Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper.
Speaker: On today's episode we are talking all things mental health with Cain as Barbara Chemis.
Speaker: Take it away.
Speaker: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldaney and I have one of my favourite people to bump into at the conventions, Barbara Chemis.
Speaker: Is Chemis the right way of pronouncing it?
Speaker: Chemis?
Speaker: Okay, perfect.
Speaker: I was as an Irish person, I always have to make sure I get that perfectly clear.
Speaker: Barbara, welcome.
Speaker: Thank you, Jennifer.
Speaker: So glad to be with you.
Speaker: Tell us a little, well, tell the audience a little bit about who you are, where you're from.
Speaker: You're in the U.S. But yeah, tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I'm talking to you from Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker: The headquarters of the Cremation Association of North America is in suburban Chicago.
Speaker: And I'm the executive director of Kena Cremation Association.
Speaker: And we're a trade association with 3,500 members, ranging from funeral homes, cemeteries, crematories, suppliers, students, consultants, the common denominator being cremation.
Speaker: That's what we focus on and what we like to talk about.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Very good.
Speaker: And so cremation, obviously, in COVID times especially, has taken a massive increase.
Speaker: And I feel like you and I sort of will, we definitely think a lot alike about the same thing we've joked about sort of doing this podcast for a while.
Speaker: We, like cremation, it's on the rise.
Speaker: I mean, we're running out of burial space the world over.
Speaker: We all, well, we all know that.
Speaker: The general public maybe doesn't know that, but we all know that.
Speaker: But then with COVID and obviously certain restrictions and stuff and people not being able to have funerals, cremation seems to just increase, increase, increase.
Speaker: Do you think that that took a huge step and it'll now peter out or do you think it'll just keep climbing and climbing, climbing?
Speaker: Well, I do think cremation rates are going to continue to grow.
Speaker: And interestingly, in 2020 and 2021, the two primary cases
Speaker: well, years for COVID deaths in the US and Canada and US and Canada statistics are what came in most tracks.
Speaker: But I think this is true internationally.
Speaker: Fascinating is the percentage of cremations grew predictably.
Speaker: It, you know, as I talked to my members, they're like, oh my gosh, my cremation rate is three times, four times what it was.
Speaker: Well, what, and I believe them, they're right.
Speaker: Because the sheer numbers of cremations increased so dramatically.
Speaker: So as far as COVID driving some exponential or stair-step increase in cremations overall, we didn't see that.
Speaker: It was 1.5% increase year over year.
Speaker: But the total number of deaths was so much bigger.
Speaker: And so in 2020, it was just shy of 2 million cremations in the United States.
Speaker: The final numbers for 2021 aren't in yet.
Speaker: We're starting that data collection now, but the preliminary numbers were closer to 2 million cremations.
Speaker: I expect we'll hit 2 million in 2021.
Speaker: And that's incredible.
Speaker: That's hundreds of thousands more than 2019.
Speaker: So even though, you know, I'm cautious about, oh, yeah, cremation rates grow predictably and all that.
Speaker: No, the experience is that hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. experienced cremation probably for the first time or the first time in a long time.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And in circumstances you described without the ability to have services, some of our members reported, especially in the East Coast in the early months of COVID, they would get a call at the cemetery.
Speaker: What can you do first, cremation or burial?
Speaker: Family didn't care.
Speaker: They just didn't like their loved one in a refrigerated truck or what can happen faster.
Speaker: They were making decisions
Speaker: under circumstances that I hope we never experience again.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I know that's, that's crazy.
Speaker: I never, I never knew that.
Speaker: That's, that's a horrible position that the families were in.
Speaker: I mean, I know there was, there wasn't so much atrocities that kind of went on, but to, to think that somebody had, you know, lost somebody and then having to say something like that, I mean, that's brutal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because I know, yeah, in our, in our, in my memorial business,
Speaker: we yeah we found that a lot of people um got somebody cremated and then are having the service later memorials in the last year and stuff have increased for us um where the urn is present and and but they're having it sort of a year or two years after the person passed away um whereas with burial while you can still absolutely have a service and if you haven't done something i would recommend it not for my own gains but from a
Speaker: I, it's interesting when I started my journey and sort of this idea of a memorial service that's similar, that is a funeral, but it's not a funeral and stuff.
Speaker: People used to think, oh, it was just throwing a party and this life celebration quote got thrown around so much.
Speaker: And, you know, people would say, oh, you're just dancing on graves or you just want a party and stuff like that.
Speaker: And I'm like, that's not what it is at all.
