Confessions Of A Funeral Director With Caleb Wilde

Caleb,

Thank you so much for coming on,

Coming back today,

And for sharing your book and these insights with us through Confessions of a Funeral Director.

I would love to go ahead and jump in and have you tell us your personal loss story.

Yeah,

So I am writing about things that I haven't experienced as intimately as others.

I haven't lost a parent or a child,

Thank God.

Grandparents have been the things that have been closest to me.

In fact,

You could say that a lot of my grief is secondary grief,

A lot of my trauma is secondary trauma because of what I experience as a funeral director seeing these things daily.

And I don't want to assume that that makes my perspective any better,

But I do feel as though it's given me some degree of objectivity to look at things because that's what I'm paid to do.

I'm paid to be objective when it comes to death.

I'm paid by families to be a thinker or the heart when hearts are broken or the mind when minds are broken.

So a lot of those reflections that I've had from my experiences as working as the heart and mind for people who are broken translate to my loss experience.

And again,

It's very secondary.

But the things that I see regularly,

And I'm probably a little different than most funeral directors in that I take them in a little deeper,

Which is not good for the longevity of a career in the funeral profession.

But at the same time,

It helps me to reflect deeply,

Which is what I like to do.

I've always been willing to walk into the darkness to find things.

I'm the one who pushes away his fear to go find the light switch in the dark auditorium.

So this is something that kind of suits my personality.

A lot of these stories I share,

A lot of my loss stories are shared with the people that I serve.

I want to talk about the actual title of your book.

The title of your blog is Confessions of a Funeral Director.

I'm interested to know what exactly makes your insights,

What makes your book and your blog,

Quote unquote,

Confessions.

Is there some taboo as a funeral director about sharing what you see and experience?

Or do you have maybe a different perspective than other people who are in the industry?

Mostly when funeral directors share their stories,

They try to find the outrageous ones.

They're kind of like,

I don't want to say it,

But it's the best term that's coming to my head right now.

It's kind of like death porn,

Where it's just all the extravagance and all of the funny or the deep or the dark without any of the real.

I've kind of wanted to steer away from that.

Confessions for me had multiple meanings.

One was that it's personal.

I studied theology.

I have a grad degree in theology.

I was kind of drawing from that background where confessions aren't just something that's personal,

But they're also something that's shareable and are ideas that touch the core of value systems.

That's kind of what I was going for with Confessions of a Funeral Directors.

I wanted something a little bit deeper than most of the stuff out there that's just the extremes.

I wanted to look at some of the deep stuff.

This is like death therapy as opposed to death porn,

You could say,

I suppose.

I like that.

It reminds me of a couple of other industries like public service industries or healthcare or things like that,

Where the first question that people will ask at a cocktail party is,

Man,

What's the craziest thing you've ever seen?

What's the craziest call you've ever been onto?

You're like,

Well,

Yeah,

That's a slice of it.

But at the same time,

In those situations,

There's very little room for taking that step back and observing or finding the human moments in there.

It's the question that I guess get asked all the time.

I'm usually tentative to share.

I don't really like sharing those stories.

Maybe that's just me,

But that is what it is.

Kind of leading into that and speaking of being approached at cocktail parties or just being approached about death in general,

You talk about this concept in your book,

That all of us that are not in healthcare or the funeral industry being death amateurs,

Where we've moved death so far away from us,

Where other people are in charge of it,

It's in somebody else's hands.

When it happens,

You call a phone number and then things happen xyz,

That we're not equipped to really handle death anymore.

Mentally,

Emotionally,

Physically,

It's hard to wrap our brains around.

I'm interested in hearing you expand on that a little bit more.

I just loved how you phrase that because it's such a small phrase,

But it contains this fear of death happening to us,

This fear of death happening to others,

This mentality of the death negative,

That death is gross and it's dark and nobody wants to be around it.

And yeah,

Just like this morbid thing that we always want to keep at this distance.

How did we get here?

Ah,

Capitalism,

Partially.

Yikes.

Yeah,

For sure.

I mean,

The funeral industry is built around making ourselves out to be professionals and everybody else to be amateurs.

If we can make death super scary,

We can make it to something that you can't do on your own,

Then you need us and you need to hire us to help you with this big,

Scary death problem.

But it's not just that.

I mean,

We have also given authority over,

Well,

Authority used to,

You know,

It was kind of centered in religion like 200,

300 years ago,

And then it started to be centered in science,

Which is good.

It's certainly better than the whims of a religious tyrant.

And now we're kind of centering authority in our individualism and who we are as ourselves,

As people,

Which is probably a healthier step yet.

