{"id":117398,"date":"2017-11-01T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-11-01T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=117398"},"modified":"2017-11-02T15:08:31","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T19:08:31","slug":"podcasting-way-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/01\/podcasting-way-death\/","title":{"rendered":"The Podcasting Way of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The futuristic Aeternal hearse, designed by Abhishek Roy.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I discovered funeral-industry trade podcasts during a dark night of the soul. I\u2019m allergic to wine, but I\u2019d been drinking it anyway, and as I lay in bed feeling my heart thrash and my sinuses cloud, I contemplated the fact that I now have a circulatory system but someday won\u2019t. This is a fixation of mine that arises with inexplicable and alarming frequency\u2014I\u2019m twenty-five and healthy; I haven\u2019t experienced tremendous loss.<\/p>\n

My abstract anxieties about death tend to coalesce around my most concrete repulsion: embalming. That night, in a desperate ploy to overwhelm the circuitry of my fear, I searched for a podcast that would explain the process with clinical precision. That\u2019s how I stumbled across the embalming episode of Deathcast, <\/em>in which the former body remover Kelsey Eriksson describes draining the body of blood and pumping it full of preservatives. Her voice was lilting and reedy, the sugary pitch of Kristen Bell narrating Gossip Girl<\/em>, which did not make her description of my grisliest nightmares easier to swallow. In fact, as I learned about \u201ceye caps\u201d\u2014thick, barbed contacts that close eyelids and lend shape to postmortem shrunken eyeballs\u2014my dread clotted into a neurotic fixation. I downloaded podcast after podcast of \u201cdeath professionals\u201d trading industry tips, promoting hair-raising products and telling one another stories of the trade that are as startling and macabre as urban legends.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the first lay person to do a deep dive into the media of the funeral trade. In 1961, Jessica Mitford published her sensationally popular book The American Way of Death<\/em>, a scathing expos\u00e9 of business practices in the funeral industry, which she sourced in large part from trade magazines. Of these magazines, she writes, \u201cTheir very names were captivating: Casket & Sunnyside<\/em>, Mortuary Management<\/em>, and my favorite, Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries. <\/em>Once hooked, I found them to be compulsive reading, revealing a fantasy world I never knew existed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The fantasy world of the early 1960s\u2014apparent in the industry\u2019s product names and ad campaigns\u2014was indebted to shopping malls and space exploration: a mattressed casket (\u201cthe revolutionary Perfect-Posture bed\u201d), a gravesite that constantly plays \u201cpiped in pop hymns,\u201d and \u201cFuturama, the casket styled for the future.\u201d Today, funeral trade media is indebted to Silicon Valley. Among funeral podcasts of the past five years are Funeral Gurus<\/em>, Death Goes Digital<\/em>, and End-of-Life University. <\/em>These podcasts advertise a baffling array of products, from cloud-based video tribute software to an \u201caftercare service\u201d that automatically sends cards to grieving families to a company that preserves and frames a decedent\u2019s tattoos. The language of disruption, branding, and organic content\u00a0is close at hand: \u201cJET SETTIN\u2019 & CONVENTION HUSTLIN\u2019,\u201d \u201cFuneral Home & Cemetery Synergy,\u201d and \u201cSwansongs\u2014How to Send a Memory to the Future\u201d are some of the episodes currently on my phone.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m jarred by this merging of burial traditions with digital consumerism, though in reading Mitford, I realize it\u2019s inevitable. \u201cSimplicity to the point of starkness,\u201d Mitford writes, \u201cthe plain pine box, the laying out of the dead by friends and family who also bore the coffin to the grave\u2014these were the hallmarks of the traditional American funeral until the end of the nineteenth century.\u201d The twentieth century trends that characterized my grandparents\u2019 funerals (embalming, elaborate funeral homes, floral arrangements, silklined caskets) are not, as I assumed, timeless\u2014or even particularly traditional. They were invented, Mitford argues, by the funeral industry to move product. America prospered and death followed suit with aspirational suburban luxe: the air-conditioned mausoleum, the sculpted memorial park. I admit that it\u2019s fitting. My pearl-clutching reaction to every episode of Death Goes Digital <\/em>seems ludicrous when I think of how much of my time on earth I spend online.<\/p>\n

More unsettling to me is the knowledge of how many profit opportunities will arise from the most dreaded event of my life. The most business-y show in the funeral trade is the weekly podcast and YouTube series Funeral Nation TV<\/em>. The show\u2019s hosts are Ryan Thogmartin, the CEO of a \u201csocial media content agency that focuses on storytelling for funeral companies,\u201d and Jeff the \u201cfuneral commander\u201d Harbeson, who describes himself as \u201ca little mix of Ron Burgundy and Rush Limbaugh.\u201d The show\u2014whose clickbaity episode titles include \u201cGET READY FOR THE SUPER BOWL OF FUNERAL EXPOS\u201d and \u201cGot corpse?\u201d\u2014is a testosterone-soaked frolic through the problems and opportunities of the funeral business, with the apparent aims of promoting products, hyping the audience for funeral conventions, and making funeral homes more profitable. Among the show\u2019s innovations is a segment called \u201cWTF,\u201d which stands for \u201cwhat the funeral,\u201d in which the hosts shame funeral professionals for poor business practices, such as advertising a funeral home on a trash can, or misspelling hearse.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The opening credits for\u00a0Funeral Cribs<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

To view death through the lens of profit seems indelicate, at best, or perhaps even indecent. Mitford argues this forcefully, chronicling a nationwide pattern of abusive practices\u2014price fixing, high-pressure sales tactics, and outright lying about the particulars of the law\u2014designed to take advantage of a consumer base that is almost exclusively deceased or bereaved.<\/p>\n

