Emma Payne: Mobile Technology for People who Are Grieving

Transcript

Speaker: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.

Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper herself and on today's episode we talk to the grief coach Emma and she's going to tell us how she uses technology and something that we use every day to help the bereaved.

Speaker: Let's get away.

Speaker: Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.

Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney and today I have a lady called Emma Payne with me.

Speaker: Payne might be her last name but and I'm sure she's heard this before but she is working on easing that for others and so I'm very excited to welcome this guest Emma and she's doing lots of work actually in the UK and Ireland so I think she's going to be interesting to all our listeners on either side of the Atlantic.

Speaker: So welcome Emma.

Speaker: Thank you for having me.

Speaker: Really pleased to be here.

Speaker: Great.

Speaker: So tell us a little bit about you.

Speaker: If nobody knows who you are or what grief coach is, tell us exactly what it is about.

Speaker: What on earth I'm up to?

Speaker: Exactly.

Speaker: That's actually really funny about the last name.

Speaker: In all the interviews I've done, no one said that, but you're right about that.

Speaker: That's funny.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: I had thought about it because I have a friend, Katrina, who is doing work in green burials and also is quite well known in her work.

Speaker: And her last name is Spade.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: She's in burials.

Speaker: So we have to joke about Katrina Spade and Emma Payne.

Speaker: But so, yes, let's see.

Speaker: I so.

Speaker: Six years ago now, my friend died and I was part of his sort of six-month terminal diagnosis was with him when he died and he had asked me to speak at his funeral.

Speaker: And I, of course, agreed to do that.

Speaker: But it was a difficult ask because he was the best friend and also the second cousin of my husband who had died a decade prior by suicide.

Speaker: So essentially what I had agreed to do was fly across the country and stand in front of hundreds of people, many of whom I hadn't seen or heard from in a long time since my husband had died.

Speaker: But it ended up being a really positive and quite profound experience because I essentially spent all the way through the pub night and everything else, essentially spent 72 hours with people saying,

Speaker: Oh my goodness, Emma, I'm so sorry I didn't reach out.

Speaker: I wanted to, but I wasn't sure what to say.

Speaker: I didn't know anybody who died before, this kind of thing.

Speaker: So I, and at that point in my career, I had spent about 20 years building web and mobile applications for things like suicide intervention work, getting young people registered to vote.

Speaker: So I believed very much in the power of mobile technology to help with behavior change.

Speaker: And so when I was flying back from the funeral, I just thought, this is ridiculous.

Speaker: I mean, I spent 10 years not hearing from the people I would have liked to hear from.

Speaker: And 100 people spent a decade genuinely feeling badly that they failed me, that they hadn't done what they wish, feeling awkward and embarrassed that they hadn't known what to do when their friend's husband died.

Speaker: So on my plane back to Seattle, I actually mapped out all of what Grief Coach would become, fully assuming that by the time the plane landed and I got on Wi-Fi, I would see that it already existed.

Speaker: But it didn't.

Speaker: So, yeah, I started building it off the side of my desk, quit my job in 2019, and I've been doing it full time.

Speaker: And so Grief Coach is a text messaging platform.

Speaker: We deliver direct expert grief support to people who are grieving customized based on all sorts of things, cause of death, age, relationship.

Speaker: So if your husband died in a car accident, different message than if your mom died of cancer and so on.

Speaker: But every subscription includes, um, gentle coaching tips, date reminders for friends and family who want to help and might not be sure how.

Speaker: And so that's why my sort of beginning story matters because,

Speaker: I'm certainly proud that we're giving great support to grievers, but I think the real magic is when we send those tips and reminders to the people who want to help and just don't know how.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah, that's what we're doing.

Speaker: Yeah, it's a great service and it's not in some ways dissimilar to my own story because what the catalyst for me was getting into it was

Speaker: Two friends of mine who passed away and while they were my friends and I was dealing with more mortality, they were also siblings of my best friends.

Speaker: And so while I was dealing with my grief, I was dealing with also another form of grief, which was how to support.

Speaker: a best friend and be there.

Speaker: And I remember one of them, I put together a care package and I, you know, I drove halfway across, okay, the country in Ireland's not, that wasn't a huge deal.

Speaker: It's like driving from New York to not even Boston.

Speaker: But anyway, I drove halfway across the country with the package and, you know, it meant the world to my friend.