Speaker: Like I 150 million percent believe in the funeral, the blueprint of
Speaker: that as being something where everyone gathers and grieving can begin if it hasn't already and just that safe space for everybody and creating that just lovely warm environment um and there's such a fine line between it being a celebration of life and mourning a loss you know and we were actually only talking about it at a memorial at the weekend it's um you know you can throw a party of course you can and if that's what but i feel like that just sort of
Speaker: cushions that it's like we're ignoring the grief we're ignoring the loss we're ignoring the person has passed away um and i think we have to address that so i think um whether somebody in covid got um cremated or buried i feel like having some sort of a service even if it's for 10 people in your home something just something um it's a funeral is just so so so important i think so i wholeheartedly agree and i think there's
Speaker: you know, language matters, obviously.
Speaker: And whether it's funeral celebration of life or, you know, dinner, whatever, whatever it is.
Speaker: I think we as humans, it's our impulse to gather, to comfort each other, to celebrate together.
Speaker: It's not, you know, it's not typical to have solo, you know,
Speaker: you know, markings of, of rites of passage kind of thing.
Speaker: And so, you know, COVID interrupted that sometimes, sometimes it could be, I went to more kind of online funerals, including family as far flung as the Philippines during COVID.
Speaker: I don't think they would have live streamed it otherwise, right.
Speaker: Had it been COVID.
Speaker: And I'm so grateful because this was a distant relative and I could participate and I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have,
Speaker: flown to the Philippines even had I could at that point.
Speaker: So there's, you know, there's, there's an accessibility aspect that technology brings us to gather.
Speaker: And I have to say, I think the favorite part of that, of that there, I mean, that the whole service was great, but there was this time between the mass and driving to the cemetery where my cousin-in-law is,
Speaker: He had a driver, but he was filming downtown, the downtown of the small town where most of the relatives had grown up or visited frequently in their childhood.
Speaker: And the Zoom chat went nuts.
Speaker: It was like, oh my gosh, so-and-so's, like I see them on the street.
Speaker: There they are.
Speaker: There's so-and-so.
Speaker: And oh, that cafe's still open.
Speaker: I'm glad it survived COVID.
Speaker: And like all of this, all of this, like, you know, reminiscing about their town.
Speaker: And of course there were family memories shared and stuff.
Speaker: during the ceremony and during the burial time.
Speaker: But I mean, that experience was all of it.
Speaker: It was tears during the mass.
Speaker: When the casket closed, it was literally wailing on Zoom.
Speaker: Then this family reunion, virtual family reunion.
Speaker: And then at the cemetery, more sharing of memories and experiences and asking after people.
Speaker: And it was, you know, so it was the whole range
Speaker: experience.
Speaker: That's a very specific example, but I think whatever the impulse is, whatever we call it, you know, we do something to mark these rites of passage.
Speaker: And Kena research has validated that too.
Speaker: A few years ago, for example, we did some focus group research.
Speaker: And if you've ever participated in focus group research, you know, you hire somebody to populate the focus groups, but you've got to tell them who you want.
Speaker: So we told them income and age and gender and all these things.
Speaker: And then we said, we want two groups.
Speaker: We want a direct cremation group and a cremation with service group.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And, and they said, okay, fine.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: And we screwed up.
Speaker: We made our first mistake in the research.
Speaker: And we said, direct cremation means people who chose cremation and did nothing.
Speaker: And cremation with service means people who chose cremation and then had a funeral celebration of life, fill in the blank.
Speaker: They came back to us and said, we can't populate the first group.
Speaker: Out of our tens of thousands of people in our database, we can't find anybody, we can find thousands of people who arrange cremations, but no one who did nothing.
Speaker: No one.
Speaker: And the mistake was, what we meant was did nothing with the funeral provider, with the cremation provider's involvement or assistance.
Speaker: They could have done something on their own.
Speaker: So once we change that, then we could populate both groups.
Speaker: But I'm here to tell you, I'm sitting on the other side of the glass during these focus groups, and I can't tell who's the direct cremation group versus the cremationless service group.
Speaker: As they talked about their cremation experience, they were the same.
Speaker: Not that it didn't matter if a funeral director was involved.
Speaker: Of course it did.
Speaker: However, by and large, their experiences were similar, whether they DIYed their services or not.
Speaker: So
Speaker: The importance, this is all by way of validating your statement.
Speaker: The importance of seeing this is critical.
Speaker: Yeah, it really is.
Speaker: That's really fascinating to hear because I often, in my dealings with funeral homes, it's kind of one of the things I'm saying, I'm like,
