he kind of speculates that uh ed's uh i don't know the age range but he says basically at two they know what death is and they're fine with it and then by four they kind of start not being able to accept it anymore and that by like six or seven they have a very adult-like almost religious defense mechanism against the reality of death and he's talking about how a lot of two-year-olds and things like they like kind of know something's wrong like three four they'll see a bird that dies in the yard as example he gives them they're like yelling at the parent to put it back in the nest or to make it talk um and they have this kind of they're kind of enamored with it but then if you come back

to the same kids and you talk about that by the time they're six seven then they have like some sort of uh you know defense mechanism against death where they're like no he went to another world and there's this world or like i actually have magic so i can see that but there's something that the brain creates to help them understand this thing that they can kind of accept when they're younger, which is kind of an interesting part about Yalom. I wish he said more about that. It's just two pages in there. But it's one of the more interesting kind of speculations that he makes. Yeah.

Do you think some of that is them beginning to kind of internalize how other people around them are reacting or he doesn't say I would say that I mean I remember I worked with kids in my first show about a college like a group and there was like someone's dad died and there were parents who were

like it wasn't like a formal funeral either it was like a big kind of celebration of life. Everybody dressed casually, like, you know, music and whatever. But they were like stopping their kids from going who were like sixth grade, seventh grade. I mean, not really young. And they were like, well, they're just so young. I don't want them to be around that. And I was like, you know, no, this is normal.

This is natural. Like the lesson that you're teaching here is not good. You know, this fear does not go away away this thing does not normalize itself um and i think like we do have a culture that just hides death away from children from everybody and we have this sort of you know probably fueled by you know uh capital this like need to sell you something and we pretend to be young forever and ever and then you having done some jerry psych and some like hospice social work people don't know how to die you know they never maybe we know intellectually that we do but we don't ever have any tools to approach that phase

of life and it is it is a part of life um i don't know i mean do you see that else the kind of like just fear of death that we have here that it's not something that i don't think is is even normal or human honestly you know it's kind of contra yeah um i've noticed this with my my son who's about kindergarten who's in kindergarten and um yeah there was my dad doesn't fish but for some reason he was like i've got to take hank fishing it's like i guess he turned into a grandfather and it's like okay i never learned to fish i've got to figure this out um but so we go to the go to the lake with a fishing pole and so it turns out my dad's not going to actually he's not actually into it because it like because he's an emergency room physician.

And then it's all of a sudden, like he, he's, he's saying, well, it kind of makes me sad to catch the fish. And even when you're, and he, he got really, my father got really sad about, you know, a fish that he had caught, like a tiny, a little fish that he had caught and then couldn't get the hook out right. And didn't know what, and, you know, and then my dad didn't want to really fish anymore. And I thought that was, it was really interesting, but my son, I'm not sure if he even really processed that that was happening, but there were some other kids there showing him how to do the fishing, fishing rod. And, um, and and there was a there was a little fish that they ended up it was like this group of children trying to revive this fish on the dock and like the three of them like it was it was like 30 minutes of them like trying to resuscitate this fish and they got it i think they got it to like flap around again like and then and so they

were thinking okay we're gonna we're really gonna bring it back to life but it was this whole thing where it's and then my dad and I were kind of pacing around awkwardly like not really you know not not wanting to say no it's really not coming back to life um because I mean you just feel you feel bad saying that when it's like kid, but then it was like, well, the lesson teaches itself because he, you know, eventually he's like, okay, well, it's not going to work. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, but I, I, and I, something else you're making me think I'm, I remember, you know, adults trying to hide death. And so there were several times where I was like on a trip or something when I was young,

and there would be somebody who passed away. And they didn't tell, you know, they didn't want to tell me because I was out of town. And then it was like the funeral had happened and everything happened while I was, while I wasn't there. And nobody let me me know or one time I was on college and a great aunt died and I didn't find out until like a couple weeks later and I was I was so mad that it was like this even you know even as like a 20 year old it felt like it feels like the people in older generations were still trying to like brush things under the rug and yeah very my yeah there's a lot of discomfort with death and anglo-american families for sure like i know stephen jenkins is a palliative care counselor that's written some books he's uh interesting um but he always talks about the us not being