Speaker: And I guess in some ways I'm lucky insofar as I just,

Speaker: Obviously, because I now do what I do, but I had that gene or whatever we want to call it, that empathy.

Speaker: I just knew what to do at the right time.

Speaker: I'm lucky insofar as I didn't know what to do.

Speaker: I just went with what I felt was right and what they might have needed in the moment.

Speaker: So I definitely think there, you know.

Speaker: It's not just the immediate family that grieves.

Speaker: It's the wider community and they don't know.

Speaker: And I find with like on Instagram and a lot of the funeral accounts that I follow, you know, they'll say, don't say this.

Speaker: Don't say I'm sorry for your loss.

Speaker: Don't say, don't say, you know, all of don't, don't, don't.

Speaker: But there's not that many out there that are do, do.

Speaker: And this is encouraging.

Speaker: And this is.

Speaker: And some of them are great and some of them are, are,

Speaker: not so great um and I guess you have to apply them to your own personal situation but so how does the subscription work so say for example and my poor parents they get killed off in every podcast but anyway say for example I've lost my parents god love them um they are so very alive thank god but um say for example I've lost my parents do I subscribe is it gifted to me by maybe the funeral home or by a friend and how does that what's the logistics I guess

Speaker: Yes, it can work in all sorts of ways.

Speaker: So often it's that the funeral home or the hospice or an organization purchases it and passes it along to you and says, you know, here's something that can help you with your grief this year.

Speaker: But people also just buy them themselves on Instagram.

Speaker: And we do have gift subscriptions as well.

Speaker: So people also, you know, it's less than the price of a bouquet of flowers, really, to give someone a full year of support as a sympathy gift.

Speaker: So all three of those things happen.

Speaker: I love what you just said about the don't, don't, don't.

Speaker: That's my absolute pet peeve.

Speaker: I say it again and again to anyone that will listen.

Speaker: If we keep telling people what not to do, then it's our own fault if people are too afraid to say anything.

Speaker: They're just creating this fear that, oh my gosh, what if I say the wrong thing?

Speaker: That of course, the only wrong thing is to vanish.

Speaker: And all of this kind of fear-based thing, what if this and don't do that, I think is a real disservice.

Speaker: It's so much what we see each and every day is that people do want to help.

Speaker: And with a few simple nudgings and encouragements and reminders and specific suggestions, they're very pleased to do it.

Speaker: And it's, yeah, I think all the don't, don't, don'ts are great.

Speaker: a real problem at the moment yeah they're really they're just not helpful at all it's people will just don't do anything then exactly right then you just freeze because then you think oh my goodness what if I do say the wrong thing yeah well that's it and honestly I've yet to come across somebody grieving who was violently upset at somebody saying I'm sorry for your loss like if that's

Speaker: Even if in the moment, it's the only thing that comes to mind because it's the most generic thing there is out there.

Speaker: It's still as long as it's said with some sort of authenticity, then it's fine.

Speaker: So now hiding in the bushes.

Speaker: Yeah, I got to have that yet.

Speaker: So my next question, I guess, would be so.

Speaker: So say again, sorry, my dad.

Speaker: So say they passed away and say the funeral home has gifted me with this.

Speaker: How do my friends get involved or how does that work?

Speaker: So you add them in.

Speaker: So whoever the subscriber is, the griever, owns their subscription for the year and you can edit it and change it as you like.

Speaker: It takes five minutes to sign up.

Speaker: So you share as much as you're comfortable sharing.

Speaker: But as long as you tell us your name and the name of the person that's died and your birthday so that we just know that you're not a teenager or whatever, you will get a full 12 months of messages at least twice a week, extra ones on whichever holidays you tell us are important to you if you tell us

Speaker: that Easter and Christmas are important to you, then you'll get messages around those dates.

Speaker: If you choose to share the date that your mom died, you would get messages around that.

Speaker: And then you have a choice of adding in some friends who want to support you and then they will get texts as well.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And anybody that anybody can stop and start whenever they want.

Speaker: They just text back, stop and start.

Speaker: So people can take a break if they want to.

Speaker: And yeah.

Speaker: And I have to ask, I'm hoping the answer is no, but I have to ask, has a text ever gone awry?

Speaker: Has it ever gone?

Speaker: you know, poorly or badly, or has there ever been a terrible story or, you know, where not necessarily your fault, but for whatever reason, something has gone.

