Transcript
Speaker: Hi and welcome to the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldaney aka the Glam Reaper herself.
Speaker: Today's podcast I'm joined by two beautiful girls definitely on the glam side of the death business and they are called the death wives.
Speaker: Let's get into it.
Speaker: So tell me how much liquid do they get back?
Speaker: A lot.
Speaker: More than they can handle.
Speaker: Oh yeah?
Speaker: They can handle.
Speaker: I'm not sure how to give you a measurement like in fluid ounces or anything like that, but it's, I mean, it's a massive drum.
Speaker: It's a story high and that will hold about three bodies.
Speaker: So equivalent to a little more than a truck bed is it's a good estimate.
Speaker: So most families don't want that much.
Speaker: They actually work with some organic farms that will take the excess.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Flowers at this point, non-fruit bearing things, because we're not sure society's ready for that yet.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: There's no human leftover.
Speaker: Like there's no DNA there.
Speaker: It's literally fats, sugars, peptides.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: It's literally the breakdown of what we are.
Speaker: So it's not biohazardous.
Speaker: It's not.
Speaker: Absolutely not.
Speaker: And that's the coolest part is because we really are pretty biohistorists when we die.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, there's all cancerous drugs.
Speaker: Chemotherapy or are taking tons of, you know, painkillers or all these things.
Speaker: And that stays with you.
Speaker: And so when you go through this process, you know,
Speaker: it'll break everything down there's a few actually very green options that will completely get rid of all those toxins so you do have a good relationship with the earth instead of you know because i'm sure people will be fascinated with this i know it's it's out there a little bit but i know a lot of people still haven't a clue about it um and also i think there's been a lot of miscommunication because there is so many names for it and so i think the public is a little bit like wait what
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: Yeah, which one?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm like, even to be honest, even myself, I remember a couple of years ago at a convention, I was like, is this the same as that?
Speaker: I'm very confused.
Speaker: What's happening?
Speaker: And so, okay, so a body goes into a chamber, water, a water bath, I guess?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: One last spa treatment is a joke, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, you know, if you enjoyed some in life, why not have one last one in death?
Speaker: And how does it get rid of all of the drugs and all of the bad?
Speaker: Like part of me is thinking the amount of Diet Coke I drink.
Speaker: Surely my body is like part Diet Coke, part wine, probably.
Speaker: How do we become less toxic?
Speaker: What happens when we're in there?
Speaker: That's a science question that's beyond me.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I don't have to stop.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: The science part of it is like the alkaline.
Speaker: So alkaline hydrolysis is the scientific term that most people will hear.
Speaker: They're trying to make that kind of a term, but Joe Public, like you said, they don't, what alkaline hyaluron?
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: But they know the word cremation.
Speaker: And they hear water and they're like water cremation.
Speaker: Oh, you get so you get ashes back is what it comes down to.
Speaker: Technically, it's not ashes because they didn't burn, but you're getting the same kind of product.
Speaker: So water cremation is a little bit easier to understand.
Speaker: But yeah, alkaline hydrolysis is one of the terms you'll hear.
Speaker: that solution, however it connects to the fats in your body that breaks everything apart.
Speaker: So all the amino acids that have made us what we are, this solution goes in and breaks those down and breaks those apart.
Speaker: It's corrosive.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's corrosive.
Speaker: I mean, way more than your Pepsi is, right?
Speaker: Like your Pepsi will clean a penny or whatever.
Speaker: The alkali will do it better, faster.
Speaker: What I love about it is that it's like literal alchemy.
Speaker: I love everything about the concept of alchemy.
Speaker: And I read the book, The Alchemist, to clients on a regular basis.
Speaker: And when I saw Emily's process, we have a friend who opened up a water cremation business here in Denver recently, and her name is Emily.
Speaker: And when I saw her process, I realized this is literal alchemy.
Speaker: This is taking something
Speaker: and breaking it down to its original elemental components, like on really basic levels, like salts and sugars and peptide.
Speaker: It's like really basic levels.
Speaker: And then if we want to, we can take those basic things, you know, and use them as fertilizer to actually grow new things.
Speaker: Like that's actual alchemy.
Speaker: It was done with gold and now we're going to do it.
Speaker: You sound way too excited.
Speaker: There'll be some people listening going, oh.
