Transcript
Speaker: I'm sure there are funeral Pinterest boards or ideas for what to do at your funeral, how to creatively or represent someone or what's the newest, coolest thing to do.
Speaker: And I think there has to be room for that, for people who want to express themselves in different ways or new ways or ways that fit and really align with who they are and what they care about in their life.
Speaker: But equally, if you want an old school traditional, like, you know, just like my parents or my grandparents had in a funeral in whatever religion that is for you, whether it's Buddhist or whether it's Church of Ireland or Episcopalian in the States, whatever that is, like there has to be room for that too.
Speaker: If you just want to, I don't know, what will we call it?
Speaker: Plain vanilla?
Speaker: Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jennifer Muldowney, a.k.a.
Speaker: The Glam Reaper.
Speaker: And on today's episode, we have another Jennifer, which we love.
Speaker: And Jennifer has almost me and Jennifer have swapped lives.
Speaker: So I'm an Irish living in New York and Jennifer is an American living in Ireland.
Speaker: Welcome, Jennifer.
Speaker: Hello, time twin or separated at birth or I don't know, but yes, we apparently have swapped lives.
Speaker: If I was a glamorous undertaker and death professional, that would be the life I would have swapped lives.
Speaker: Well, tell us, you are, Jennifer, you and I have been chit-chatting on social media for a decade, I think.
Speaker: I really do.
Speaker: I think it was back around the time I was writing the book in Ireland that you and I maybe first connected on Twitter and stuff like that.
Speaker: So tell us or tell the audience what it is that you do.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, my name is Jennifer Morinstrich.
Speaker: I am a lecturer at the Technological University of the Shannon Midlands Midwest.
Speaker: And for anybody who is from Ireland or familiar with Ireland, that is the new name and the new institution of the old Limerick Institute of Technology.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I suppose the simple way to say that is that I teach at a university in Limerick, Ireland, and I teach in the Department of Applied Social Sciences, and I'm a social worker by training and spent a good while in the States.
Speaker: I was born and bred in the States and working as a social worker in the States and then moved here to Ireland about 20 years ago.
Speaker: But no matter where I've been in the world, I am interested in loss and grief and death and thanatology and death studies, all those kinds of things.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: That's how I found you on Twitter.
Speaker: We found each other.
Speaker: And yeah, this is the stuff I like to talk about and read about and think about and teach about.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: And tell us what would be a student that you have, you know, if you think of an average student, how do you intertwine sort of panatology and your death interest?
Speaker: How do you intertwine that into your lectures so that, you know,
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Good question.
Speaker: So, uh, the core part of my teaching here is in a program, uh, called a bachelor of arts in social care work.
Speaker: And I suppose for American listeners, they might not be as familiar with the title social care worker.
Speaker: It would be like a human services worker or an assistant social worker or like a mental health worker would probably be the title that's a little bit more familiar to folks in the States.
Speaker: But it is a registered title here in Ireland.
Speaker: And it would be similar, I suppose, in ways to social work, except probably working a lot more at the front line with all different kinds of people.
Speaker: People with physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, people in prison.
Speaker: And, you know, people who are kind of live maybe some disadvantaged lives or, you know, kids who need a little bit of support and education.
Speaker: Loads of different ways that social care workers do what they do so well, which is supporting people.
Speaker: And like one of the things that I see all the time in the helping professions, whether it's medicine or nursing or social work or social care work or psychology, occupational therapy, whatever it is, is that students don't talk enough about loss, grief and death.
Speaker: So I try to bring that into the teaching as much as I can, because inevitably so many people who go into the helping professions,
Speaker: are going to end up supporting people who might be facing the end of their own lives or who have experienced the loss of someone very, very close to them in their lives or have experienced losses that maybe don't have anything to do directly with deaths.
Speaker: So like, I just feel very strongly that if student professionals don't have some exposure to, to the kind of the models, the theories, how those things work,
Speaker: apply to their own lives and their own experiences, they are not going to be able to adequately support somebody who's going through it, you know, out there or practice.
Speaker: So I'm pretty passionate about that.
Speaker: And two things.
Speaker: and LIT as it was once then and the folks in my program and my heads of department have sort of listened to that message and have allowed me to do a little teaching in that area for our social care students and now for our new bachelors of science and applied psychology students as well.
