Transcript
Speaker: It's very difficult to not lose yourself in other people's grief and the grief work that you see going on around you.
Speaker: Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney who is very not glam today because I am suffering with cold, allergies, one of the above, we don't know.
Speaker: Ever since I got to this country like nine years ago I've discovered that allergies are a whole thing.
Speaker: So yeah, so we're not feeling so glam, not feeling so hot but I have my Irish lemsip here which is keeping me going and I am really excited about today's guest.
Speaker: I have to tell you I've followed him for years, not in the weird stalker sense but
Speaker: Kind of, maybe.
Speaker: I don't know how far you pushed that.
Speaker: But I'm super, super, super excited to have the very famous, very, and I'm hoping we'll have some confessions from a funeral director.
Speaker: Welcome, Caleb Wilde.
Speaker: Well, thank you for having me.
Speaker: And I do not have what you're drinking.
Speaker: I just have water.
Speaker: I should put something in it.
Speaker: It might help me be a little bit more, you know, as we were talking about, I'm not a morning person, so it takes me a long time to wake up.
Speaker: to get going well that's a lot of cobwebs yeah listen i hear you i'm not a morning person myself and i i have a tendency to send emails at like one and two in the morning because i'm a night owl right but i'm not i just want to clarify well this is an irish drink it's 11 a.m that we're filming this it is not i'm not going to be the stereotypical irish there is no whiskey in this okay everybody just wants to clarify maybe at some point later in the day yeah well if my whiskey was close to me i would grab it right now
Speaker: Well, you're talking to an Irish person.
Speaker: And to be fair, when we're recording this, we've just come out of St.
Speaker: Patrick's weekend.
Speaker: So that would be allowed, I feel.
Speaker: Like an Irish.
Speaker: It'd fall on a Sunday, which is almost the ideal day.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Well, thank you for saying that, because I don't understand why the parade, the parade in New York City.
Speaker: Well, I do understand why it was on the Saturday because the New York half marathon or something was on the Sunday.
Speaker: I'm like, sorry, the New York half marathon needs to move for the Irish, not the other way.
Speaker: No, that doesn't make sense at all.
Speaker: No, and it crossed over with the Irish rugby game.
Speaker: Like, a huge, the final of the Six Nations, a huge sporting event in Ireland.
Speaker: So most actual Irish people were watching the game instead of being at the parade.
Speaker: Anyway, I could rant for a while about that.
Speaker: But anyway, Caleb.
Speaker: Yeah, that's very culturally insensitive.
Speaker: Yes!
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: We're very good at that, though.
Speaker: You've been here nine years.
Speaker: LAUGHTER
Speaker: Well, we just impose culture if we don't listen to culture.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: Actually, I like that.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Anyway, so, Caleb, welcome to the Glamour Reaper podcast.
Speaker: Tell me, and it is, it's a very large question, and I'm hoping I can take some breathing space to drink my Lemsip here and maybe blow my nose.
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: Apologies.
Speaker: I won't.
Speaker: But tell us, how did Confessions of a Funeral Director come about?
Speaker: How did you, your sixth generation funeral director, do you want to maybe take us through the family stuff first up to how, I guess, family,
Speaker: Yeah, I am a thoroughbred.
Speaker: So on both sides of my family, paternal side, I'm a sixth generation, maternal side, I'm a fifth generation.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And I was constantly manipulated is the word that I use now.
Speaker: Encouraged was the word that I would have used previously to enter the funeral business.
Speaker: And yeah, so both sides of the family, thoroughbred, undertaker.
Speaker: So far, no superpowers, which I'm disappointed in.
Speaker: You would think that all the formaldehyde over the years would perhaps have given me some type of x-ray vision or maybe laser eyes.
Speaker: It'll probably just give me cancer, which is disappointing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, another 10 years, 20.
Speaker: So you were born into the funeral space.
Speaker: Do you have siblings?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Two younger sisters.