But when it went to science,

All of our hard problems supposedly can be solved by the people who are trained in education.

And this is also true when it comes to dying.

When somebody is dying,

It is hard.

It is so hard.

And we think that the authoritative center lies with those who are trained and educated.

And what we haven't realized,

And maybe this is where we need to move forward,

Is that when it comes to death and dying,

Education doesn't create an authority or it doesn't create a professional.

But love does.

It's a very simple idea.

But when your loved one is dying,

What gives you authority?

And what makes you really the best person to care for that person is because you love them.

And so that death amateur idea isn't the way it's supposed to be.

It's something that has been created,

I think,

Out of the scientific authority,

Out of some of the religious authority.

And,

You know,

Funeral directors have moved into that.

We've made ourselves the death professionals.

We've even called embalming a science because we want to give or portend this idea that we sit as authoritative figures over this very difficult thing,

Similar to a doctor.

And it's wrong.

It's not true.

There is no such thing as death amateurs.

But most of us believe we are because we've professionalized people who don't deserve to be the professionals when it comes to dying and death.

Yeah,

We'll never be doctors,

Unless you are.

Or you won't be a funeral director unless you are.

And I certainly know things that you will never know or never need to know,

Just as a doctor knows things that I'll never know and I'll never need to know.

But they aren't at the center of the story.

The center of the story is the real professional,

And that's the loved ones.

They know the dying and the dead better than anyone.

Because this is people.

We're not machines.

We're not robots.

Doctors can't make the process better.

If we were machines,

Then maybe they could.

If we were robots,

Then maybe so.

But we are the ultimate authorities on the people that we love.

And the people that we love are the authorities on us.

They know us because we've given ourselves away to them.

We give parts of ourselves to the people that we love and vice versa.

And that's the way it should be.

And so when somebody dies or somebody's dying,

We have a part of them in us,

A big part of them.

And we know how to care for them because we've been carrying them around with us and caring for them in our hearts for years.

It's just the beauty of what it means to be spiritual.

It's the beauty of what it means to be human.

And so I think that we need a change of paradigm,

A change of perspective,

Where we realize that the authorities here aren't the nursing homes.

The authorities aren't the funeral homes or the funeral directors.

But being that the dying and the dead reside in us,

We are the ones.

I'm getting chills and I'm tearing up on this end because this is a belief in my own grief experience that I felt but could not articulate and I almost couldn't bring it forth into physical reality because,

You know,

Grief brain is just such a monster.

I was frozen at the time.

And my favorite story,

My absolute favorite story in your book is the story of Tommy and his family and of you visiting their home to pick up Tommy and asking his wife and his other female relatives,

Would you like to be the ones to dress him for this service?

And this,

It touched me and the response and they said,

Oh,

Yes.

And they just this relief,

This seeming like lifting of this pressure off of their shoulders of that last,

You know,

Ritual being able to take part in that that death care experience.

And I immediately flashed to my own funeral home experience,

Which I've never shared on this podcast before.

But I remember the evening my mom died in the afternoon,

But in the evening,

We called our local funeral home to come pick her up.

And it was very much like you talk about in this book,

This button dump,

Okay,

They're here to do their job now.

And there was no saying goodbye.

And she was whisked out the front door.

And the next day,

Day after when we did a viewing,

They had they had covered her in something that looked like green Astro turf like a carpet.

And I guess it never occurred to us that we could have picked out clothes for her that we could have seen her off in a certain way that we could have gotten there early to help prepare like all these smaller rituals that would have been so much more meaningful,

Even like fixing her hair or bringing her favorite lipstick or things like that to the funeral home.

It just never occurred to any of us,

My dad,

My sister or me to ask for these for these rights for these privileges,

Because she did still reside in us.

And so when I got to the funeral home,

It was such a shock to see her in such a different state than any of us remembered her.

And I'm interested I'm kind of leading into a question with this is what can what are we allowed to ask for from our funeral homes from our funeral directors in this process?

I know I have so many grief growers listening to this podcast who are in a place of anticipatory grief or they're waiting for someone they love to die.

And when that day does come,

What can they ask for?

How much can they participate in this process?

I would start at a fundamental idea.

And it's one that we all assume,

But maybe we just need to emphasize is that the dying and the dead are ours.

Say that again.

Say that again for the people in the back.

They're ours.

They are our loved ones.

They are not the hospitals.

They're not the doctors.

They're not the nursing homes.

They're not the funeral directors.

They're not the funeral homes.

They're ours.