Speaker: And I also really love some postgraduate teaching that I do with the Irish Hospice Foundation and the Royal College of Surgeons in their master's in bereavement.
Speaker: So I get to spend a lot of my working time doing things like that.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker: And it is.
Speaker: It's so important.
Speaker: And we actually only just recently had, I'm sure you followed us, John, John Adams and the president of the Funeral Directors Association in the UK, obviously with his mission for
Speaker: teaching bereavement in schools and so we had him on and I'd met John at the NFDA here in the United States um you know we just you know gelled straight away and I absolutely I think it's so important it shouldn't necessarily be left to teachers to you know it shouldn't necessarily be an onus on teachers um there is a certain element of of of it being taught in the home but it does need to be addressed in schools I definitely think and it's
Speaker: You know, and it's amazing he got his 10,000 signatures actually the day we released the podcast, which was kind of lovely for both.
Speaker: And so do you think there'd be any way of bringing something like that into Ireland in your experience?
Speaker: Or I guess you were trying to do it bit by bit in the older students' lives.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think, you know, anytime that you look at trying to change syllabi for whether it's primary school, which is elementary school in the United States, or secondary school, which would be the equivalent of high school, it's a really long and slow process.
Speaker: And I imagine that there's a lot of informal teaching that happens around loss and grief in those classrooms from the very, very youngest ages.
Speaker: But yeah, I would feel pretty strongly that we should kind of model what the UK has been doing.
Speaker: And certainly I really admire John for coming out with that.
Speaker: Especially as a death care professional, I think it was really interesting to have his voice so strongly in that.
Speaker: But yeah, I would love to see that in Ireland.
Speaker: I think sometimes we, people in Ireland, get this reputation of being, oh, they're so good at death.
Speaker: They are fantastic at death.
Speaker: They do it so well.
Speaker: Nobody does it like the Irish...
Speaker: And people are right.
Speaker: There's a distinct cultural uniqueness to how Irish people manage death.
Speaker: But I tend to think it's kind of focused maybe around the very immediate time following the death and that maybe we're not so good at all the stuff that leads up to before that.
Speaker: And we may not be so good at all the stuff.
Speaker: I agree with you more.
Speaker: Yeah, I get all the time.
Speaker: Any TV, any radio, and especially since I came to the States, they're all about you.
Speaker: No, we are terrible at death.
Speaker: We are good at funeral.
Speaker: We're good at the weight.
Speaker: We're good at what we culturally was amazing.
Speaker: We got together over food and drink and the person was in the room.
Speaker: We're good at that.
Speaker: But we are not going to talk about it.
Speaker: We're not going to pre-planning.
Speaker: We're not going to even just, yeah, opening it up as a conversation, you know, even grieving.
Speaker: It's it's most of and, you know, I started my career in Ireland 15 years ago and it was like, you know, immediately, as you said, immediately after the funeral and people were around you.
Speaker: But then a week later, a month later, six months later, a year later, poof.
Speaker: those people were not to be not to be found.
Speaker: You know, yes to me.
Speaker: My granny used to do it and like listen to the obituaries on the radio and stuff like that.
Speaker: Like, I mean, we it's just it's a weird it's a weird, weird thing.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't I completely agree with you in that.
Speaker: I don't agree that we are we are good at death.
Speaker: I don't think we are at all.
Speaker: I joke about my own parents.
Speaker: God bless them.
Speaker: I killed them off so many times when I talk about them.
Speaker: But I'm like, they, you know, I might say, oh, mom, that's a beautiful pair of pearl earrings.
Speaker: She's like, oh, I'll have them when I'm gone.
Speaker: And, you know, or you can have them when you're gone or when I'm gone.
Speaker: And I'll say, no, no, no, don't be talking about something like that.
Speaker: We're so superstitious.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We can't even talk about it here.
Speaker: You can have this when I'm gone type thing.
Speaker: It's no.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: I think we get into a situation when, you know, people from other cultures kind of in a complimentary way say, oh, you're so good at death.
Speaker: There's nothing like an Irish wake.
Speaker: It's quite a superficial comment.
Speaker: I think we do what fits.
Speaker: for people culturally, but the culture is always changing.
Speaker: And I think it's, it's changing incredibly quickly, um, over the last kind of decade, two decades and certain like COVID propelled much of that as, uh, as well.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, I think, I think that there are loads of people
Speaker: And I mentioned one already, certainly the Irish Hospice Foundation, but many others that are kind of trying to call time on that flippant idea of like, oh, the Irish are so good at death and you're grand and, you know, you do it better than anybody else in the world.