Speaker: And of course, none of the females.
Speaker: And I say, of course, because we know this industry is misogynistic.
Speaker: And so the only people or children who have been encouraged on both sides of my family have been the men.
Speaker: And I was the eldest born and I happened to be a male.
Speaker: So the weight of the heritage fell upon me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So two younger sisters.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And they're not in the funeral space at all?
Speaker: No interest.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: In fact, yeah, they probably have distaste towards it.
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: And so, okay, so you were born into this.
Speaker: Were you given any option that there would be anything else that you would do or no?
Speaker: Patronistically, yes.
Speaker: They would say that I could do what I wanted to do.
Speaker: When I talked about doing other things that I wanted to do, I wasn't met with the same encouragement.
Speaker: So yes and no.
Speaker: Verbally...
Speaker: You can be anything that you want to be, but when I talked about anything that I want to be, it wasn't met with the same type of enthusiasm.
Speaker: Okay, so it was more of a lip service than anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And for those who grew up in a family business, specifically a funeral family business, there is a lot of, there's a lot of pressure.
Speaker: There's a lot of pressure to carry on the legacy, the community pressure.
Speaker: I mean, I remember I started working when I was 15, 16, and even the community would come in and, you know, they'd pinch my cheeks because I've never grown out of the baby fat.
Speaker: It's still here.
Speaker: And they'd say, well, I'm so glad I can die now knowing that a wild is going to take care of me.
Speaker: And things like that as an impressionable 16-year-old was like, okay, well, do I really have a choice?
Speaker: I thought I had a choice.
Speaker: I tried doing other things.
Speaker: I was very much evangelical growing up.
Speaker: because that's another part of an established family funeral home in a community is that religion is not just an option, it's a necessity.
Speaker: And that evangelicalism led me into doing mission work for two years.
Speaker: But mission work doesn't pay and the food sucks.
Speaker: So I, you know,
Speaker: fell back into what I was predestined to do from the very beginning, which is take on the mantle of the sixth generation funeral director, the wild funeral home.
Speaker: Are your parents still alive?
Speaker: My dad is going to retire next year because he'll get his full benefits from Social Security.
Speaker: And my mom works there as well as a secretary, and she will retire.
Speaker: retire when my dad does okay um so and i of course left the funeral home yes which we will get to okay so we so okay so you've you're thrown into this funeral space or growing up in it really i guess you're not thrown into it's a jungle that grew around you it's like forest that grew around you and you just sort of had to navigate your way around it
Speaker: Were there, as you were growing up in it, and I guess leading up to the start of you starting the moniker, Confessions of a Funeral Director, and writing, and we want to get to all that, were there parts that you felt drawn to most and there were other parts that you were most allergic to, like parts that you enjoyed and parts that you really just hated?
Speaker: Yeah, the core of who I am, and perhaps this is my inheritance, the core of who I am, something that I am naturally is I care for people.
Speaker: I genuinely want to help people.
Speaker: And so that aspect of death care was something that drew me in naturally.
Speaker: And there's so many opportunities for that part of who I am to come out.
Speaker: in death care.
Speaker: And the other parts, you know, family dynamics, of course, I didn't see it in the beginning.
Speaker: There's, I think, an assumption within the funeral industry in the United States that if you grew up in a family business, the red carpet's been laid before you, you get great pay, you can go take off whenever you want, and the red carpet's been laid out.
Speaker: I don't know if I already said that, I may have.
Speaker: But it's the silver spoon idea.
Speaker: And that was not the case for me.
Speaker: Family businesses can be a cluster.
Speaker: Since we're allowed to cuss, it can be a clusterfuck.
Speaker: I was just going to say, you can do that.
Speaker: Okay, good.
Speaker: And yeah, it's
Speaker: So I didn't have a day off for the first two years that I worked there, and the pay was not easy, and the dynamics were difficult.
