Death, et seq.

In this week’s episode of Death, et seq., I am talking to two of my favorite people about two very different topics. First, I’ll be talking to my uncle, Philip Chaney, about his experience growing up in a funeral family in a small town in Nebraska in the mid-20th century. There were two funeral homes in the county — one Catholic and one Protestant. The funeral homes were both combined with furnitu...

This episode discusses funeral and disposition planning in the context of estate planning, explains why pre-planning is a good idea, and discusses the major options available to American funeral consumers including the "traditional" American funeral of embalming, open casket viewing, and in-ground burial or cremation, and alternatives such as home funerals and green burial. The laws rega...

I am so happy to have Caitlin Doughty as my guest on Episode 4.  Caitlin is a licensed funeral director and the owner of Undertaking LA, a funeral home in Los Angeles.  She is the co-founder of Death Salon and the founder of The Order of the Good Death.  She is the host of Ask a Mortician, which is a highly entertaining series of videos on YouTube (my favorite is the one on Viking burials). Caitli...

In the United States today, most funerals are arranged by licensed funeral directors, most bodies are prepared for disposition by licensed embalmers, and many funerals take place in licensed funeral homes. The funeral industry has been handling the dead in America for only a century. This is largely an industry made up of “mom and pop” family owned businesses, passed down from generation to genera...

Whenever people ask me what I do, and I tell them that I research, teach, and write about the law of human remains, their first response is to say “uuuh.”  And their second is to say “I’ve always wondered…”  America is a uniquely death denying culture, which is perhaps why we know so little about what follows death.  Not in the spiritual sense…but in the physical sense.  What happens to human rema...

Subscribe on iTunes , Stitcher , or Google Play . Thanks! My name is Tanya Marsh and I teach Funeral and Cemetery law at Wake Forest University School of Law in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I've found that people have a TON of questions about human remains and what happens to them. That's why I'm launching a new podcast called Death, et. seq (literally, "Death, and what follows"). I pl...