comfortable with death and then the cultural problems and vulnerabilities that we have i mean kearney started talking about people getting basically calmed uh you know when they're grieving a loved one i mean there's a lot of vulnerability that americans have about that that i think we don't notice um i mean even like makeup is like you'll be 10 years younger you'll last forever you know it's like they don't just start selling you mortuary makeup when you're dead i mean they start when you're 12. they um that was actually that also something with the industry if they had to legally they had to stop claiming that embalming could preserve you forever because they absolutely tried to claim that at first and with with the arsenic i mean yeah yeah you also became very toxic but i mean but but yeah it's like

that's much like any eventually yeah much like like any, you know, industry for profit. Like, yeah, they're going to sell you the rosiest possible picture they can. You know, they're not going to tell you that, like, yeah, this isn't going to last forever. And it's going to get, it's probably going to get a little nasty. Yeah. Well, and I think, I mean,'s the the birth of buddhism right the earliest thing that we can tell that hinduism is splitting off and doing something kind of different is that the hindu uh a lot of the religious figures just start hanging out in

torno pits looking at bodies and it's kind of like you know the glittering dharma and moksha and temple and you know pathway to god through the self was maybe a little bit avoidant and then they start being like hey hey, we die. Or is this really real? You know, whatever. They're psychically chewing on, you know, Buddhism goes a different direction than Hinduism does to handle an anxiety that the culture is maybe not sitting with. I mean, yeah.

Y'all have any like ideas about how good death could be? I'm more, you know, Courtney knows a lot about religious practices around the world, like a more natural or sustainable or psychologically healthy you know process or there is there other examples out there um i think um i mean i really think it would be cool if people started leaning into kind of like mortuary gardens like places where you could just naturally vary people and maybe you know maybe you could have a small marker but also it's like it's it's not just it's not a lawn like we have now it's actually you can see stuff like blooming and growing you know partially from the fact that yeah like yeah your loved one is going back to the environment at least for me that would make me very content

i'd love to i'd love to go like hey let hey, let's go take a hike through the gardens. Go see so-and-so real quick. You're going back anyway. Just how long do you want to put it off? Yeah. We are headed back into something that is not really an avoidable destination, no matter how much formaldehyde. I mean, it's just, in the end, we will eventually hit a point where it's like, look, we've got to start disposing of people in more efficient

and sustainable ways. Alkaline hydrolysis is starting to get big, which I hope that they start implementing that as a greener method of doing cremations. The idea of it freaks people out to no end, but as soon as you kind of learn exactly what it does and what the end result is, it's barely any different from cremation.

What do you think, Alice? Google is kind of auto-blurring it. What is the pyramid behind you on the wall? Is that a picture of a temple, a ziggurat, or is that like an artwork? I can't. No, it's not. It is a... Okay, temple, a ziggurat, or is that like an artwork? I can't. No, it's not. It is a, that one down. Okay, it's a mountain.

Gotcha. That's a mountain with different pieces. It's not a pyramid. And a map of my dreamscape up there that I've been working on. Yeah, I love the idea of green cemeteries. I mean, it has to catch on at some point. I mean, and wasn't it true, Kearney, you probably would know this,

wasn't it true that cemeteries used to be where people would go out and picnic in the cemeteries and it was like a fun place that people would go with the family on the weekend. Yeah. That was, that was a big thing, particularly during the, the Victorian age. Because I mean, the big problem was urban cemeteries in places like London were just not sustainable. You could not, they, they were literally like,

they were burying people on top of each other and running out of room. Like you would, you would go six inches down, hit a coffin, kind of thing. Not like, there was a reason that people thought that that urban cemeteries were you know gross nasty places because yeah when you have that many bodies in one place it doesn't matter if they're under the soil it's still gonna smell bad it's still gonna be like nasty so they they started a movement to try and do kind of these rural cemeteries, these like the one of the first big. I don't know what the first big necropolis was, but I know it was a member of the royal family got married to a commoner. So they were unable to be buried in the standard accommodation.

So instead, they got a nice little tomb in one of these rural cemeteries. And that was kind of the thing that kicked it all off. As soon as one of the royal family did it, everyone was like, OK, I want my tomb now. And yeah, so they very much used to be like, yeah, places you could go out and picnic, places you could go for a walk. Modern cemeteries are generally not nearly as interesting, obviously. But yeah, that's what they initially started out, both as a method of figuring out what to do with urban cemeteries, but also it was just like, yeah, this is a nice green space we can enjoy.