Speaker: You should have seen us when we first went to her facility.
Speaker: We like hugged the machine and we were like, oh my gosh.
Speaker: And then Erin actually got to, you know, see it and experience the whole thing.
Speaker: So they get back liquid fertilizer, human liquid fertilizer.
Speaker: It's not human though.
Speaker: Okay, not human anymore.
Speaker: All right, so liquid fertilizer.
Speaker: The fertilizer that was formally known as Jennifer.
Speaker: And then here's her skeleton ground down.
Speaker: So that's similar to cremated remains.
Speaker: Because a lot of people don't realize that
Speaker: You're not actually burned.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We always try to be very sensitive to our audience of how we describe cremation, but it is that, I mean, you, you're burned and there's parts and by law, those parts have to be broken down so that they don't look like bones.
Speaker: Bones.
Speaker: But that's, I think that's part of it.
Speaker: again back to where we kind of all got a bit crazy and a bit skewed is everyone's afraid to tell joe public what cremation actually is and i think that's what's anybody who's coming up with these green innovative new technologies that's what they're coming up against is they're getting these arguments of flushing granny down the toilet or putting granny out on your fertilizer and i'm like well you just lit granny on fire and
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Ground your bones down.
Speaker: So if you've been okay with that for the last many years.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Exactly that.
Speaker: You know.
Speaker: It's true though.
Speaker: Like, it's like, we're all kind of afraid to dance around it because we don't want to burst people's bubble that cremation's not like, I mean, my mom, when I sat down and did a pre-plan with her, she was like, well, I don't want you to bury me.
Speaker: because I don't want the worms to get me.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, but you know you're dead, right?
Speaker: She's like, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: And then I was like, okay, cremation.
Speaker: She was like, yeah.
Speaker: And then a couple of years later, she's like, you know what?
Speaker: I actually don't know that I want to be cremated anymore.
Speaker: Cause like, I mean, I know I love the heat, but like, what if I'm still alive?
Speaker: Like that'd be really uncomfortable.
Speaker: I love the heat.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: This woman, like she goes to bed with her hot water bottle, like every night and like, it's always cold.
Speaker: So that's why cremation appealed to her because she was like, well, I'll be eternally warm.
Speaker: I'm like, I think that's called hell.
Speaker: But sure.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: She also hates that I always talk about her on like any media.
Speaker: Now my own podcast.
Speaker: She's like Christ almighty.
Speaker: Do you have to keep telling everybody about this?
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: So neither of you necessarily have a water cremation unit.
Speaker: You work with you as part of your death wives community.
Speaker: You've got connections.
Speaker: What are your thoughts on say and say Katrina is doing the composting.
Speaker: So if you're into the green.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: We both light up with that.
Speaker: OK, we know we're loving that.
Speaker: Have you been there?
Speaker: Have you seen anything?
Speaker: I haven't yet gone there.
Speaker: I've seen her talk many times and I've talked to her, but I haven't actually seen the new unit that is
Speaker: or is Eunice, do we call her the Eunice?
Speaker: I'm not even sure.
Speaker: Maybe she's not the one.
Speaker: We just actually had our one year anniversary, Erin.
Speaker: Did you notice that?
Speaker: Our pictures?
Speaker: I did, I noticed.
Speaker: Yeah, Katrina was here in Colorado.
Speaker: We went to the Capitol building a year ago.
Speaker: to legalize that here in Colorado.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So she's good to go in Colorado.
Speaker: Yeah, it'll be here soon.
Speaker: She just opened up the first center.
Speaker: It's called Recompose and it's in Washington.
Speaker: So that's not very close to us here in Colorado, unfortunately.
Speaker: So I don't know that we'll be seeing it anytime soon, especially under COVID.
Speaker: We would love to, but more realistically, I hope that within a couple of years, there is a facility here.
Speaker: I know I'm very excited to see that because I have to say, I remember hearing about that years ago and I was very dubious.
Speaker: And then I am.
Speaker: She was at a talk here in New York and I was just like, hmm, interesting.
Speaker: This sounds like this could be a winner.
Speaker: This sounds like it could work.
Speaker: So I'm very interested to see more about that and hopefully get her on the show, actually, as well.
Speaker: Obviously, she's just she's a lovely girl, lovely woman.
Speaker: I should probably call her.
