This Is Uncomfortable October 3, 2024 Transcript

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Reema Khrais: When did you first realize you were interested in working in death care? How did that come about?

Joél Simone Maldonado: Oh my gosh. When I was a little girl.

Reema: Really? You knew that young?

Joél: Yes, and I had this obsession with autopsies, Reema. 

Reema: Joél Simone Maldonado’s fascination with death began when she was just five-years-old, at her great-grandmother’s funeral…

Joél: And I can remember asking my mom and my grandma, why are we watching her sleep? Why is she sleeping in that box? Who did her hair and her makeup? If she’s asleep. And why did they do all of this only for us to go outside and put her in this cold, snowy, wet ground? And so it’s just always been something that I’ve been fascinated and curious about.

Reema:  Were there people in your life at the time who were intrigued by your curiosity, like your family members?

Joél:  Well, I won’t say necessarily intrigued, I say concerned.

Reema: [Laughter] Yeah. I mean, I think that’s what I was trying to say. I was trying to be kinder about it. Okay. Yeah, “concerned.” 

Joél: Concerned. I just don’t think people knew how to handle a child being so curious about death, because they didn’t have the answers… So that’s why I’m so grateful for my uncle. 

Reema: Joél’s uncle was an embalmer and a funeral director. From the time she was eight, Joél would spend her spring and summer breaks tagging along as he worked.

Joél: spending every day at the funeral home with him
Reema: wow
Joél:  And he would answer all of my questions. He took me into the embalming room. And the first thing that he told me was that you’re entering a sacred space. This space isn’t about you. This space is about caring for others in a dignified and respectful way. And so you need to carry yourself in that way at all times, not only in this embalming room, but especially in this funeral home.

Reema: Joél’s early obsession with death evolved into a career as a funeral director and what she calls a sacred grief practitioner — steeping herself into a world so many of us spend a lifetime trying to avoid. 

I’m Reema Khrais, and welcome to This is Uncomfortable.

In a lot of ways, I can’t relate to Joél. I’ve never liked thinking about death, or about autopsies. But this last year has changed me. After experiencing so much grief, after losing so many of my family members in Gaza, in the most unimaginable way, I feel like really I’ve had no choice but to think about our mortality. Some days, it honestly feels like the only thing on my mind. 

So when we decided to do this miniseries around grief and money, I wanted to talk with someone who has an intimate relationship with death, someone who’s made it their job.

Joél got real with me about what it’s like to work in the death care industry. She shared things I would’ve never thought about. She also talked about why it’s so important we financially prepare for the inevitable… And then later in the episode, I share some of my own reflections around grief.

Even though it was really heavy, I left our conversation feeling comforted… which is not unusual… studies show that thinking and talking about our mortality is actually good for us, it can improve our outlook and our relationships. 

Alright, here’s my conversation with Joél. 

Reema: Okay so what does mortuary school involve? 

Joél: Believe it or not, the closest thing that I could relate it to is medical school, except for instead of learning how to take care of patients, you’re learning the same things – the anatomy, the biology, the chemistry, the physiology, the pathology – all the things that you learn, those core classes, but they’re geared towards those that have passed on.

Reema: They also taught her how to run a funeral home – the accounting side, navigating state laws, that kinda stuff. And she says, of course, there were the things you’d expect, like how to embalm a body. She also took this class called restorative art…

Joél: …which is basically the art of piecing human beings back together after traumatic loss or impact. If a person’s in an accident, removing glass and asphalt and debris from their hair, from their face. There’s artistry to it. There’s science to it. There’s mathematics to it. So it, it’s fascinating, which is a little uncomfortable to say. [laugh] But mortuary school was one of the, if not the best experiences in my life because I met other individuals who had that same passion and morbid curiosity, as I did. This group of people who completely understood me at a core level. It was also one of the most intense times of my life because I took 28 courses in 11 months.

Reema: Wow that’s intense. How much does it cost to go to mortuary school? 

Joél: For the year I went it was $12,000. That was, what – over 13, 14 years ago? 

Reema: She luckily didn’t have to take out student loans; her grandmother covered the cost, which she’s very grateful for.

After mortuary school, Joél did an apprenticeship and eventually worked as a funeral director in Atlanta. She’d spend her days meeting with families, making funeral arrangements, she’d also embalm and cremate bodies herself, and then do that restorative art we talked about. She was making around 60-thousand dollars a year. To make ends meet, she also worked as an university office assistant and did hair on the side. 

As a funeral director, Joél was selling services that most people wish they didn’t have to buy, and often can’t afford. In this country, the median cost of a funeral, including a viewing and a burial, is about 83-hundred dollars.