Speaker: And maybe...
Speaker: We demand that we take a breath and slow down and say like, okay, what are the bits that we do really well, which is ritual.
Speaker: I think you're, you're right.
Speaker: But what do we need to take a look at it, how we can open up and make it easier to do the advanced care planning?
Speaker: Or to do the, you know, what do I really want for funeral or to do the, where do I really want my pearl earrings to go?
Speaker: And might I just jot that down so there's a clear record for everybody?
Speaker: So it's, you know, make everything a little bit clearer.
Speaker: giving the person an opportunity to kind of do a little bit of a life review, but then also afterwards sort of leaving space for grief, whether it's grief in the workplace or grief in the college classroom or grief in the secondary school exam hall or the dressing room of the GAA club or, you know, the dinner table at Christmas, you know, wherever that is, leaving that space to talk about grief and not just
Speaker: You know, like I tell students all the time, like, okay, we're going to talk a lot about death.
Speaker: And you're going to think that that's going to be really depressing.
Speaker: But there's other aspects of loss that you might not necessarily include in that category, but that are just as powerful and that shape your lives.
Speaker: for better or worse that have nothing to do with death that maybe we need to have a think and a little feel about as well and allow a little bit more oxygen to permeate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's my little reason to get up in the morning.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, no.
Speaker: And, you know, you kind of touched on it a little bit there.
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: I mean, to me, my my whole TED talk that I did while it was on sort of the whole thing really was about judgment of loss.
Speaker: And yeah, it kind of did focus in on pet loss and my own personal experience.
Speaker: But I completely agree with you in so far as like, you know, loss and grief, grieving.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be loss of a human being.
Speaker: It can be loss of a job.
Speaker: It can be loss of a spouse like divorce.
Speaker: It can be loss in so many different ways.
Speaker: And we all grieve.
Speaker: I mean, I've had people, you know, I have a pet cremation jewellery line and I've had people spend hours on the phone with me absolutely devastated about their dog because they weren't married and the dog was their sort of companion for life.
Speaker: And now the dog was no more.
Speaker: And so who am I to sort of sit here in judgment and say, well, you shouldn't grieve like that.
Speaker: Like I lost my father or I lost my sibling or whatever it is.
Speaker: It's it's not for me to sit and judge anybody.
Speaker: We're all completely different and we all appreciate things differently.
Speaker: You might appreciate a chair you love the most and it can be anything.
Speaker: And so I think it's really important to arm people in
Speaker: schools in colleges and everything for this.
Speaker: I look back and I loved where I went to college.
Speaker: But I look back on the things I learned in secondary school and college and back home and Ireland's education system is second to none.
Speaker: I mean, it's brilliant.
Speaker: But I look back and I think
Speaker: What in God's name was I learning half of the time?
Speaker: Like I did a degree in business studies.
Speaker: And when it came to setting up my business in Ireland, not in New York, because that was a whole different ballgame in Ireland, I had no clue what I had no clue where to start.
Speaker: Like I had sort of the entrepreneurial background and I knew of concepts, but I logistics, I didn't have a clue.
Speaker: I think I even had to go back and do a false course.
Speaker: You know, it doesn't, it doesn't prepare us for real life.
Speaker: It doesn't prepare us for real life.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the practical bits and I think, yeah, I think you've really hit on something there.
Speaker: I also think that sometimes we do a disservice when we're training health and social care professionals because we sort of repeat things.
Speaker: a system in which they believe that they are not allowed to grieve, that they have to keep kind of stiff upper lip, be the professional, not let emotion show, not, not, not get too engaged in something, not make their grief bigger than, you know, a family members or a,
Speaker: Or relatives or partners or, you know, another resident, if maybe it's in residential work.
Speaker: And like there's pieces of that that are true.
Speaker: There's pieces of that that are true.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But to deny your human connection.
Speaker: to another person in this case is you know how can you really adequately support people who are going through the most difficult times in their lives and who may not have all the resources that you have if you deny your own humanity about things yeah I can't grieve so I think a big thing of what I try to teach is that
Speaker: You know, you are going to encounter people in your working life that you will lose, whether it's because they leave a service or because they graduate from a program or they move into more independent housing or their health declines.
