Death, et seq.

In this episode, Tanya Marsh and Susan Hubbard discuss the law of cryonics and the five states which have either enacted a statute or considered a case regarding the legality of the process.

I really enjoyed being a part of this episode of the Legal Deac podcast — hope you enjoy it too! Death in the US can be one of the most complex aspects of modern life, and caring for the dead takes many forms that are regulated by some of the most complicated laws on the books. In this episode, we explore the history, nuances, and quirks of funeral and cemetery law in the US and talk to students a...

The death care system in the New York City metropolitan area is overwhelmed. In this episode, we speak with Phil Tassi, President of the New York State Association of Cemeteries (NYSAC), and David Fleming, legislative director of NYSAC, to better understand the challenges facing cemeteries and crematories in the state.

Recorded on April 18, 2020, Brooklyn funeral director Amy Cunningham explains how death care is being handled in New York City a month into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Estate planning should involve more than simply creating the appropriate documents to address who will receive your property after your death. Modern estate planning also includes some planning for a period of time prior to death, particularly if circumstances arise that a person cannot manage their own property or cannot make health care decisions for themselves.  The vast majority of people will...

On this week’s episode, I am happy to share with you a conversation that I recently had with Barbara Kemmis, the Executive Director of the Cremation Association of North America, or CANA. Cremation is on the rise in the United States. As Barbara will explain, after it was legalized in a handful of states in the 1870s, it took about a century for the cremation rate to hit 5% in this country. For th...

Jodi Hildebran Lee and Jordan Crosby Lee are the Couldn't Be Happiers. Check them out at www.couldbehappiers.com. On this episode, they play murder ballads The Long Black Veil and a feminist re-imagining of Pretty Polly, plus their original song Jackson Square (which may or may not be about reincarnation).

The Protestant Reformation of the early 16th century changed countless aspects of everyday life for every kind of person across Europe. One of the things most profoundly affected was the popular conception of death. On this episode, I will be speaking with third year Wake Forest University Law School student Jordan Artrip about how the theology of the Reformation caused a paradigm shift for how de...

About a month ago, I sat down with my friend Tim Mossberger in Champaign, Illinois to talk about our mutual favorite band, The Avett Brothers, and a bunch of their songs that deal with topics related to mortality.  Tim has a website called As My Life Turns to a Song – The Avett Brothers Archive.  He has been methodically collecting and documenting the history of the band, and together with Paul Oe...

Death is celebrated all over the world on annual basis. More than 175 million Americans will celebrate Halloween this year, with total spending in 2018 reaching $9 billion, with the average consumer planning to spend $86.79 on decorations, candy, costumes and more. While celebrated on a mass scale, most Americans likely do not know the history behind Halloween and how it has turned into a billion-...

This hybrid episode combines Cemetery Tourism in Philadelphia and the music of recording artist Dan Zlotnick. In Part I, I discuss the history and some of the notable burials in Spruce Street Cemetery, the Old Pine Street Church churchyard, Christ Church churchyard and burial ground, the potter’s field in Washington Square, and Laurel Hill Cemetery. In Part II, singer-songwriter Dan Zlotnick share...

This is Tanya Marsh and you’re listening to Death, et seq. My guest this week is Sarah Crews, the director of Heart Land Prairie Cemetery in Salina, Kansas, the first all natural burial ground in Kansas, and the President of the National Home Funeral Alliance. Sarah also has a background in hospice and music. Links: National Home Funeral Alliance Heart Land Prairie Cemetery

My guest this week is my friend Josh Slocum, who is the Executive Director of Funeral Consumers Alliance and the co-author of Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death. Josh is a consumer advocate who is also willing to give consumers a little tough love in the face of what he refers to as learned helplessness. At the same time, he argues that the industry should be more transparent with...

Amy Cunningham is a progressive funeral director and the owner of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services in New York City. A former journalist, Amy co-authors a blog, The Inspired Funeral , with Kateyanne Unullisi. Full Transcript: Intro: This is Tanya Marsh and you’re listening to Death, et seq. The Fall semester just started at Wake Forest, so we’ve gone to episodes every other week for a little while...

Episode Transcript: My name is Tanya Marsh and you’re listening to Death, et seq. We’ve been talking about funerals a lot on this podcast so far, and I wanted to switch gears this week and talk about one of my favorite topics – cemeteries. I love cemeteries. As my friends and family will attest, I am a semi-professional cemetery tourist. When I visit a new place, I want to check out the historic c...

Lee Webster discusses her educational and advocacy efforts in the "neo-traditional" home funeral and green burial movements. Links to organizations and resources mentioned in this episode: Green Burial Council National Home Funeral Alliance New Hampshire Funeral Resources, Education & Advocacy Changing Landscapes: Exploring the growth of ethical, compassionate, and environmentally su...

One of my major goals with this podcast is to introduce listeners to a variety of perspectives on the funeral industry and changing death practices. In Episode 3, I talked to Dan Isard, who is a management and financial consultant to funeral homes. In Episode 4, I talked to Caitlin Doughty, who is a non-traditional funeral director in Los Angeles with a critique to the status quo. In the next few...

Megan Rosenbloom is Associate Director for Instruction Services at the Norris Medical Library of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and the co-founder and director of Death Salon , the event arm of The Order of the Good Death . Rosenbloom is writing a book called Dark Archives , anticipated to be published in 2019, which describes the history and discusses the ethics involved in...

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...