And so we need to emphasize that and we need to allow ourselves that knowledge where when they are at the funeral home,

The funeral home is simply holding them for us.

Or when they're at the nursing home,

The nursing home is holding them or the hospital's holding them for us,

But they are ours.

So I think we need to feel entitled no matter what or where we are with our dying and our dead,

Because it's an entitlement that is simply the way it is.

It's one of those things like you reach down and you can only go so far and then you hit rock bottom.

And that rock bottom truth is like the simple idea and you try to dig deeper,

But you can't because it's rock bottom.

That's just,

That's it.

So you hit something and you just can't go any deeper.

And that's it.

I mean,

This is the rock bottom of the whole thing is that they are ours.

And so as ours,

We're entitled.

And whatever we feel we need to do,

We're entitled to do.

So if it's to dress our loved one,

We're entitled.

If it's to do the hair of our loved one,

We're entitled.

If the loved one dies in our house and you want to keep them there for a couple of days,

You are entitled to keep them there for a couple of days.

If you want to have the viewing quickly or you want to have it for a while at your home,

You're entitled.

So we need to go back to that rock bottom place,

That foundational idea that these are our people and they're ours first.

And it's true that doctors and funeral directors serve a purpose at the end.

But when it all comes down to it,

They're ours.

We are entitled to express our grief,

Express ourselves,

Our rituals,

Our family,

Our community rituals.

We are entitled to do whatever we want to do and need to do.

That was awesome.

I just have to say that was so incredible.

And that thought has literally never entered my mind.

It seems like we have this at the moment of death when you turn your hands on the clock and you pull the curtain over the clock and time stops forever,

That person,

That loved one is no longer ours.

And it relates back to this fear of the transition of death,

To the permanence of death,

All these things related to it saying,

Oh,

This is no longer mine.

We have instantly cut ties in this moment.

And it's just this continuing relationship and as the grief process sets in,

Whether it's anticipatory grief before a death happens or when the death happens,

Then you start to grieve.

You go into in your book in a lot of different places about this concept of grief being a form of worship.

And I would just love if you could expound on that for a little bit.

Yeah,

So that's a permission idea as well.

I think for those of us that come from a religious background like I do,

We have a view of God that's very austere,

Powerful,

Unmoved and on emotive really.

Of course,

Those of us who are able to maintain our religious persuasions about God do so because we eventually come to the place where we see God as loving.

And so that seeing God as loving,

We need to,

And I need to,

All of us need to allow that to play out farther than most of us do.

So if God is loving,

Then there are very much similarities between us and God.

And you could say that,

Of course,

The Judeo-Christian heritage is that we are reflections,

We are images of God.

So if we are that,

Then grief isn't not real for God,

It's more real for God.

Sorrow isn't not real for God,

It's more real for God.

And so what we've done,

I think,

Is we've basically seen worship as a very limited thing where it takes place on whatever our holy day is.

And it has to do with austerity and reverence and it's never messy.

But if we are reflections of God,

Then worship is pretty much inherently messy.

And it's something that we need to transition from the Sunday morning view that most of us have of worship and give ourselves permission,

Not just permission,

But allow ourselves to see God as somebody who is able to cry with us.

Now,

However we define that,

It's different for everybody.

But if we say that God cries with us,

Or if we say that God sheds tears with us,

It gives us permission.

So if God does that,

Then we are becoming like God more fully when we allow ourselves to lean in to our tears.

If God does indeed grieve,

Then we're becoming more fully like God when we grieve.

So grief is worship.

Grief is us becoming like God.

And I think,

Like I said,

It's a permission idea because so many believers have this idea that God does not grieve,

That God does not cry,

That God does not feel the way that we feel.

And so because they feel that way,

They don't have permission from their deity to do these things.

I'm just saying that you have permission because I believe that when we engage in those things,

We're not becoming less.

We're actually becoming more like God.

When we become more human,

Which of course goes against a lot of the things that we think of when we think of God,

But the more human we become,

It's not that we're moving farther away,

It's that we're moving closer because we're his image or God's image.

So that's the idea with grief is worship.

So many Christians don't feel permission.

So many religious people don't feel permission to grieve because their God is a million light years away from the human experience.

I'm coming up with this story that I've also never shared on the podcast before,

But is actually over on my website in the About section.

And I have an aunt who is very,

Very attuned to God.

She calls herself an intuitive or a medium,

But she is this channel to the larger wisdom of the universe.

And in one conversation she and I were having after my mom's death,

She brought herself in kind of with the energy of this all-loving God and asked me to have a conversation with it.

And I was angry.