Speaker: We're pretty obsessive.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: And we have a bereavement team that's looking carefully at, we see queued messages for the next day.

Speaker: So we're quite careful.

Speaker: We haven't had, we, I, um, early on when we were still sort of, you know, just had 40 or 50 subscribers and we were practicing, we had one where, um,

Speaker: Because we didn't origin, well, first of all, we launched the company in February 2019.

Speaker: And then a year later, a global pandemic began.

Speaker: So we had had to add a cause of death to the system, which we never really imagined doing.

Speaker: So we added this whole new cause of death, which meant that messages that had been tagged for certain causes of death needed to be re-tagged.

Speaker: And in that shuffle, we had, it was a stillbirth, stillbirths are very,

Speaker: tricky for us system-wise because you don't talk you could say your baby was stillborn as opposed to died or and so we had one where luckily it was a test account so it didn't go to a real person but you know there was a mix-up where it seemed as though the person had lived a life like share a favorite memory of your time with Susie right and Susie being still born yeah but luckily it didn't actually oh god yeah it's like I mean I

Speaker: the only fear I guess I would have with something like that, and it can happen to anything, anyone, any, you know, it doesn't necessarily apply to just text messages, is that, you know, working in this business, you know, somebody could pass away today and a text message could land in two weeks time and somebody else could have passed away on them or some other catastrophic, terrible thing.

Speaker: And suddenly you've got this text message and you're like,

Speaker: I mean, I try to live, I will tell you that the first year or so after I quit my job and we were sending the texts out, I would just lie in bed thinking, oh my gosh, like, you know, exactly, exactly those kinds of worries.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But I've actually come around to a different thing, which is to live what I just said was we have to be based, we have to live driven by love and not fear.

Speaker: So if we help a thousand people and one person get something that wasn't spot on, well, so be it.

Speaker: And so sort of a year into the journey, I was able to make that adjustment to myself and just think,

Speaker: Emma, you sold your house, you quit your job, you're spending all your waking hours trying to support grieving people and the people around them.

Speaker: So if someone gets something that's not exactly right, you're going to forgive yourself that myth.

Speaker: It hasn't happened, though.

Speaker: But the other thing I'd say is that we started last September, we started surveying.

Speaker: So let's say a hospice or a funeral home buys a whole package of subscriptions, gives them out, then we can actually survey their users and ask them about their experience.

Speaker: And it's absolutely overwhelming.

Speaker: Like our average positive response rate is like 96% giving us a five out of five or four out of five for is it helpful?

Speaker: So in fact, not only have we not had the mistakes, such would, but it's generally a really positive experience because we remember all their important dates and we use the name of the person who's died and we're being very

Speaker: supportive and empathetic and practical and giving them resources specific to stillbirth if their child was stillborn.

Speaker: You know, it's very, it feels very personal for people, I think.

Speaker: It's great.

Speaker: It really is.

Speaker: And I was having a conversation with somebody just today where, you know, we were talking about how the industry, and I know some people, some of my listeners don't like me calling it an industry, but sorry, I'm going to keep calling it that, how they, you know,

Speaker: you know, when a family walks into a funeral home, they really are so dependent on the funeral director's expertise.

Speaker: And as we all know, you know, you're a human being, I'm a human being.

Speaker: We all have different capacities for expertise and we all have different areas that we shine in and things like that.

Speaker: And it's really just come to my attention that, you know, family comes in and they sit down and

Speaker: If, for example, you mentioned Katrina Spade and her, you know, natural decomposition and turning into soil, she, you know, if a funeral director is maybe extremely old school or doesn't sort of update on new trends and new, you know, disposal methods, they may never offer that.

Speaker: And that's that's where it kind of becomes a little bit more serious than just the person sitting in front of you not having the expertise.

Speaker: And I found that quite a lot.

Speaker: I've actually just did a celebrant service today, too, actually.

Speaker: And.

Speaker: It shocks me every day how few funeral homes here in the US know what a celebrant is.

Speaker: And to me, that's an old trend at this point.

Speaker: I'm kind of like, what?

Speaker: We're eons ahead talking about other things.

Speaker: So I am absolutely on a similar vein.

Speaker: It absolutely boggles my mind each time we speak to large mental health providers where they're

Speaker: Therapists have no bereavement experience, for example, at all.

Speaker: We had a launch meeting yesterday with a client that was actually, they operate multiple organ procurement organizations and tissue banks.