This is a nice third space we can have. Yeah, even buttoned up repressive Victoria was a lot better at death than we are now. I mean, what was it? You ever seen those hair flowers? They would make your relatives hair into like decoration, like ornaments that you kept around your house. Oh yeah. Yeah.

And the, the photography. There's a picture floating around of my grandfather's little brother who died when he was maybe two or something and there's a a death photo that we found in some albums somewhere and it's i don't know you know it's so it's so sad to me it really is see the photo of this beautiful little baby who's but that was such a thing i mean they were very comfortable getting up and close with death in those ways. Or memento mori hung around to the Victorian period.

I think it started medieval, maybe. Do you know that one, Kerney? Are you familiar with that? Yeah, memento mori. I mean, there's always been examples of memento mori going back as far as like the Romans. Do you remember the incident at Suwannee with the bone? No, I don't. Do you remember the incident at Swanee with the bone? No. You might have left before that, but somebody basically was doing work on a building or something, and they found bones. The police had to come and stuff.

It was just an office. I think it was the admissions office. Somebody found a femur on the keyboard that fell out of the ceiling. Human hair and bones yeah but then the police were like no this is you know hundreds of years old it's fine um and they think the best guess of it was it was somebody's memento mori that at one person at one point it had somehow made its way into the drop ceiling because you know so when he was old civil war academy some of that was still going on um but the memento mori tradition they basically uh usually a transition place when you graduated school or starting a job or what

married whatever they'll just give you a bone and be like remember you die eventually so make it count that's yeah keep a little bone around that's what i'm gonna start doing a human bone not just yeah yeah now i'm gonna start like i'm gonna make sure i carry like just human vertebrae on me and when i meet people for the first time i'll give them one when i'm probably saying goodbye and just hey remember you're gonna die one day so you know you're up selling the mental morning i'm gonna get a whole skeleton on my back and give it a piggyback ride because i really want to make my life better i'm taking it everywhere i am going on shark tank with my new my new uh future Memento Mori. It's going to be a great thing.

But yeah, Memento Mori have a history. I mean, the Romans had them. There's a famous example of a, it's not a fresco. It's a mosaic in Pompeii of a skeleton holding two wine jugs, like the dangers of drinking. And of course, Memento Mori got big boosts throughout history. Of course, the plague. It's the first anti-drugs ad. Yeah.

How do you Latinize Nancy Reagan? What is that? I've actually, when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough... Regus Septimus. I was fortunate enough in high school to be able to take a Europe trip and go see in Switzerland. I went through a little town that had actual like play guard on its on some of its bridges. So seeing some of the, you know, the dance macabre scenes of dancing skeletons and stuff is very cool.

There was a little while during the Renaissance that cadaver tombs got very popular. It was like the chic thing was instead of showing yourself on top of your tomb in effigy, you would show the rotting version of yourself on top of your tomb in effigy. So they went through this very nice we kind of like the Dark Souls aesthetic and went hard into that

for a little while. I would love to see something like that make a comeback. My God, our death rituals are so sterile. I want to see, like, start slapping some, like, barber-leaf skull on stuff again. Yeah, is the Party City, you know, skeleton, is that really the height of what we should do?

We just get out of town? Look, I think that we need a little less capitalism in funerals and a little more Party City. Only partly ironically. I've kind of been conditioned growing up to think that skeletons sound like

Cab Calloway. That's what I imagined that they sound like. Have you seen that skeleton that they're selling now that's like 20 feet tall or something they haven't yeah no all the all the the goobers over in places like trustful i mean when they're trying to outdo each other with their halloween decorations when they're not the people like so against how we this is like doing a cheerleader triangle more. Like I thought,

I remember there's, there's one house over on trustful clay road where they always go all out every year. Like I deliberately try and drive right there in October. It was like, Ooh, what are they doing? And I remember last time they had like three of those giant skeletons out like doing different various things.

I was like, you guys have maybe a little too much disposable income. Even that much. I thought there was some serious investment in the going brain of a giant skeleton. There's a lot more of them than there were in the P.T. Barnum days.

Yes. It's more about the cost of having to have an entire storage room to store all of your bones. Mass skeletons. the cost of having to have an entire storage room to store all of your like that foam. Mass scale. Well, now someone can go do the Cardiff giant hoax, but now they actually have a skeleton to build off of.

