The Funeral Dirge

I have a really amazing family. I'm telling you that right now, and this week's episode is just another reason to prove it. My uncle David is one of the most interesting people I know. He's a professor at Rutgers University and he teaches orthodontics. He's a member of Civil Air Patrol. He's one of the most well-read and intelligent folks I've ever met and he's someone...

The music geekery went off the charts with this one friends. What a delight it is for me to bring you this conversation between myself, my mother and our dear old friend Rabbi Jonathan Hausman. He and my mom have been friends for well over two decades and for the longest time she always told me that he and I (me, Hannah) would really like each other. Well it's true. Music nerds tend to get alo...

What happens when the shit hits the fan? Who makes the phone calls? Who signs the papers? Who do you call? Where do you get the phone numbers? We dive into these questions and a bunch of other stuff this week. Health care proxies, accident prevention for athletes, strategies, resources and the like -- and we told some old family stories! Links to all the things below: - LLS Fundraiser --> https...

I wrote a big paper about right-to-die issues when I was in college. I was taking an ethics class and we spent a number of weeks discussing doctor assisted suicide. I became fascinated with the relationship between death and medicine, and how our culture discusses the issue of taking one's own life if faced with terminal illness. As we discuss in the episode, my argument was if you have as muc...

Mental health. The opioid crisis. Parenting. Being a young person in the world right now. To say thinking about all of those things at the same is hard would be the understatement of all time. Some days it feels unconscionably difficult to manage, and yet we do it every day. Some days it all feels like too much and it's difficult to talk about. If there is anything I'm grateful for it'...

This was great. This is me and mother talking about the women in our family. As a kid, I didn't really have a sense of who my nana was. She died when I was real young, I think I was four or five. My memories of her are very blurry and a lot of what I've learned has come from my mom and my grandfather. My mom told me some stories about her, and the other women in our family, many of whom I...

Who's next in line? What happens if who's next doesn't want it? How does it work? Can't we all just get along? The Business part of family business. That is what we talked about this week. Working with family is an odd thing. It's hard to really capture exactly what it's like because in some ways I feel like it requires a lot of mental gymnastics. In any case we talk about...

It's true. We were in a cult once. A yoga cult. You'll have to listen to hear the whole story, but ultimately my mother and I talk about our experiences after our time with the Kundalini folks. What it felt like to be apart of the group, what happened to us, what we learned after we got out. We also discuss my own experience in dealing with rediscovering my faith and spiritual practice aft...

Mom and I reflect on the attack on the Boston Marathon ten years on. There's not much else to say other than it was really nice to be able to talk about it together. It helped make sense of a really tough day and I hope you find some solace in this as well. The links below are for my fundraising efforts to run the Chicago Marathon on October 8th. I've also included the link to Martin Richa...

During this conversation, mom and I discuss what it was like to grow up around funeral homes and funeral service. How does one go about discussing death a child? My mom offers some insight through a story we tell about how she prevented my sister and me from watching the Lion King. We talk about the history of the business in our family and what it has meant to us over the years. Towards the middl...

Welcome to the Funeral Dirge. This is a show about mothers and daughters, family, family businesses and whatever else we feel like talking about. Mainly it's about death and dying. Our family has been in the funeral business for five generations and we thought it would be fun to discuss the history of Funeral Service in our family, as well throughout New England, where we're from. It's...