I was pissed.

I was,

How could you let this happen?

The bad things happen to good people.

I'm so young.

I can't believe you'd think I can't need a mother at this time in my life.

All this stuff.

And I was just railing against this God.

And the voice that came back,

And this is what I have on my website,

The voice that came back is,

I wish you would just let me hold you.

And in that instant,

It was the same kind of that relief feeling from the Tommy story of just this pressure being lifted off my shoulders.

It never occurred to me that a God would exist that would want to hold me in pain.

You know,

This,

This idea that,

That God is willing to be in the trenches.

God is willing not only to see grief,

But to experience it and to hold us through it.

It just,

And that literally just broke open my entire world to this concept of,

I have permission to participate in this too.

If,

If some entity as big as the universe,

As big as God,

As big as whatever you'd like to believe in,

Wants to hold me through this process,

Then I have permission to participate in this as well.

And that is huge.

That,

That moment totally blew my mind.

So this concept of grief and continued remembrance as acts of worship,

Not as pathology,

Which is kind of how we've framed it in our Westernized,

Especially American minds,

Is radical.

This is just a radical take on grief,

Which I love.

And moving to that idea of remembrance,

You also talk about a concept in your book of this passive remembrance and active remembrance.

And you use this example of walking into the home of two parents whose daughter has just died and they have this shrine set up at her place at the table.

It's got stuffed animals and photos and drawings from her cousins and,

And things like that.

And it seems like in the book you had this gut reaction of,

Oh,

That's not right.

Something about that's kind of off.

And,

But then there's this shift,

Like you do,

You have this reflective place where you step back and you're like,

Oh,

This is them choosing how they want to remember her for the rest of their life with her memory.

This co-participation.

So can you kind of enlighten our grief growers a little bit on your definitions of passive remembrance versus active remembrance and maybe how we can bring that active remembrance of our loved ones into our lives?

So it kind of goes along with some of the things that I was talking about earlier.

So yeah,

I read that in some cultures when you're grieving,

You're exempt from religious law.

And the idea there is that when you're grieving,

There's a part of you that's died.

So it's almost as though you're exempt because you yourself are dead.

And so I love that or the idea behind that.

When we give ourselves away,

And this is a concept that I weave throughout the book,

You know,

Especially there's one chapter called Sarah's Mosaic,

Where I talk about how funerals are mosaics of the deceased.

We each bring our own pieces that our loved one has given us and we bring them all together and we create a living mosaic.

And I do believe that we give pieces away of ourselves and we receive parts of others so that we're made up.

You know,

We like to think that we're individuals and we are,

But we're made up largely by the people that love us.

And we don't even need to know those people.

The people who have carried us here,

Grandparents,

Our ancestors,

These people,

Their love,

Their energy continues on to now.

To me,

I am here because people loved and wanted me and called me to existence.

It may not be that way with my parents,

Maybe I was an accident to them,

But I've been called here.

I am built up by these ancestors and I am built up by the people who have loved me.

I am not just mine.

I am many people.

When somebody dies,

There's parts of us in them too.

Part of us dies when somebody dies and part of them still lives on in us.

But if we really do believe that we've given ourselves away and that we've given parts of ourselves to the people that we love,

When they die,

Part of us goes with them.

And so it is as though part of us dies when we experience death.

And to think that we'll ever get over that,

To think that that has an end,

Or to think that there's such a thing as closure.

If you lose an arm or you lose a hand,

There's never going to be a time in your life where that doesn't affect the way you live.

It will always affect you because it's a part of you that's now missing.

So closure in my mind is a myth.

There's no such thing as the closure that a lot of us want.

Now,

Of course,

Our relationship changes and we learn to dance with the limp or we learn to get around without the missing parts.

And so we adapt and we change.

Maybe that's how some people define closure.

But the idea that we're done with it,

That we no longer grieve,

Is a myth.

So why not,

Instead of ignoring that,

Instead of looking for closure and just saying that I'm going to step away from this now,

I've had my month,

I've had my year of grieving and now I'm done.

Why not just acknowledge the fact that it's a myth and instead of walking away from our grief at a certain point,

We lean into it.

Instead of seeking closure,

We practice what I call active remembering,

Which is where we acknowledge that we are intimately connected with the people that we've lost.

And instead of just saying,

Okay,

Well,

You know,

That's over now,

The funeral is done.

Let's do something very practical.

Maybe make a shrine or let's try a way to give the death space in our lives.

The deaths have,

The dead have been pushed out quite literally,

Physically in all of our spaces.

Our houses do not have spaces for the dead.