Reema: Early in your career, how did it feel talking to people about money? Like I imagine it’s one of the last things they want to talk about when they’re losing a loved one.

Joél: It was so uncomfortable. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable it is to be sitting in front of a family, that the first thing that they do is tell you how much money they don’t have. I worked in a very affluent area; even those people would come in, and the first thing that they said is, you know, “I really don’t know how I’m going to pay for this,” or “We weren’t expecting this. This is the worst time that this could happen.” And so it was a gut wrenching conversation.

Reema: Yeah, how would you navigate that? What would you say?

Joél: Honestly, at first I would cry, with them. I honestly would. Um but as time went on and I had mentors, I learned to tell people we’re here to take care of you, and we’re going to do our best to do this in a, a way that does not leave you destroyed financially and that will be padded with dignity.

Reema: Like what kinds of things specifically are you discussing with them, in terms of finances?

Joél: Let’s say for example, someone calls and says they’ve lost a loved one, and  they know they can’t afford to do the bells and whistles. I’ll let them know, you don’t have to have a wood casket, which tends to be more expensive. Or you don’t necessarily have to have a car service come and pick you up from your home. Those are things that we are conditioned to believe we have to do because they have been done, maybe that’s all we’ve ever seen done in our family’s funerals, you know?

Reema: Yeah, yeah.

Joél: So just talking to people and presenting them with their options, which was another thing I struggled with: other professionals who would make assumptions about people coming in the door and only present them with what they thought they could afford.

Reema: This was a point that came up a lot during my conversation with Joél: how much it bothers her when people in the death care industry make assumptions about their clients who are often in a very vulnerable place. 

Joél: It’s almost like I get into mama bear mode when I’m talking about grief, because  people that are grieving need protection. But since COVID, there have been an explosion of – and I’m using air quotes – death care and grief care companies and services and platforms. And you can tell that their root is money, because they see all of the loss that we’re experiencing collectively as an opportunity for gain. 

Reema: Joél made the point that death care, yes, it’s always been a business – it generates more than 20 billion dollars a year here in the U.S. But increasingly small, family-run funeral homes – which have been the backbone of the industry – are being bought by private equity firms. These firms buy and merge funeral homes into larger chains, which can make their services more expensive. 

And lately, Silicon Valley has entered the chat, with new ways to bypass the traditional industry altogether. Like, you can now use online services to help you write an obituary or a will. There’s even a service that will handle cremation and mail you your loved one’s ashes. Or to help with your grief, you can now talk with a deceased loved one through an AI chatbot that claims to recreate their essence. 

These services might actually help people, but Joél’s argument is that when your goal is to optimize grief, then you’re also probably trying to optimize your bottom line.  

And she says the influx of money into the industry can overshadow the importance of compassionate care… understanding that each person has their own unique needs.  

Even back in mortuary school, Joél felt like there was a lack of cultural competency…

Joél: And by that, I mean, there was no education about caring for the religious, the cultural, the physical nuance of who people are. For example, as a Black woman, I didn’t learn anything about how to take care of people that look like me, about how to take care of our hair, about our specific cosmetic and make, uh, Just other needs that we have at the end of life that make us unique as human beings, right? And so that was really frustrating. And then as I got into the profession as an apprentice, I had experiences in embalming rooms with seasoned individuals that disgusted me. From there being jokes about black male genitalia to…

Reema: Oh no.

Joél: …witnessing a seasoned funeral director cutting off a woman’s braids from her scalp, not knowing that he was cutting off her hair in that process. And when they view their loved one for the last time, they look like a complete hot mess, because the embalmer didn’t know what they were doing not because they didn’t try but simply because they just don’t know that perhaps someone’s hair should be handled this way, or perhaps someone’s makeup should be done this way and not that way, or this is type of dress is appropriate versus not this type of dress. So, I mean, there, there’s so many implications.

Reema: Yeah these are things I would not think about but makes a lot of sense. Especially when that’s the last image that you’ll likely have of your loved, like the last physical one 

Joél: Yes 

Reema: That’s a very important moment.

Joél: We call it a memory picture. That last time that you see your loved one, that viewing, that creates what’s called a memory picture for the family and the community.

Reema: Talking with Joél, I can tell she’s always felt called to do this work, but as it goes with any job, do it for long enough, and the rosy tint fades. She grew frustrated by the lack of cultural knowledge in the industry. And she underestimated the amount of emotional labor this job demands. 

Like she’d want to connect with her clients as a human, as someone who understands how grief can pull you under. But doing that, day after day after day after day, it wore her down.  