Speaker: Seems really down to earth.
Speaker: like maybe maybe maybe i should be her really big things for you know for people and the earth on a pretty large scale so we're big fans of hers absolutely absolutely so tell me just before we sort of wind it up tell me a bit more about death wives and i mean are you open to memberships are you tell you know if there's anybody in the industry listening or
Speaker: We're obviously going to leave all your links and everything, but tell us a little bit about maybe what you see the future, what you hope for the future.
Speaker: And yeah, if people want to be members or, you know, get to your training and things like that.
Speaker: We have so much to say about this.
Speaker: Frankly, it's all we've been talking about the last couple of days because Deathmix is growing in big ways.
Speaker: Lauren, do you want to start?
Speaker: And then if there's anything you didn't say, I'll doop, doop, doop at the end.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, as I kind of said at the beginning, education has always been like number one.
Speaker: And the reason why education is so important is because
Speaker: When they got to me as a funeral director, I saw how skewed their relationship with death was and how much extra grieving was going on and just like this really uncomfortable relationship.
Speaker: And I just think of it as like when a baby's born, we're not like that, but that's how we are with our relationship with death.
Speaker: And so you have to start at the very beginning and that's just having conversations.
Speaker: And so when it comes down to just educating, we always just want to be accessible to everybody.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We're not just for death doulas.
Speaker: We're not just for funeral directors.
Speaker: We're not just for people who are learning about this in school.
Speaker: We're literally for everyone because death is an experience for everyone.
Speaker: We're all going to die.
Speaker: We may not remember when we die, but we'll all die.
Speaker: But we'll have family, we'll have friends, we'll have grief that we've been holding for years that we didn't even know was attached to a death or maybe even a bad funeral.
Speaker: I mean, there's a lot of aspects to death in the whole.
Speaker: And so what we do is we just kind of break it down and carve
Speaker: compartmentalize it and have little classes on these different topics, just so people can see like, I heard the term death doula is that something I want to do?
Speaker: Well come take death doula 101 and like we're going to explain to you what that does.
Speaker: oh I heard about you know these new green options okay we'll come take our eco environmental friendly death class or even just talk about home funerals or planning your own funeral or community grief groups like we have so many different things and that's
Speaker: That's really what Death Wives is, is we have this massive amount of education and support.
Speaker: And then we have a community of people that we are building.
Speaker: We're a collective of death workers because we've all come together, you know, with this one goal of making death part of life again.
Speaker: Beautifully said.
Speaker: I didn't even think I have anything to add to that.
Speaker: That was beautiful.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Death Wives is education and outreach on a grassroots level so that people who want to do this work
Speaker: and do this work and so that we can kind of reclaim the way that we do death in America, you know, dispel a lot of the myths that people have, create openings for intimacy and for healing around the topic, you know, have the option that if you don't want to outsource it to a big corporation, you don't have to, you know, if you want to, you can, it's not for everybody.
Speaker: you mentioned something earlier Erin which I thought was actually quite interesting and I hadn't heard it before and it's actually quite true is that you've got death care and then this alternative death or death industry and then this alternative death industry and actually quite sadly that does seem to be
Speaker: quite true so in terms of if there's funeral directors listening to this female or otherwise it's i guess the wives bit doesn't necessarily bode you have to be female to join and they wanted to get through whether they work for corporations or not you're open to just generally people just and what do they do do they sign up to a newsletter do they send you an email say hey i want to be a death wife or keep me updated what's the process
Speaker: Right now, as we're recording this at the end of January, we are booked solid through May, which is a great problem to have.
Speaker: And what that tells us is that people are really hungry for this education, this content.
Speaker: So we are in the process of digitizing and recording everything so that we can kind of deliver it on demand instead of having to our schedules and just really creating a larger platform for getting the information out there.
Speaker: which we're excited about.
Speaker: In the meantime, definitely follow us on social media at death.wives or at the death wives.
Speaker: Get consistency on that across the board at sometimes, but we had to take what was available.
Speaker: And yeah, and let us know if you want to be on our newsletter, we'll send those out and certainly let people know ahead of time if they want early registration, shoot us an email and we'll
Speaker: Our classes sell out like that.
Speaker: So you kind of do need to email us and let us know that you want to be on that wait list to get the email to be able to register early.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: And are you physically doing the classes still or you're virtually doing them all?