Our lives don't have spaces for the dead.

Maybe we have a picture up in the living room of some of the people who have died.

That's a space.

Instead of thinking that's weird,

I think we should lean into it a little bit more.

Should I put this picture of grandpa and grandpa in the corner?

Instead of thinking,

Well,

Maybe that's a little too morbid,

Let's lean into it a little bit more.

Let's explore how we can actively give the dead space because whether we acknowledge it or not,

They've taken up space and they've taken a part of us.

That idea for me is just that so often our remembering is passive.

We remember and smell is very strong stimulant for remembrance.

Maybe all of a sudden you smell something that was your grandmother or your mother and all the memories come flooding back.

It's beautiful,

And the tears are healthy.

It's largely a passive thing.

I think that instead of looking at it as morbid,

Like I did in that story and pathological,

I think that the healthy thing is for us to do it actively and give the dead a little space in our lives.

I love this idea and it's one of my favorite ideas in your book.

It's actually one I talked about,

I think in episode four of this season of coming back.

It's my interview with Morgan Brown,

But the entire top of the show was talking about our right to continue to miss people.

It's just been one of my favorite episodes that come up.

I know in the last pieces of your book,

You talk about bringing your son home,

Jeremiah.

That just warmed and touched my heart.

I thought it was such a great way to wrap up this,

Such a balanced book of the yin and the yang of death.

The death is not all cold and bony,

But it's also where the dirt helps the flowers grow into the beauty that they are and brings life into the world in its own way because death is where heaven exists.

I'm curious to know,

How old does he now?

He's five.

What are you teaching him about death and grief and the work that you do?

What does he think that you do or who you are?

He loves work,

Just any type of work.

I actually dress him up in a suit.

I bought him a suit.

He's got dress shoes.

He'll come in to work with me.

He's learning.

You have to be able to look people in the eye and be sociable if you want to do well at funerals.

He's learning to do that,

But we have him passing out cards.

He loves it.

He just loves to come in.

Of course,

He comes in with me because the funeral business isn't like most jobs where you are able to separate yourself.

It all blends together.

When my wife is out working or she's at the grocery store or whatever,

Shopping or whatever she's doing,

And I have Jeremiah,

If I have to go to the funeral home,

He's coming with me.

That's just the blending of this profession.

He's seen many,

Many dead people.

It was actually last week he came in with me.

He asked if he could touch the hand of the dead person,

Which is the first time he's asked that.

He held their hand.

He just grabbed it and held it.

Of course,

He says it's cold.

This is an observation that I thought was beautiful because it's a fact of reality.

I don't shield him.

He is more resilient than I am.

Now's the time,

Right?

Yeah.

Kids aren't afraid or grossed out or like waked out.

They're not death averse until we tell them to be.

That's right.

Until we give them our fears,

Which we do.

We're really good at giving our children our own fears.

I,

As a parent,

Am always conscious of that.

The fears that I have will be transferred to my children.

It's not a difficult concept for him.

I don't use any flowery words or religious concepts that the person is in a better place.

All of these things are fine.

I have no problem with those.

I just want him to see it for as it is.

Let him interpret it as he wishes.

I love the fact that he comes in with me and he sees these things.

He says that as he holds the hand of the deceased,

It's cold,

Dad.

I like that.

It's good.

How can we become more grateful for our lives in the face of death and not because we're afraid of it?

Because so many people see death and they're like,

Oh my gosh,

I've seen death and now I'm going to do everything and check off my bucket list.

There's this scrambling to be grateful for life.

Then there's this other concept of seeing death and seeing the reverence in that and then having that softness of,

Wow,

I get to be alive.

How can we hold that second picture so we're not grateful because we're afraid?

That's a great question.

I've never thought of that before.

I think you're right.

We do.

We let the fear motivate us coming out on the other side way too often.

That's why I suppose we have to do the deep work now.

People have said to me that they don't want to read my book and that's fine,

But they don't want to read it because they're grieving.

In my head,

I think,

Well,

You're probably right.

You probably should have read it before you're grieving because there's some deep work that needs to be done beforehand.

We can't assume that if we only think about death in the death times,

If that's the only time we think about it,

We can't assume that we'll have a healthy relationship with it when it comes.

I think too often,

I guess most of us feel like we can cultivate the relationship when it's here and then that's it.

I suppose that the more we lean into it now,

It starts now.

Our closeness with deaths,

Our embracing our mortality starts now,

Then maybe we won't have that headlong fear of getting everything done and we'll be able to deal with death a little bit more lovingly.

That's a good point.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.