Joél:  I want you to imagine being a funeral director there to do your job and make arrangements, and now not only have you sat in the seat of grief with this person, but now you’re carrying that… that, and not just the story, the emotion behind that story, because course. There are tears and there’s air punching and there’s just emotion behind it, right? 

I call the arrangement room the confession box. People come into funeral homes and confess things that you would not believe, like about anger…

Reema: Like what?

Joel: …or experiences or, “He molested me when I was 6 years old and I don’t, I can’t be mad at him anymore,” you know, or “Who am I going to be mad at now about anything because I blamed him or her for everything?” or just people come in and confess affairs or just anything. If you’re not aware of how to process, or I don’t even want to say compartmentalize, but purge – you know what I mean? – yourself of that energy, on top of having those uncomfortable  conversations about finances, on top of the uncomfortable family dynamics, on top of not being able to pay your bills. 

Reema: Well, that’s what I was also wondering, like, how do you manage your own emotions and your mental health while supporting people through such profoundly difficult experiences? Like, do you experience burnout, compassion fatigue?

Joél: I burned out. I have experienced compassion fatigue. I think coming to the realization that at some point in this journey, I’m going to die, and everyone that I know is going to die. It became not so much a curiosity, but a realization of mortality.

Reema: Did that give you a moment of pause? Were you thinking, uh, maybe this industry is not for me, or maybe I should pursue another career? 

Joél: I don’t necessarily think that I thought it wasn’t for me. I wondered if I could handle it. I think a lot of that depression was just not realizing how grief affects people, and not realizing that not everyone gets to say goodbye. Sometimes people are on their way to work, have all intentions of coming home later and boom, they get in an accident on the freeway. I, I, I had a lot of anxiety attacks during that time, right? Seeing people who had died in car accidents, and then I’d have to go drive home, you know what I mean?

Reema: I can’t even imagine how traumatic and how difficult it must have been to be exposed to that every day.

Joél:  It really hit me hard. And I also had an experience where, um, I just got tired of seeing young Black men, um, die by gun violence. It was back to back to back to back to back and it broke something inside of me, and I decided to step away for about six months. I didn’t do anything death care related. And I’m so grateful for that time because I went to therapy, and I got help, and it changed my life. I learned to not only establish but enforce boundaries, which is important, and I tapped into my spirituality, um, and began to recognize what I do as a sacred exchange of energy. Yes, it’s a beautiful thing to sit in the seat and be trusted to care for people while they’re grieving and to care for the deceased. But at the same time, it’s an exchange: I have to get something out of this. And it’s not always monetary. I have to find joy in what I do. I have to find peace at the end of the day. That’s the energetic exchange.

Reema: You were able to recharge after that… 

Joél: Yes. 

Reema: …and get back into the work? 

Joél: Yes. 

Reema: Joél worked in funeral homes for a few more years…then she quit her job and decided to do her own thing……she founded the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy to try to offer solutions to the problems that troubled her. 

Joél: And so, the work that I do now is completely focused on educating other death care and end of life professionals, whether they be doula or medical professionals, about those nuances and about that specific care for Black individuals. So what we aim to do is basically honor, preserve and educate others to serve from a multicultural lens.

Reema: She offers courses like, how to shampoo and detangle Black hair, or remove braids, or how to do make up on melanin skin. And she still works with grieving families, helping them navigate the financial side of things, which we’ll get into in a minute. 

After the break, I ask Joél about how we can all better prepare for the inevitable, and we chat about trying to make sense of grief.

[MID ROLL BREAK]

Reema: Welcome back. So these days, when Joél works with families she’s often helping them navigate the emotional minefield of grief, but she also gives practical advice, like how to plan so you can make life easier and hopefully conflict-free for the people you’ll leave behind. 

Joél: I say to people, um, planning for your death is the ultimate autonomy. And not necessarily, that doesn’t say that you’re planning how or when. You’re taking control of what’s going to happen when it happens,

Reema: Like Joél says it’s helpful, of course, to create a will – that we update regularly – even if it’s a modest one. We should also consider organizing important documents: our insurance policies, any retirement statements. Maybe even designate someone to handle our digital footprint, like our social media accounts or any online subscriptions. And if you’re able to, she says you can start saving. 

Joél: You can walk into a funeral home and ask them to open a trust, and you can go the route of putting a hundred dollars a month in that trust. You can pay towards your funeral, your casket, your cemetery plot, your vault, your cremation. So just having things like that in place, or even just having money in your bank account available when you pass away and having a designated person that can have access to those funds. Um and pre planning isn’t always financial. Sometimes pre planning could be, I want to wear this dress and not that dress. And the reason that makes things easier for your loved ones when you pass away, is because that is something people stress over: “What should I bury mom in? What would dad look best in?” So picking those items out yourself. 