Speaker: And so they can't be at the day program with you anymore.
Speaker: They have to go into a nursing home or they do, in fact, die.
Speaker: And certainly, like students that go to work in the homelessness sector and homelessness services or substance abuse, you know, and, you know, drug treatment and drug support programs.
Speaker: are going to be, you know, it's more likely that they are going to encounter deaths in the workplace with the people that they support.
Speaker: So sort of just like getting them ready for that.
Speaker: And I think the way that you get ready for that is you examine what your own personal experiences have been with loss and deaths in your own life up until now.
Speaker: And see what areas are maybe a little bit sensitive to you, a little bit bruising for you to look at.
Speaker: And like, how can you learn to mind yourself in that as well before you go out and work with more vulnerable people?
Speaker: Yeah, I completely agree.
Speaker: And it's funny whenever I'm talking to a family and especially when I train all my celebrants, I train celebrants now over here and even when I'm training them, I'm like, it is OK to show emotion.
Speaker: In fact, you know,
Speaker: I definitely don't want you to not show emotion and hide whatever you're feeling.
Speaker: Obviously, you don't turn into a wailing banshee because, you know, usually we don't know the deceased.
Speaker: But when you're hearing those stories and you become a part of their family tree for those few days and
Speaker: You know, you're it's it's absolutely emotional.
Speaker: And I actually always say the day I don't feel emotion and I do have that heart of stone is the day I'll hang my hat up because it's not for me anymore.
Speaker: But every single one of my memorial services I plan or my celebrant services that I do, I I feel it because it's a loss and you're you're you're.
Speaker: you know, it's human beings at the end of the day.
Speaker: So I absolutely think it's that stiff upper lip, I think.
Speaker: And I think a lot of the funeral directors in the world are kind of taught that as well.
Speaker: And I think they're starting certain ones are starting to sort of break away from that.
Speaker: But I do.
Speaker: I think that that was kind of a prerequisite in the last couple of decades.
Speaker: And
Speaker: um I that's not what people want anymore people want you to be emotional because granny died um and they're really sad they want to see that you're as upset as they are not as upset but they want to see that you care you know so yeah yeah yeah and I would imagine I mean I I I don't know and I would like to look at obviously like I'm an academic so I'm always kind of like looking like what does the literature say or what does you know what what theories are evidence is there to support that but
Speaker: You know, I wonder too, as we do, certainly in Ireland, kind of step back from the very, very strong influence of the Catholic Church.
Speaker: Now, it's definitely still here and people embrace it.
Speaker: And I think it's not wrong to say that sort of the older age cohort in Ireland might embrace it more perhaps than some of
Speaker: So are the younger people.
Speaker: But as we step back from that, and even as so funny, I was listening to NPR the other day and they had a report on that said, you know, religious attendance and church attendance is actually receding a little bit in the United States and that more and more people are identifying as having no particular religion.
Speaker: I wonder if
Speaker: does that space that at one time was filled by churches or houses of faith with, with, with rules and templates for like how to do death, does the funeral and death professional step in and like religion is less of the guiding force and emotion and connection and remembrance is, is more of, of what guides so that people are craving that, um,
Speaker: you know, show me that you're human, show me that you're connected to me, show me that this isn't just another funeral that you're kind of taking off, you know, inserting my Nana's name in the rare and then, and then kind of taking off for a round of golf.
Speaker: I didn't,
Speaker: Yeah, I definitely think it is.
Speaker: And I feel like the rise of celebrants, death doulas, you know, this these new these new roles that are coming up in this space, I think are showing that that is fact, you know, whether there's literature and facts to back it up.
Speaker: But I mean, definitely direct cremation is is more prevalent now than than ever.
Speaker: And I think people
Speaker: are kind of choosing that yes for monetary reasons but I think they're choosing it because it gives them the space to do something else that they don't have to burial you know they're not restricted by this rigid sort of timeline and that they can do something like what I do which is memorial planning and or they can take the remains and go to their local golf club or do something in their home or it's just more personalized
Speaker: And I know for me, I mean, literally, it's why I started was I was raised Catholic in Ireland.
Speaker: I still identify as Catholic, but I don't want my funeral to be all about the priest of the church, which is what it is.
Speaker: You know, I want my few little Catholic prayers to be said, but I want it to be about me.