Speaker: So they want to provide grief support to their bereaved families, the people who are the families of the donor of the organ.

Speaker: But they have like one bereavement person in one state and thousands of deaths.

Speaker: There's no way that that person can speak all the languages that the families might want or have all the expertise in both suicide loss and accidents and traumatic loss and cancer loss.

Speaker: It's impossible.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So, yeah, I agree.

Speaker: We have these.

Speaker: industries full of well-meaning, lovely people, but the scale of the need is large and also diverse, right?

Speaker: People are looking for support and can't find what they need.

Speaker: Yeah, and that's it.

Speaker: And I mean, I guess with what you're doing, the fact that you're sending, which is where we all look these days is at our phones.

Speaker: And you're sending that those resources.

Speaker: Yes, the advice and the warm words, but equally the resources that somebody might need in that moment or can pass on to somebody else.

Speaker: I mean, it's the first place we turn to for anything these days is online.

Speaker: And even more so, we have online now in the palm of our hand.

Speaker: And in some ways, the world is getting, it's getting nearly even more fragmented, but it's getting more together in some respects, you know, like the internet is bringing us all together, but it's equally putting us in little pockets.

Speaker: So, you know, it's trying to, I can, you know, I'm not a funeral home, but I

Speaker: the old community that was once there is not.

Speaker: I mean, in New York City here, it's such a diverse city.

Speaker: It doesn't matter where you are, you can't physically speak to everybody in the community.

Speaker: It just doesn't work that way, whether it's language or culture or whatever that might be.

Speaker: Now, are you in the UK and Ireland as well?

Speaker: Are you global?

Speaker: We are.

Speaker: Yes, we're delivering text globally now.

Speaker: And I think we're in, so far we have subscribers in 18 countries and we're offering support in 14 languages so far.

Speaker: The UK is, you know, I think our third or fourth biggest location at the moment and growing.

Speaker: And yeah, there's been actually quite a lot more happening in Ireland.

Speaker: I think that really just word is spreading and people are hearing about what we're doing and discovering us wherever.

Speaker: wherever they are, which is really lovely.

Speaker: Well, and it's exactly, you know, what we just said about the world, you know, is so transient.

Speaker: We're moving around.

Speaker: So somebody who might have used your subscription service here in New York might move back home to Ireland.

Speaker: Not me.

Speaker: Or they add a supporter in.

Speaker: You could be in New York and grieving, but your auntie's in England and she wants to support you.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: I think like the technology thing about it's,

Speaker: we're so low tech compared to all the technical things that are out there.

Speaker: You don't have to download anything.

Speaker: You don't even need an internet connection.

Speaker: Um, there's nothing to install.

Speaker: Um, which people are always surprised to hear that 15% of our subscribers are over 65.

Speaker: Um, because it's text.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: It feels personal, private and easy and we don't really think of it as technology.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: It's the thing that we have and we use it to connect with each other.

Speaker: We have people that we had a one, a man this week who I think was in the UK,

Speaker: And he was like, oh my goodness, I've accidentally deleted all the texts you've sent me.

Speaker: Can you send them back to me?

Speaker: I want to keep them all.

Speaker: And we said, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker: We can go back in because people keep texts.

Speaker: Yes, they do.

Speaker: And think of them as personal.

Speaker: And because the text messages are written, you know, hi, Jennifer, we're sorry your mom has died.

Speaker: Now I'm sorry, mom.

Speaker: But because they feel personal because they have everybody's names in it and people hang on to them.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: That's amazing that you wanted them resend.

Speaker: That's brilliant.

Speaker: And you could.

Speaker: Yeah, it was lovely.

Speaker: That's really nice.

Speaker: Yeah, it was lovely.

Speaker: We said, well, sure, we can resend them back too.

Speaker: We had a girl named Renee who was 17 when her mum died early in the pandemic.

Speaker: And she said to me that she said, oh, I haven't deleted any of them.

Speaker: I wait until after a third period and I can go in my room and I'm more of an introvert.

Speaker: So I don't want to go in a support group or do another zoom meeting, but I like having my texts and I can be in my room and think about my mom and read the different tips and suggestions and think about her.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker: That's really powerful.

Speaker: Nice.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: It's really nice.

Speaker: It's great to know that you're impacting people that way.