Reema: What would you say to someone who’s listening to this and is like, I am young, I’m healthy, like, I don’t need to worry about this. I don’t want to worry about this.

Joél: We’re all gonna die, and unfortunately we don’t know how and we don’t know when. None of us want to think today is our last day, especially when we’re young and healthy and we have everything to look forward to. But the only thing that we really are promised to look forward to is death.

Reema:Yeah. If I had to sit down tomorrow and go through my bank account and do like the financials and try to prepare for that – that, that feels like pulling teeth. I, I don’t want to do that. I’m assuming that you’ve done it?

Joél: So, here’s the thing. I felt like I was 100 percent ready prior to 2020, right? 

Reema: Okay.

Joél: In 2021, I met my husband and I got married in 2022. I don’t feel as if we’re ready yet.

Reema: You’re a unit now. It’s different.

Joél: I’m a unit. Yes. Mm hmm. Also, it shifted culturally: my husband is of the Baha’i faith, right?

Reema: Oh!

Joél: The reason that that’s such a big conversation, um, on a deeper level is that when he passes away, no matter where in the world we are, he can’t go more than an hour outside of the place where he died to be buried. What if we’re someplace and it’s–

Reema: like according to his faith

Joél: right. We travel a lot. Let’s say we’re in Europe, and we can’t go more than an hour away from where he died to bury him. Do I want to be buried there?

Reema: [sighs] And it’s like you just, everything is so uncertain, right? I mean, you just don’t know. And we were having these conversations, um, with my grandmother, uh, you know, with my family around my grandmother’s death recently. Um, she was in Gaza, and she evacuated because she was very sick. She had cancer. And luckily we were able to get her out of Gaza. Um, and she was in Egypt, and you know, she never intended to rest in Egypt. Um, but there was no other choice. Right?

Joél: Mmmhm. 

Reema: And that was a very, very difficult time where anything that she’d planned would have gone out the window anyway, right, because we’re in a new country, and it’s all happening so quickly. And it was a very eye opening experience for me, because I think I didn’t realize a lot about our own rituals in Islam around burials and, you know, I think this is similar to other cultures, but you have to bury your loved one within 24 hours. And, um, but it was a very traumatic experience because it’s, you know, we’re like trying to figure out how to pay for it and how to like do the logistics, and we don’t have a car and where’s the cemetery, but we also want it to be in a cemetery with other Palestinians. And, um, it’s just, it really brought to light to me that no matter how much planning you do, there’s just going to be so much out of your control.

Joél: You’re 100 percent correct. There are things that are fixed, right? Like, a person has passed away. But then you also have those variables about, well, what if we’re at war? What if we’re, we’re exiled from our homes? Right?

Reema: Mhm. Yeah.

Reema: Along with my grandmother, I’ve lost dozens of other relatives this last year. Entire branches of my family have been killed by Israeli airstrikes. It’s unfathomable. I talked about this with my dad in an episode last season. Since last October, the grief has been inescapable. I find myself reaching for answers to questions that shouldn’t exist. 

Reema: I honestly don’t know if I would have been able to have this conversation with you a couple years ago. Um…

Joél: Why?

Reema: Because I just avoided thinking about death. And I think I’ve been forced to confront it this last year with all of the family members I’ve lost, um, and it’s, it’s definitely made it easier to talk about our mortality, um, in a way that actually feels kind of freeing, um… 

Joél: Right. 

Reema: Thinking about our mortality, like it allows me to get outside of my head, to take some distance from the daily dramas of my life. It gives me perspective. And so it has been this, – I hate using the word gift during a very traumatic and difficult time – but it has been an unexpected gift. And I’m curious if you’ve had a similar perspective shift in that way? 

Joél: I’m a completely different person, Reema. And that goes back to what we were talking about, about that spirituality and becoming more spiritual. I don’t see myself as this person that’s responsible for completing these tasks. The question I am learning to ask myself from my heart is, is this useful? Who can use this? 

Reema: Yeah

Joél: But I do believe that whatever your grief journey is, the ultimate reward for that journey, for lack of a better word, is the revelation of the gift that you need to continue upon that path. And that gift, I’ve seen it take multiple forms. Like, um, some people become activists. For example, think about MADD, right? Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Some people become, for lack of better words, a better human being. You know, a husband loses his wife to cancer that’s been an angel her entire life, and he becomes a better person for watching her go through her journey, you know? So…

Reema: Yeah. 

Joél: Yeah, so it’s very different for everyone.