Speaker: It's not easy working with your grandfather, your father, and then my second cousin and my great uncle, which is what it was when I started out.
Speaker: Yeah, there's just different views.
Speaker: And as everybody's family, it's rare that there's an appointed leader because nobody wants to say, well, you're leadership material, but you not so much because it's your child.
Speaker: It's your it's your son.
Speaker: And that's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Part of a dynamic of a family business is appointing leadership is difficult because it means one's more qualified than the other and you're playing favorite.
Speaker: So it doesn't happen much.
Speaker: And so there's my grandfather used to say, everybody's a chief and nobody's an Indian.
Speaker: And I, while I don't really like the, some of the sentiments there, the idea is true.
Speaker: There was no leadership.
Speaker: And so there's a lot of posturing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, so I like the serving part and the family dynamics part had its good points and also its drawbacks.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so what inspired you?
Speaker: Was there a moment or how did Confessions of a Funeral Director come about?
Speaker: What made you start that?
Speaker: I think I just, I needed my own voice.
Speaker: I needed a place where I could be somebody other than Caleb Wild, the sceneal director.
Speaker: I could be somebody who writes, somebody who's able to use words for power, somebody who's able to be self-expressive and have their own thoughts and own opinions, because there's a vast shadow that a family business casts.
Speaker: And losing your identity in the funeral industry is something, losing self-expression is something that happens a lot.
Speaker: And it's something that I talk about a lot.
Speaker: It's very difficult to not lose yourself in other people's grief, in the grief work that you see going on around you.
Speaker: And that coupled with being in a family business where everybody assumed that was a certain way.
Speaker: I needed my own space.
Speaker: And thank you, Internet.
Speaker: Because that was, I just saw some other friends writing and carving out a space for themselves and decided to do the same thing.
Speaker: Yeah, and you and I mean, I'm sure I'm possibly leaving one or two people out, but you and we just interviewed Little Miss Funeral there a couple of weeks ago, Lauren.
Speaker: You and her, I believe, were sort of two of the first influencers in the space, so to speak, who, I guess, pull back the curtain on the funeral space and sort of what happens behind that final curtain.
Speaker: Did you, because you were the first and we talked about it with Lauren, because you guys were the first, did you feel sort of a weight to give the public the truth or to defend funeral directors or sort of what, where did you land on that or how did you, or did you just sort of write whatever?
Speaker: Yeah, so that's a good question.
Speaker: I started out writing about theology.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: So theology, I have a master's degree in theology, and that was something that I gave a lot of my energy towards.
Speaker: And then I realized that nobody's really interested in reading theology.
Speaker: So I started to shift.
Speaker: But yeah, that's how things started.
Speaker: I started writing pieces for Christian magazines, kind of got in that whole conversation.
Speaker: from a progressive standpoint, because I was always pretty progressive when it came to my religious persuasions.
Speaker: And then it started to shift.
Speaker: I think my faith changed.
Speaker: I didn't feel as strongly about the things that I had once felt so strongly about.
Speaker: And then I just started writing about death more.
Speaker: And once I started in, the main pushback that I received
Speaker: Because I was an early adapter.
Speaker: There wasn't too many people sharing publicly.
Speaker: And now I feel old.
Speaker: Like I don't have a TikTok account.
Speaker: And so it's like I see people doing TikToks and going into the prep room.
Speaker: And I think to myself, wow, if I had done that, I might have gotten hard and feathered by the by the funeral industry.
Speaker: So part of me feels good because I feel like I carved the path in some sense that other people are going way ahead of me.
Speaker: And yeah, that's great.
Speaker: Like, I think that's what should be happening because I'm an elder millennial.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: I'm not Gen Z. And this transition from boomers to millennials to Gen Z in the funeral industry is another cluster.
Speaker: So the fact that Gen Z is finding space within the industry and being accepted for what they're sharing for the most part is fantastic.