Speaker: I'm not being a diva here, but it should be me.
Speaker: I'm the one who's dead, you know.
Speaker: It is your party.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: You know, and so I think that's another thing that people are
Speaker: People are, I think decades ago, like when I think of, I always think of my grandmother because she was just, you know, such an advocate of the church and, you know, went to mass and she was just your stereotypical Irish grandmother.
Speaker: And so there was never a question of what would happen to her when she passed.
Speaker: But her life was also very different to my life.
Speaker: There were certain expectations of women in Ireland and globally of what you did and what you could and couldn't do and stuff.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: I think now there's a lot more equality.
Speaker: Okay, you know, there's still a lot way to go, but there's a lot more equality, diversity.
Speaker: You know, well, I never have believed that there's any two of us that are the same, but we're so different.
Speaker: And that I think that's where the Catholic Church, and I don't want to say actually the Catholic Church, I mean all religions, and I spoke about this on Irish radio back home one time, where I was like,
Speaker: And they are within their right to ask that everyone in their congregation and or, you know, anybody that comes to mass is pure and, you know, comes to church once a week and devotes themselves.
Speaker: They're within their right to ask for that as part of the club.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or whatever it is, you know, like you're within a right to ask for if you're joining this book club, you've got to read this one book every week or whatever it might be.
Speaker: However, I just feel like by having that and I don't want to say Hitler because that's probably the wrong one, but by having that really strict, strict requirement, I think you're alienating people.
Speaker: 90% of people like I would I go to St.
Speaker: Patrick's Cathedral regularly if I knew that you know my funeral could be half church a half prayer half you know the mass ritual and half about me then I probably would come back to it you know but right now I mean I think it was the Archbishop of Meath at the time he banned eulogies even so the one little bit we were getting we were now not getting anymore so
Speaker: look, you know, well, we don't need to go down the religious aspect, you know, but yeah, I just I think people are wanting I think people are wanting more different things.
Speaker: I think, you know, it's not that they're pushing.
Speaker: I think they're being pushed away from religion.
Speaker: And I think back to what we were talking about, I think if they're educated in schools and then in colleges and universities and especially if they're going to roles where they're caretaking, I think it's very important to what I'm famously kind of known for saying is meet people where they're at.
Speaker: not where you want them to be, you know, not where you want your sales to be or whatever it is, but just meet them where they're at and where they're at could be all over the place.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But maybe they want a Catholic service.
Speaker: Maybe they want to have it in the golf club, you know, and just figuring out what it is that they want.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I think you're right there.
Speaker: And I think I think, again, it is and it's so funny sometimes when I teach about, you know,
Speaker: about death cafes and those kind of, you know, community encounters with discussing death and mortality.
Speaker: And they're part of death education as well.
Speaker: You know, I kind of say,
Speaker: I wouldn't want, and I'm sure there, I'm not really into Pinterest, but I'm sure there are funeral Pinterest boards or ideas for like what to do at your funeral, how to creatively or represent someone or what's the newest, coolest thing to do.
Speaker: And like, I think there has to be room for that, for people who want to express themselves in different ways or new ways or ways that fit and really align with who they are and what they care about in their life.
Speaker: but equally if you want an old school traditional uh like you know just like my parents or my grandparents had in a funeral in whatever religion that is for you whether it's buddhist or whether it's church of ireland or episcopalian in the states whatever that is like there has to be room for that too if you just want to
Speaker: I don't know, what will we call it?
Speaker: Plain vanilla?
Speaker: Or, you know, just like the usual.
Speaker: I think, again, it's back to what you said before.
Speaker: It's like no judgment.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just about whatever it is that you choose.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Take judgment off the table.
Speaker: And just listen and just be there.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Anyway, Jennifer, I could talk to you all evening or day or I mean, it's definitely nighttime for you.
Speaker: God bless you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for staying up to chat with us and we will likely have you back.
Speaker: and maybe have a longer discussion but thank you thank you so much for just giving us your wise words and we're going to leave all the links and contact information below so that if anybody wants to reach out to you maybe in Ireland I know we have quite a few listeners in Ireland but that they want to reach out maybe just inquire about what it is that you do and you know the work in the Irish Hospice they're obviously incredible as well but yeah thank you so much for joining us you are welcome I would love to chat again thanks Jen
Speaker: Thank you.