Reema: yeah, That’s good point. And it also is, I’m sure, comes down to the circumstances of your life and what else is going on with you and…

Joél: Your relationship with that person, the way that person died. Even if you had the best relationship, what were the circumstances of your relationship when they passed? Were there things left unsaid? You know, and, and that’s the thing: like a lot of people talk about, um, the Kubler Ross five or seven stages of grief. And I, while I think they have merit for what they were intended for, that was created to address a very specific type of grief, which is anticipatory, where perhaps you have the opportunity to make amends and say goodbye and prepare yourself mentally for the loss, but that doesn’t apply always.

Reema: No, no, not at all.

Joél: I remember a woman told me that she, her husband died like of a heart attack or something at work, right? And she, you know, he, they were older and she was okay with the fact that he had transitioned. She wasn’t happy about it, but she was okay. But after finding out that he had passed away, she got home and she walked into their bedroom and she tripped over his shoes. And she said, when she did that, she just lost it! She was so angry at him leaving those shoes in her but she realized that that would never happen again. That was the moment that it sunk in for her, that he was gone. 

Reema: Well, I think sometimes we don’t even know that we’re grieving. You know, like these last few months, I’ve just been, there have been times where I don’t know.  I’m like, am I okay? Like, would I have done this normally? Would I have felt this ordinarily? 

Joél: I’ve learned through working with others and helping others navigate their journey, that a lot of times people need permission  to not be okay. If I heard someone say something like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be feeling this way about, you know, losing my mom 10 years ago.” You lost your mom. You’re never gonna have another mom. You only had one mom. I don’t think that would ever go away. I don’t think that loss ever is truly resolved. And it’s the craziest thing in the world to me  that we have created such expectations on ourselves that even in loss, we, we have to seek permission to grieve.

Reema: And also it’s like grieving – maybe I even heard you say this in a different interview. It’s not just grieving someone you love, right? It’s, we’re always grieving when things change, you know, things are ever changing.

Joél: Yes, and we’re all in different stages and facets of grief. 

Reema: I like to think of grief as an extension of our love, which gets at the final point Joel made as we were wrapping up our conversation. She said that the greatest inheritance we can leave behind is in the way we loved people, and how we lived out our values. 

Joél: When I think about my grandfather, even though, like, he left homes and properties and money and all those things, right? I don’t really think about that. I  think about his stories. I think about his character. I think about the fact that when I introduce someone and they recognize my family name, or I’ve introduced them once and they recognize my family name, the impact that he had on their lives, right? 

Reema: Yes.

Joél: You can plan for that by waking up every day and saying, I’m going to tell my story today. So we pass on things that are intangible, and I think those are the things that matter most. And I know that sounds contradictory – to plan for your funeral and choose your casket – but those are the things that matter.

Reema: Working on this series about grief, I’ve honestly worried about whether you all would want to listen. There’s so much pain in the world, and sometimes you just want relief. But if you’ve listened this far you probably know that dealing with grief head on can be healing. 

This writer I love, Pema Chödrön. She’s a Buddhist nun who talks about this idea of groundlessness… you know, when life feels out of control. She says if you embrace that unsettling feeling, if you don’t run away or try to distract yourself, it can actually push you to a deeper sense of connection and purpose. 

Some days that idea really resonates with me, like I’ll try to channel the grief in the way that feels meaningful and energizing, you know, by spending time in community or getting clear with myself about what really matters, and actually prioritizing that. And then there are other days when the grief and anger make me just want to retreat.  

I haven’t felt OK for a while now, but my conversation with Joél reminded me that we don’t have to experience our grief alone. 

Amanda, who I talked with in the first episode in this series, she told me something that really touched me: that in the weeks after her dad’s death, she listened to this show while sorting through his things. It means so much to me to know that some of y’all are listening during really tough times, that this show might bring some amount of comfort. 

And this series showed me that it really is a two-way street. It’s helped me work through my own pain. So I just wanted to say genuinely thank you all for listening, and for being a bright spot during a dark time.

Alright that’s all for this week’s show. If you have any thoughts about this episode or just want to reach out, you can always email me and the team at uncomfortable@marketplace.org 

Also, be sure to check out our newsletter this week. Our producer Alice Wilder wrote about the inspiration for this series, a sort of behind the scenes look, and we also included some resources that have personally helped us navigate our grief. If you’re not already signed up for that, you can do that by clicking that link in the show notes. 

This episode was produced by Alice Wilder and me, Reema Khrais. Zoë Saunders is the show’s senior producer. Jasmine Romero is our editor. Sound design and audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts. And Caitlin Esch is Supervising Senior Producer. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace. And the theme music is by Wonderly.

Alright, thanks again.