Speaker: I mean, COVID.
Speaker: Yeah, COVID.
Speaker: I mean, it's horrible.
Speaker: As a funeral director, I have a very different relationship where I will start crying if I talk about COVID.
Speaker: Death career has been to try and offer these final moments and closure and services and
Speaker: And I'm just being, nope, sorry.
Speaker: Nope.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: You can't see him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like things we're talking about and we want people to know how to do it.
Speaker: They can't physically do it right now.
Speaker: It's so discouraging.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I hear you.
Speaker: I've literally just, hence the wine, I've had the longest day because what I do pretty much the majority of my time is memorials.
Speaker: And I've had, I'm working with a family who obviously we can't do a memorial.
Speaker: And so we're actually doing a documentary, sort of this is your life.
Speaker: And, you know, I just spent the last like four hours going through photos and amazing, incredible.
Speaker: incredible memories but it's just devastating because to me I'm like these need to be physically seen not in a movie I mean I just I I'm not gonna lie in 2020 I held a lot of virtual memorials and honestly it's not my bag I know there's versions of me out there that are doing it and good for them and I know there's absolutely a place for them but it's just my heart of hearts believes in the holding of the hand and the
Speaker: I'm your best friend here with you through it all.
Speaker: We'll get you through this.
Speaker: Like I like exactly as you were just saying, Lauren, like it's it's heart wrenching to just
Speaker: Like I can't even bring it all virtual.
Speaker: I just can't.
Speaker: I can't bring myself to make my business virtual just to make my business virtual.
Speaker: I just it's not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is as close.
Speaker: A podcast is about as close as I'm going to get.
Speaker: I'm like, you know, call me in two years when we actually can't hold each other's hand and I can walk you through it.
Speaker: Because honestly, I do believe in better late than never when it comes to a memorial or a service or whatever it is.
Speaker: I do believe.
Speaker: And
Speaker: It's a whole topic too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Like later's coming.
Speaker: We'll have a lot of services, but yeah.
Speaker: On the other side, my actual physical job as a funeral director has been horrible, but what we learned is that yes, we love teaching our classes on in person.
Speaker: You know, we would have a volunteer be the body as we bathe them and put them in a shroud and carried them over to their casket.
Speaker: We thought that that the education part would be lost somehow and trying to do virtual.
Speaker: And we started off by just having like virtual death cafes.
Speaker: And then it was just like, okay, let's try one of our classes in a two hour format.
Speaker: And our classes are like six hours live in person.
Speaker: And so then we were like, okay, well actually one of these six hour classes is like three classes.
Speaker: And this class is actually four classes.
Speaker: And so that's what we did is we started breaking them down.
Speaker: and people liked it, and then they would come and take the other one, and then they would tell their friend, and then they would take that one, and then this one, and then that one.
Speaker: And before we knew it, we were like, wow, people really do want this, and we're getting people from all over the world versus just locally in Colorado or nearby.
Speaker: As horrible as COVID has been, it's opened a whole different pathway for education for us.
Speaker: And we found it to be so much more accessible and anybody can come and learn from us anywhere at any time.
Speaker: And that's pretty cool.
Speaker: And that's what we're doing to build upon even more in these next few months is just to be able to offer it wherever you are.
Speaker: Anytime, come on our page and sign up and get it.
Speaker: That accessibility, we really mean that.
Speaker: We've so far offered all of our classes on an honor system sliding scale, starting as low as $33 per class because we want
Speaker: You know, it's not college tuition.
Speaker: We don't want you to have to like worry about it if you want the education, come and get it.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: That was amazing.
Speaker: And I feel like I'm going to get you on again to just, you know, talk some more.
Speaker: Definitely keep me updated on anything and everything that you do.
Speaker: But yeah, thanks so much.
Speaker: You're fabulous.
Speaker: Bye, ladies.
Speaker: Well, what did you think of that episode, guys?
Speaker: I thought it was really interesting.
Speaker: What the girls are doing is fantastic and definitely something that you should all check out and dig a bit further into.
Speaker: They're on Instagram and I love their work on Instagram.
Speaker: So check them out and all the links and stuff are below.
Speaker: And if you want to send us a question in or you have a guest that you think we should absolutely get on the show, please email us at glamreaperpodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: I'll talk to you soon.