Speaker: But yeah, most of the pushback that I got was from within the funeral industry.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I did not feel any need to defend the industry.
Speaker: I felt a need to be transparent and to be honest and vulnerable and just me.
Speaker: So yeah, and I think I got to the place where I realized I'd rather inform the public because the industry at that point, when things first started, the pushback was so strong that I just kind of like, fuck it.
Speaker: I'm not really interested in spending my energy.
Speaker: with a group of people who have these views on death care that I saw as not only detrimental to the business aspect, but detrimental to public perception.
Speaker: We're in a place now where everything is available.
Speaker: And instead of attempting to hide what we're doing, that's only going to create more secrecy.
Speaker: It's only going to create more doubt and criticism.
Speaker: These stereotypes that funeral directors have of being exploitive and super secretive.
Speaker: So the public deserved to see a part of what we are and not just the Hollywood stereotype that's so often portrayed in movies and TV shows, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: So yeah, transparency was a huge thing, a huge motivating part, as well as self-expression when I started.
Speaker: And do you feel that because that's one of the reasons why I sort of started this podcast is I'm not a funeral director, I'm not a licensed funeral director.
Speaker: And I work with funeral directors and I work with some incredible funeral directors.
Speaker: And my background is sort of marketing PR, PR, as you guys say.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The accent sometimes kills me.
Speaker: But that's my background is sort of that coming from that.
Speaker: And then I was a wedding planner and came to the dark side, as I like to say.
Speaker: But I it always really made me sad how like I knew so many incredible and really caring funeral directors and all that was in the media was it was always on price.
Speaker: It always seemed to get they seemed to get nailed to the cross on price.
Speaker: And then if there was something like a pandemic,
Speaker: there would be, oh my God, there's bodies everywhere and there's, you know, and they pick one person like the guy in Colorado who's stocking up, you know, bodies and stuff.
Speaker: And of course that should be in the media.
Speaker: Of course that should be.
Speaker: But where's the feel good stories?
Speaker: Where's the, you know, amazing stories of the funeral directors that work 24 seven through the coronavirus, you know, in order to help all these people who reduce their prices in order to help families who are struggling?
Speaker: And
Speaker: All of these different stories, like none of them make the media.
Speaker: So for me, I sort of started this A, because I wanted to have these really interesting conversations with people like yourself.
Speaker: And I had questions because I'm not a funeral director.
Speaker: So, you know, people were asking me things like, do you fart after you die?
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: I'm like, well, it's a valid question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, people have questions and they're like, wait, Jen, you're in the funeral business.
Speaker: What to answer me this?
Speaker: And like some of them I haven't thought of, like the first thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like a man having an erection.
Speaker: Like I never thought of that.
Speaker: So I think that's called a prietism.
Speaker: I think that's just a technical term.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's rare and usually only happens when the death is by asphyxiation.
Speaker: OK, well, there you go.
Speaker: You heard it here first, guys.
Speaker: So I sort of started the podcast because I wanted answers to these questions that Joe Bloggs, as I call them, or Joe Public had.
Speaker: Like they have these questions ruminating around in their head.
Speaker: And so, you know, I was like, OK, well, I'm Joe Public.
Speaker: I'm Joe Bloggs, really.
Speaker: So let me sort of bring in these experts and ask them.
Speaker: So that's kind of what it sort of started to become.
Speaker: But it's, I guess, in a roundabout way, what I'm asking you is, you know, in all the pushback that you got, did you ever feel the need that sort of, were almost the funeral directors proving the point that you were almost making to the public?
Speaker: You know, because you were sharing and trying to be transparent and all this sort of stuff, but then you had these
Speaker: a-holes um I'm sure um because I've also seen here's the thing like I'm not a funeral director but I have a business in the funeral space and then I also know some incredible people who are innovating in the space and I've seen on social media the comments people get that you've gotten that my friends have gotten and a lot of females have gotten the level of abuse of oh well you're not this and you're not that I mean it's actually hysterical so I can't but call them a-holes because listen assholes
Speaker: But so, yeah, even when I came out with my first book and it was it was I picked the nichest market in the smallest country in the world.