Yeah, I don't think that works anymore now that you can get them at Sam's Club. Hey guys, look what I dug up in my yard, you know. The origin of P.T. Barnum's circus, for anyone unfamiliar, is that he made and buried a giant fake skeleton and then dug it up and set it in a field and would charge you a nickel to look like a peak. But in fact, the start of that, actually, it was a grift of a grift. Yeah, but he copied the farmer.

He tried to buy it from the farmer for 20 bucks and the farmer said no and he made it. There was a farmer who was just like basically tired of all his his extremely religious friends like talking what he considered gobbledygook so it's like he said it was like an enochian giant didn't he like it was from rebel times yeah he was riffing on biblical giants because he was basically like i'm gonna show these these fucking goobers like that that no this is this is dumb i'm gonna trick all of you but then pt barnum saw it was like this is dumb. I'm going to trick all of you. But then P.T. Barnum saw it and was like, this is really cool. Can I buy it from you? And he said no. So P.T. Barnum just made his own and claimed it was the original

because P.T. Barnum had no shame and was incredibly based. Yeah, that's why that movie that came out a couple years ago, I didn't see it, but the trailer, they were like, he just wanted children to smile. I was like, no, this is not what P.T. Barnum did i said that to jenny the other day

like there's some scene jackman being saying to the bearded lady like they don't understand you now yes well one day it's like the real pt barnum would have been like no get out big get back out there sweetie you got like this is it's such a it's such a weird screenwriting thing that like whenever you buy the rights to some horrible american family or american story you have to make it about how they really just wanted to build a family wait for when they try and rehabilitate the sacklers with like a nice dramatic like a romantic comedy yeah i don't know death in film that's that's that's another direction that's kind of interesting um well uh i don't know i don't want to keep you guys too much um is there you know anything that

we don't get to or something that seems seems relevant or i remember the reason i started talking about the giant skeleton thing is um alex is she's a really good local therapist her name just started ember wellness if you're looking for, um, that she had one of the giant skeletons in her yard and we were like brainstorming, trying to come up with ways to keep it around for all the holidays, you know, like putting it in a Turkey costume or, but put bunny ears on it or, you know, have like a, you know, nativity of skeletons or something. And it was like, we should bring back the,... I love that. To the awareness of death. These other holidays. It's for now. The chickens and the baby bunnies are hatching but just wait.

Hang on a minute. I actually, and I still have... Stephanie will have to go away. I've got a half skeleton that I actually built up into a little ground burster zombie and it was it was the weirdest like most uncomfortable process because the way you do it is you just start with one of these plastic skeletons and start stretching candy hose over it

so you feel like you're like doing some some real weird like serial killer stuff but once you get that that painting that forms like that forms the basis. No, Mom, I was just making a Halloween decoration. No, that's not what you think. But you start painting on liquid latex and you actually get like an okay skin. It starts to look kind of like a mummy. And

I dressed him. I went to the thrift store and found a child-sized suit and put this half-skeleton to the suit. And so I had him like burst out of the ground one of these Halloweens. I need to put him out again. Maybe I will for this year. I'm going to put it in the tabard yard before

the 31st. You're welcome to just turn left at the... I'm just going to start... What I'll start doing is I'll start cranking out. I'll get better and better at making these corpses. I'll start cranking them out and I'll just start leaving them at your therapy place over time. And you can do them whatever the heck you want. I'm just leaving them there.

They'll already be dressed. They'll be good to go. You just decide what you want to do. Well, we can totally use it as a topic for therapy. It's like a person who comes in. Well, it's just you have yourself in the main chair of the office. Then you have the skeleton, a corner chair.

And the thing is, if anyone asks about it, just pretend it's not there. Just like, what are you talking about? What skeleton? Yeah. You just have it on a little,

a painting couch is the skeleton of the room right now with us. Yeah. You talk about it's mom issues. Yeah, this was, um, this was a lot, a lot of fun.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on. Cause I do, I do love to, in my own amateurish way, talk shop about death stuff. It's a lot of fun. Yeah.