Speaker: Um, that's why I tell people, um,

Speaker: People always, my mother, be like, oh, this job must be so depressing.

Speaker: And I said, no, it's the opposite, actually.

Speaker: It's very heartwarming, wonderful, rich work.

Speaker: And I'm sure you find the same when people feel supported in their grief, when they can talk about the experience they're having.

Speaker: It's actually very profound and uplifting.

Speaker: It really is.

Speaker: When my family say to me after a celebrant service or a memorial,

Speaker: The way I describe it is even if I'm devastated and crying myself in the moment for the loss that these people are suffering, it's weird because I feel like my heart grows bigger each time.

Speaker: It's just like I have a new family now that I've added in.

Speaker: It's like my little tree of life, like a new little branch because you're always a part, you're an intrinsic part of that family history forever because you were a part of that day.

Speaker: So, yeah, it's a really...

Speaker: Beautiful thing.

Speaker: Now, I do have a question before we sort of let you go or whatever.

Speaker: You mentioned about Katrina Spade and obviously all that she's doing and the fact that you're friends, maybe this will be biased, I don't know, but what are your thoughts on the future of the funeral business and whether it's disposition, whether it's funeral homes, you know, brick and mortar, all that sort of stuff.

Speaker: Have you any thoughts on that?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So about...

Speaker: Three years ago now, Katrina and I and four other founders started a little Slack channel that was just for people who were doing startups in the end of life space.

Speaker: And at last count, three years later, there's about 450

Speaker: founders that we've brought into this.

Speaker: It's incredible.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker: Some people are doing wills, home hospice, body disposition, direct cremation, turning bodies into diamonds.

Speaker: I mean, all of the, all of this incredible amount of innovation, but also deep care.

Speaker: and people coming back to death care, a lot of the founders are women.

Speaker: Um, I think going back to how death used to be treated and thought of and incorporated into our lives as opposed to being this separate, separate thing.

Speaker: Um, so palliative care in general, I just think that there's a massive amount of care and innovation happening.

Speaker: Um, and, uh,

Speaker: every single founder that I talk to is there because they didn't have a good experience for some reason, right?

Speaker: The home hospice wasn't able to come to the house, so they didn't know that the dad had a bed sore, so the something, something, or they didn't have the documents that they needed for their mom or whatever it might be.

Speaker: So people, it's, I think it's hard work.

Speaker: and well meant and people trying to find ways to improve the end of life experience for people and I what I'm seeing is that there are funeral directors that see that they can become more service oriented that they can educate themselves about all these other things that people are asking for and offering and making it a more I don't know you use the word industry and of course it is an industry but it doesn't

Speaker: want to feel like that in the moment for the family whose person has died.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: We know it's an industry.

Speaker: We know that money is changing hands, but there just feels to me to be a lot of innovation and a lot of real heart entering the space and changing things quite drastically.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: quite drastically yeah yeah no it's it's definitely it's one of those watch this space you know I think the next decade is going to really show its colors um and I think it'll be very interesting yet to see all of these innovations I mean I've been in it for now for a decade which is crazy but um there has been some innovation and some of them have faltered and fallen you know

Speaker: So that's where it's interesting is, you know, who has the longevity to stick it out.

Speaker: And that's what makes me a little sad.

Speaker: That's what makes me a little sad.

Speaker: I feel as if obviously not all of the 450 new companies are going to succeed.

Speaker: So let's say half of them do or whichever.

Speaker: It's such a volume of work and a shift in thinking about and it's impacting consumer desire.

Speaker: It just feels more and more and more.

Speaker: that people as consumers can start to think about what they want for their own death.

Speaker: Do I have my paperwork in order?

Speaker: Have I understood what these things will be?

Speaker: How would I want my body to be taken care of?

Speaker: So there does feel like there's a cultural shift and we're seeing it, I think, I don't know how many of last year's like Netflix hit series were all like death and grief, right?

Speaker: Everything from afterlife to fleabag to there's just more and more severance

Speaker: discussion of or awareness of the experience it seems.

Speaker: And so as consumer demand shifts, then the industry will have to.

Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker: It's the final taboo that's starting to be, you know, come out of the closet.

Speaker: Thank you so much, Emma.

Speaker: It was wonderful speaking with you.

Speaker: And you do have a special gift for anybody listening, correct?

Speaker: Yes, we do.

Speaker: That's right.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Thanks for reminding me.