In the context of the relentless hawking of death products, Mitford\u2019s pursuit of the cheapest and simplest death seems a necessary liberation from a bloated and predatory industry.<\/p>\n

The now-defunct podcast Funeral Pro Chat<\/em>, though, with its focus on minority burial traditions, gives a more nuanced perspective. The traditions Mitford wrote about belong largely to white Christians, whereas other faiths, cultures, and races have a different relationship to what Mitford considered the funeral industry\u2019s excesses. This is particularly true for African Americans. \u201cBecause of the discrimination and degradation faced in slavery,\u201d says the historian Suzanne E. Smith, \u201cthere is a different intensity about what a proper burial should be within African American society.\u201d Elaborate funerals have been an important way for black Americans to celebrate marginalized lives\u2014hardly the bald exploitation Mitford portrays. Furthermore, black-owned funeral homes have a history and importance that is neither invented nor inflated. These funeral homes bolster the economies of segregated communities, provide space for community organizing, and black funeral directors have long been civic leaders\u2014in the South, they would often shuttle Martin Luther King in their hearses to keep him safe between speeches.<\/p>\n

Another critique of Mitford is that her focus was too narrow. In addition to financial harm, some believe that the funeral industry has inflicted psychological harm, estranging Americans from the reality of death by dressing it up and tucking it away. Caitlin Doughty<\/a>, a thirty-three-year-old funeral director in Los Angeles, is the (softly goth) face of this idea. In her popular YouTube series Ask a Mortician<\/em>, Doughty covers topics from what happens to breast implants during cremation, to whether corpses poop. \u201cI know that conversations on necrophilia are not for everyone,\u201d she says with her signature blend of camp and candor, \u201ceven though they should be, because everybody benefits from rational educational exposure to taboo topics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Caitlin Doughty\u2019s Ask a Mortician<\/em>\u00a0YouTube channel.<\/p><\/div>\n

Doughty, who once worked in the same crematory that saw to Jessica Mitford\u2019s body, aspires to reintegrate death into everyone\u2019s lives. Just as Funeral Nation TV <\/em>channels the ethos of digital entrepreneurship, Doughty taps into the pick-your-own-apples set, encouraging families to wash and dress their dead, keep them in the home for a viewing, eschew embalming, and explore natural burial options. \u201cI want society to return to an appreciation for decomposition,\u201d she says, \u201cand return to an appreciation of us as organic matter and animals.\u201d To wash down these earnest and difficult statements, she gives us animations of cats with angel wings and an image of her own face on the body of the grim reaper.<\/p>\n

To me, Doughty\u2019s point lands not because of her perverse juxtaposition of death and humor but because of its relationship to the zeitgeist. I imagine that my grandmother\u2014a housewife in an era of sterile supermarket foods and airtight bomb shelters\u2014must have found embalming and double-walled caskets just as compelling as I, in a time of urban farming and climate change, find natural burial. Though Doughty frames her work as returning to an older attitude toward death, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s quite right\u2014Mitford correctly implies that no burial can be timeless, because no death occurs outside of time. Even a natural burial, if I chose one tomorrow, would be consumerist and digital, since it would be a choice made in reaction to how I\u2019ve lived, enabled by late-night, morbid googling and by the flourishing array of death options (hydro cremation, burial pods, cryonics, body farms) for every consumer micro-niche.<\/p>\n

Unlike Mitford, I\u2019m not categorically appalled by the notion of monetizing death, but nor do I find the array of products and choices liberating. To me, the appeal of funeral podcasts is elsewhere: in their inadvertent humor and their glib or extravagant treatments of my most fundamental fear.\u00a0Deathcast\u00a0<\/em>host Kelsey Eriksson\u2019s Twitter bio reads, \u201cI used to deliver dead bodies, now I deliver pizza.\u201d The opening sequence of the YouTube series Funeral Cribs<\/em>\u00a0(MTV\u2019s Cribs\u00a0<\/em>but for high-end funeral homes) is better produced than early seasons of the Kardashians<\/em>. On Jeff Harbeson\u2019s personal YouTube channel, he stands in front of a camouflage blanket, dressed in sunglasses and military fatigues, and implores his audience to \u201ccome on out of your safe space and listen to a message from the funeral commander.\u201d To dwell in these death-adjacent media, unable to decide if I\u2019m experiencing revulsion or delight, is an enchanting distraction. My fear of death seems unshakeable, but funeral trade media never fail, at least for a moment, to replace my dread with wonder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sylvie\u00a0<\/span>McNamara lives in New York<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I discovered funeral-industry trade podcasts during a dark night of the soul. I\u2019m allergic to wine, but I\u2019d been drinking it anyway, and as I lay in bed feeling my heart thrash and my sinuses cloud, I contemplated the fact that I now have a circulatory system but someday won\u2019t. This is a fixation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1087,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[31373,31364,31366,31369,31371,1387,31374,31368,31367,31365,31370,4691,31372,31363],"class_list":["post-117398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-caitlin-doughty","tag-casket-sunnyside","tag-concept-the-journal-of-creative-ideas-for-cemeteries","tag-death-goes-digital","tag-funeral-pro-chat","tag-gossip-girl","tag-jeff-harbeson","tag-kelsey-eriksson","tag-kristin-bell","tag-mortuary-management","tag-ryan-thogmartin","tag-silicon-valley","tag-suzanne-e-smith","tag-the-american-way-of-death"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Podcasting Way of Death<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The strange subculture of funeral-industry trade podcasts and videos: \u2018Funeral Cribs,\u2019 \u2018Death Goes Digital,\u2019 \u2018Ask a Mortician,\u2019 and more.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/01\/podcasting-way-death\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Podcasting Way of Death by Sylvie McNamara\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 1, 2017 \u2013   I discovered funeral-industry trade podcasts during a dark night of the soul. 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