Anything we don't get to you, you're all, uh, I mean, there's, I mean, I, I don't,

I'm about to go back to the office and move furniture. So I'm not in a huge rush, but, um, you know, I don't want to keep you all past the expiry. Any topics of interest or anything? Well, I'll say if any viewers want to continue reading about any of this stuff again,

any of the Caitlin Dougherty books are fantastic. And, I mean, even just her YouTube channel is great. Her video explaining New Orleans oven crepes is literally what verbatim I probably quoted to you a little while back, Joe. I always blank on

the title. Is it from here? Because it's something to eternity, but I always did the one that I believe it's from here to

eternity. If it isn't from here to eternity, the movie from the 70s where they make out of the waves though, they have the same title.

Is it a different one? No, I wasn't talking about like they parody it in airplane because when they have the same title is it a different one no i wasn't you know what i'm talking about like they parody it in airplane because when the wave comes up there's like crabs and fish and stuff i wasn't even like did she name it then even my parents eyes then like good lord yeah i have no idea i mean that's that's um i remember recently when that movie the whale came out uh real quick just wanted to look at IMDb. I was curious. I like Britain and Frasier.

And then when I saw like four other titles also called The Whale, I was like, Aaron Oski, come on, man. Couldn't you like the the citation? I bet no one's done that. That probably doesn't have the same kick as the whale. If you're watching people make out in the water in waves, then you've got not only the wrong medium but the wrong book. Caitlin Daugherty, from here you turn.

From here to eternity, if you're reading about people making out in the waves and not about the interesting Tarajan culture from Indonesia, then yes, you have picked up the wrong book. Alice, you got anything? No, not in particular. There's the book Stiff by Mary Roach, which is a really, really great book.

Thank you for bringing that one up. That one's also excellent. Yeah, about how they take care of bodies and just everything to do with what we're talking about, basically. They go into the body form briefly in that book as well. And a lot of the topics, at least regarding the American funeral industry, there's a book from the 1950s called The American Way of Death. My mother, God bless her, found a first edition at the thrift store. That was one of my prized old books. Yeah.

And the funny thing is I flipped through it and I was just shaking my head because all the problems it mentions in this book published in the 1950s, exact same issues we have today. It has not changed one iota. The prices have just changed because of inflation. That's it. That is it. They probably have some sillier names. You the the carnival barker you know upsell is it still the same people who manufacture is it like caskets and things like i wonder if it's sort of is it sort of a monopoly i know luxottica i'm pretty sure hearses are a monopoly because those are literally made to order. They don't make

hearses unless you order one. Oh. Fun fact. That would be a good small business. Sounds like good money. Yeah. That would be one area that, yeah, good small business.

Do that in the funeral industry. We should have a Ma and Pop's casket store. They're legally required to take a casket if you order it from outside the funeral home. Never let them tell you otherwise. Right.

Yeah, and they don't tell you that you can get you can choose cremation either. They like wait for you to bring that up or they try to move really quickly through that it is wild what they put i mean it just is you know do you want fries with that and you want to supersize it i mean it just continues yeah like come in this room and look at these three caskets that are here that you can choose between and then choose the vault and we're because that's a big you know we don't even talk about the vault but that's a big thing do you want a crying angel to go on top of that yeah well and

it was with my grandmother's funeral my aunt was very insistent she was like the we're gonna get the the most basic basket which was beautiful and just wood and you know they act like that's the one that you know you're really skimping on if you get but it's actually the prettiest one to me but she was like no but we're spending the money on the vault that's that's where you spend the money is on the vault and not on the casket so that but i don't know i mean i was like okay or vaults are actually far more for aesthetic considerations of the lens rather than actually for anything protective. Vaults don't, don't, if it, the thing particular in this, we're about to get into a little bit of gross detail here.

But while we're talking about it, one of the issues with any kind of, if they tell you like, oh, we got a, we've got a ceiling casket with gaskets and a sealing vault is you don't want everything perfectly sealed. That promotes anaerobic decomposition, stuff that exists without oxygen, and that's the nasty decom. You want the body to be exposed to the elements to a certain degree, even if it's just allowing

water and some air in there. Otherwise, you get soup. To put you get soup. To put it bluntly. Wow. Yeah. Well, they crack it anyway, because they want you to decompose, you know, and they bury you. Yeah, yeah. It's just that there have

been instances in the past in improperly maintained mausoleums, they have something called exploding casket syndrome, which is when the pressure builds up too much and the front of the mausoleum begins to leak. Yeah, it's corpse disposal is a gross

thing. I mean, probably... What's the average price? I mean, if you go in, you get the hearse, you get the pink lacquered casket with the... What's the average funeral cost? They're probably going to try and sell you on a standard traditional funeral, which is basically the full package. They want you to just get them. What's the average funeral cost? They're probably going to try and sell you on a standard traditional funeral, which is basically the full package.