Speaker: How to plan a funeral in Ireland.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Basically, it was called Stay For A While You're Away.
Speaker: And the only the only comeback I got from the funeral space was the chapter on price.
Speaker: I was like, guys, you're literally proving money.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So my question to you is, do you, did you feel that was there a little bit of validation in the comments that were maybe coming in that you were like, yeah, this is why I've got to keep going.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: There's vast generational differences.
Speaker: This is something that people have heard me talk before.
Speaker: I talk about this quite often.
Speaker: The industry has no prodigies.
Speaker: There's nobody who comes out of funeral school at 25 years old and is all of a sudden
Speaker: pulling in a massive amount of business unless they've inherited it.
Speaker: The capital in this business is purely social capital.
Speaker: So the more you're invested, the more you can connect with the people coming through the doors, the more you're involved in the community, the
Speaker: etc, etc.
Speaker: That's how you gain business.
Speaker: And so generally, funeral directors hit their prime in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
Speaker: Because at that point, they're connecting with the people that are coming through the door who are generally older,
Speaker: or the children of those people who are in their 50s or 60s.
Speaker: They're starting to bury their friends that they went to school with and the people that they know on a generational level.
Speaker: So leadership in this business is always 20 to 30 years behind everybody else because the leadership is 20 to 30 years behind everybody else.
Speaker: they are on the other end of the bell curve.
Speaker: And what that does, especially when we have globalization from the internet, the generational difference from one to the next is massive.
Speaker: Whereas before, generations would take up these huge swaths of time where the boomers were 50, 30, 40 years.
Speaker: And even before that, in the agrarian culture, the
Speaker: Before the industrial age, and I know I'm getting nerdy here, but before that, you know, generations were huge time-wise.
Speaker: But now it's like every 10 years because the internet is changing our cultural values and the way that we perceive the world so quickly.
Speaker: that we have millennials, Gen Z, and then already there's another generation that's being defined by sociologists and anthropologists.
Speaker: So the change from, like, so let's say that the person in charge of a funeral home is 50 or 60 years old, they're coming out of a more industrial mindset where their family grew up in the industrial age,
Speaker: And we are very much post-industrial and we're being changed and molded by the Internet and by globalization.
Speaker: There's this vast difference.
Speaker: And so, which is the reason why penal homes are so toxic oftentimes for millennials and Gen Z.
Speaker: because they're being run by boomers, have not just different but opposite perspectives on vulnerability.
Speaker: Talking about your problems is just not something that you do.
Speaker: Or transparency, sharing private stuff in a public setting is just not something that you do.
Speaker: So by nature, this industry is generally going to be 10, 10 is good, but 20 to 30 years behind other industries, uh, the, the public sentiments and, um,
Speaker: Yeah, so I started to see that.
Speaker: I started to see that, hey, this isn't just, this is much bigger than some Karen writing nasty comments on my Facebook post.
Speaker: You know, this is that the industry leaders did not have any mental space or any ability to understand that.
Speaker: how somebody could publicly share things that they perceived.
Speaker: Because for them, keeping things private was almost religious.
Speaker: It's almost sacred.
Speaker: So it's something that they protected like it was sacred.
Speaker: And so somebody like me coming along, it was like I was going into a church and tearing everything down.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not knocking everything over, treating all these things that they saw as sacred as as not.
Speaker: So an iconoclast.
Speaker: And I think that's, you know, that's that's what I came to see.
Speaker: And it took me a while to be able to see that took me a lot of feeling butthurt at at the way that people would treat me.
Speaker: But instead of me reacting vengefully, I became curious.
Speaker: Now, why is it like this?
Speaker: Why is there such pushback towards me writing a blog as a funeral director?