They want you to just get everything. At least here in Alabama, I think I've seen prices around probably you'd be spending $5,000 to $6,000. Wow. Basically, the world's worst mixer.

Again, that's why we cut out with my grandmother we cut out the funeral entirely and did a crypt side something like there were there wasn't even anyone from the funeral home there it was literally just us the family you hang out in that little room with the you know greece greek pictures and uh no we had little paintings and yeah we hung out we hung out in the mausoleum itself. We were in there. And I mean, that is nice. A properly maintained mausoleum

usually does not smell like anything. And it's very, very quiet. I used to, that cemetery she's buried in, it's right across from a big shopping center in Trussell. I used to work at a couple of stores over there. And I remember when I got set up on my break, I was like, I've got to get away from just everybody. I don't want to see my co-workers'

faces. I don't want to see the customers. I don't see anybody. I would actually just drive across the street and sit in that mausoleum. I wouldn't be doing anything more, but I'd just be on my phone scrolling through mods for Skyrim or whatever. Just sitting in the... Because it's quiet. It's peaceful.

No one's going to bother me. It's a good place to pay Dark Souls. Yes, an excellent place. Yeah, lots of quiet and solitude unless someone tries to come kick you out or something. I guess if it's your family grip, they can't, right? Well, yeah.

Yeah, we're not... Yeah, if you're not creating those disturbances, it's fine. But at least that's also the nice thing about my family is whenever whenever we we have a loved one pass on, it's generally not a super somber affair because, I mean, we'll have some tears. But often it's a it's a circle of telling funny stories about the person. Telling funny stories or making jokes about our own future demises. I remember mom at my great-grandmother's funeral made a quip about, you know,

we ought to, if we cremated her, what if we threw her in with a bag of popcorn? Like, and popped it and then called the game What's Eating Mom? It's just, like, and popped it, and then called the game What's Eating Mom? It's just, again, like, these very, like, these very morbid jokes, but that gallows humor, at least for us, it really does help.

Like, because, I mean, my family is pretty down-to-earth and logical, and we all know that, you know, you know, death will come eventually, and we just, we're all kind of planning for, hey hey don't make a big fuss out of it and have a few larps because i mean that's the only thing you can do at that juncture is yeah have your tears but then laugh about all the good times we had when i think

therapeutically and spiritually and and philosophically it's not that death is absurd it's the death kind of makes life absurd you know that's like we feel like we really care so much about you know getting the iphone you know 13 or whatever you know it's kind of helpful to pick up your skull and look into its york size and be like yeah you know what maybe this is kind of i just want you to know if i'm ever in the unfortunate circumstance where i must eulogize you one of the things i am going to mention is you have is your cackle is one of the things I wanted to talk about explicitly because you have one of the most infectious laughs I've ever heard on a person. And then right when you finish the line and the audience laughs, you'll hear the cackle coming from the crypt.

It'll be too late. I remember way too many times you and I have been joking about something, and I've been doubled over laughing. Honestly, not because even what we were talking about in the beginning was that funny. It's because you're laughing so hard, it's making you laugh. There was a pretty good riff about a family

being upsold. I won't repeat. Yeah, I couldn't breathe. Yeah, I do. I do remember that day. I'm glad we got off the interstate with this. I literally had to pull over.

Yeah, I remember we were like, man, I'm glad that we were able to pay attention to driving and laugh that hard. Well, I mean, just to kind of close out, I mean, do you have anything from a more of a therapeutic perspective, Alice? I mean, I do think that a lot of times one of the more damaging things we can do as therapists is avoid something that the patient wants to go through. And our fear that they won't be comfortable with it means we avoid things. And a lot of times that's death. I mean, when I bring up kind of uncomfortable topics, but especially the fear of death, I mean, I think that's when people kind of bloom and open up because no one else gave them space to talk about that. It's not really that

we are afraid of it as much as that we are afraid other people are afraid of it. And then that makes us feel alone. You know, I see that dynamic a lot with a lot of issues yeah yeah and um i don't mean to keep bringing it back to kids but i feel like with teenagers that it's uh like honoring because they actually want to talk about death or they're like it's a comfortable not comfortable topic but sort of you know insofar as it can be comfortable. I feel like teenagers are a good, are the demographic that like want to talk about it, scares them, but they also don't, you know, they're kind of aware that it's this thing that all the people in their lives, the adults don't really talk about. And, and that's around the age too, where start where you've maybe had a few a couple people your own age who've died like going to a funeral of another kid was is a big is was a big

thing place for me yeah um but i'm trying to think um yeah i don't know was there is there any did you have any clients in particular that you remember kind of working with around this? Yeah, there's there's a lot of cases. I mean, teenagers is a good point, though. I mean, like you I'm talking I started with a joke about how people dress at Hot Topic that were gothic when I was in high school. But I mean, there's a reason that teenagers do that right like they're kind of being like you know i'm not just i'm edgy i'm different but also like i'm okay with this thing you know that you don't know i'm gonna remind you of yeah something subversive you can't control me yeah yeah and and one of that is kind of i mean that's sort of when

you are you know you're wearing an auk and that maybe is more 80s gothic than 2005 you know but like like wearing the you know dressing uh like you know death from sandman and uh you know the the all black even black lipstick and i mean a lot of that is kind of saying i'm comfortable with the other side i see through the lies of society man you know when you're when you're 13 um in a way that's a healthy developmental phase, you know, to say this thing's kind of scary, but I'm going to sit with it and I'm going to, you know, play with other people's reaction to this thing that they're uncomfortable with. It's what you're supposed to do when you're a teenager, I guess. I mean, I guess same thing as like sex education is if you have death phobic, you know, if you're death phobic, then it's like you're not doing,

you're not doing the teenager any any favors by not not exposing them to it and teaching them something about it in a safe a safe situation yeah actually i had mentioned the onk house what i know that means life right but we kind of associate it with that do you know that yeah yeah i'm not in the 80s what did no, that's why I was saying you're wearing an onk. That's why I mentioned it. I wasn't. Yeah. Oh, no. I mean. Yeah.

That's cool. So to me, so the cross is representative of. So I have I have some different some divergent views about this, but the cross is representative of like the energy goes up and kind of stops on the like it's and then goes back into the earth but with the ankh it it's a circle at the top so you have the where the energy um stops on the side but it it keeps circulating so it's like it's more of a like christianity is you know talks about being about eternal life and but they really just focus on death i mean it just feels like it's all about death like no sooner do you hear about baby jesus when you're little then you know they kill him off

and doesn't and i think the ankh um you know, from ancient Egypt is they really believed in the afterlife and in reincarnation. And it's kind of this symbol of life flowing with them and not just being like done. It's like everything flows. But it's such an interesting irony. and not just being like done. It's like everything flows. But it's such an interesting irony. I mean, you're talking about this life force or going back into whatever, but then there were the ultimate, you know,

preservationists. What is your mummies? Like you were supposed to be there forever in the room with the stuff, you know, because I'll need it. Well, and it's, it's more of like a preparation for reincarnation because a lot of the,

you know, the tombs of Osiris was Isis trying to bring back her brother, love, her twin sister. Putting the body back together. Yeah, and putting it back on an electromagnetic grid so that certain things would line up with the sun and, know different um astrological signs waiting for you know trying to get the spirit to come back yeah i mean i think that's the ritual around death is that we have we know that this is an ending and we're trying to connect it to something else so whether you're doing that with you know astrology or community or uh you know more organized religion or in nature i mean that is the ritual around death as this is kind of an ending but yet things go on how do we point to that how do we symbolically recreate that and you know what what that thing is that you're connecting to the next step is going to be

informed by your faith and your culture and a lot of things but you know all those death rituals are an attempt to do that you know what comes what comes next right right yeah well i really appreciate you guys sitting down and talking um this is this is great and uh you know happy halloween everybody if you have a good october yeah don't sing if you want to live long. They have no use for your song. You're dead, you're dead, you're dead. You're dead and out of this world. You'll never get a second chance.

Plan all your moves in advance. Stay dead, stay dead, stay dead. Stay dead and out of this world.