To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Death: The Reckoning

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strangehamps. It is time to talk about death. Before I leave for an overnight and I clean the house, because I always think, if there's something that happens to me and my family comes to the house, I don't want to have rotten food in the refrigerator and I don't want to have it. My name is Teresa Morsey and I've always been aware of death. I had a brother who died when I was three months old and it was something that we were not allowed to talk about. I think in society people feel uncomfortable and want to change the topic and death is morbid. We've been avoiding death for a long time now. We don't want to think about people we love dying and we don't want to contemplate our own death. That's kind of a taboo subject. But now, something's changing. This is a death cafe. A group of people who've come together to share tasty treats and talk about the one thing supposedly no one wants to talk about. My name is Jatin the Chima but I go by Chima. I think death is such an integral part of life.

And the concept of not talking about it as a morbid issue but having a little lightness to it like a cafe atmosphere or the whole idea you get together empty and talk about it was attractive to me. These conversations are happening all over the country. Death cafes, death dinners, death salons and for the next five episodes we'll be bringing the conversation to you. So to start out let's talk about talking about death because even though we think we don't like to talk about death in fact it's possible that we are all actually dying to talk about it. Caitlin Dodie is the woman behind Ask a Mortician, a series of cheerfully morbid YouTube videos. Where have all the corpses gone? Until I was 23 years old I didn't see too many dead bodies. Even though 2 .5 million people die every year in the US I just

didn't see him. Then I got a job at a crematory and there they were. They had been hiding. Well to be more accurate they had been hid in by the living. Caitlin is something changing? Is something happening in the way we think about deal with death? It absolutely is. I started speaking publicly, having things on the internet, having this larger conversation. I guess almost four years ago now and the first year or so it was kind of like speaking into the canyon and just hearing nothing back. And really in the past two years there's just been an explosion of people who want to be involved just saying that hey maybe hiding all of these things behind closed doors isn't the best policy for us as a culture. This is episode one of Ask a Mortician. You ask a question about death, dying, decomposition, mourning, funeral customs and I will answer it. I'm one of those people who really likes

to know what's happening. And with death the fear comes from that lack of knowledge. And once you're given that information in a very practical, straightforward, what even humorous way it makes you feel better. So for instance when you were doing the Ask a Mortician series, what did people ask? They asked everything from more simple straightforward things like how what happens to the bones after a cremation or what are the chemicals used in the embalming process. It's surprising almost universally when I tell somebody what I do, I'm the most popular person at the party. In the sense that they they'll say oh so you you cremate a body? Oh that's tell me more you know they'll just they can't they can't help themselves because there's a lot about the funeral industry and death and dying that's still behind the scenes. Funeral home workers drive their unmarked vans up to hospital loading docs to retrieve and make off with their secret cargo. Bodies are sent to

centralized facilities to be embalmed or cremated, disposed of so is not to disturb our first world corpse free privilege. So what do you think happens to us and what's the cost of living in a culture that doesn't talk about or even want to see death and from what you're saying is largely ignorant of death too? It leads to you being terrified of death, it leads you to live out your life in deep fear of what's going to happen to you, what's going to happen to your body, is dying going to hurt, am I going to go to heaven or hell. Talking about death is important for you and it's important for your family. So people are having conversations about death in cafes and online, but what about in the doctor's office? Michael Bernhagen and Terry Caldistel have made two films about how many health professionals avoid talking about this stuff, even with their patients. When Michael and Terry started filming, they weren't actually sure anyone would want to talk about this, let alone see their films. At our theatrical premiere, which was in a small town, Okonomak,

Wisconsin, a freezing cold Saturday night, the night before the packers played a Super Bowl. We were scared of death and nobody was going to show and it sold out, which we still find that shocking. And we know we hit a chord when at the end of the film, it's usually silent and everybody slowly walks out, it was loud. It was really loud. People wanted to tell their stories and people wanted to talk. What kind of conversation did you want us to consider having? Well, here's the deal. I think it's really important that people recognize that American medicine's success at fighting disease and extending life has created a new problem. Where we die has fundamentally changed. Where did most people die 100 years ago? They died at home. Today, most of us can expect to die in a hospital or a nursing home. Yeah, what are the figures? It's something like 90 % of us want to die at home. I'm not getting the numbers right, but only 20 % of us will be able to do that. I call it the 80 -20 rule. The majority of us do want to die at home and we do want to talk about it. But guess what? 50 % of them are going to

die in a hospital. 20 % of them hooked up to a whole bunch of tubes and machines in an intensive care unit. Another 25 % in a skilled nursing facility. So we got this big disconnect. In my particular case, my mother died in a nursing home from congestive heart failure and vascular dementia. And it was a dear nursing friend of mine who managed to pull out of me in some detail the story of my mother's dying experience. And as I'm telling her this story, she gets this bewildered look on her face. And she asked me this simple question that literally haunts me to this day. Didn't anybody mention hospice as an option to your family? I said, no, nobody mentioned hospice as an option. Her family practitioner that she knew for 20 years and who's still my dad's doctor never mentioned it. The cardiologist never mentioned it. None of the nurses are the social workers in the hospital or the nursing home mentioned it. And I was embarrassed because I had been this big shot or so I thought business development guy. And I didn't know anything about hospice or end of life care. So what needs to happen? Yeah, so a couple of things need to happen. One is

the training of having this conversation should be part of the medical curriculum. That whole idea that death is now optional is one that we're fighting because the reality is death is as natural as birth. But dining natural death has become unnatural. You've helped start a lot of conversations personal but also community conversations. What if you noticed happening and what do people want to talk about? People want to talk about that they value that time at the end of their life. They want to be surrounded by their loved ones. They wanted to know that their life had meaning. Problem is if all we do is I have this procedure I can do, I can do this procedure. I mean we can keep a human body alive way past the expiration date, right? And what's really gotten difficult is where do you draw the line? Too many times in medicine we don't give people that opportunity to say goodbye. People really do want to talk about this because everybody has a story. They've seen a friend or a relative pass away and pass away poorly and sometimes

pass away well. And so that's the taboo we're breaking through. You know it's this crossroads where we are historically it's a new world that we live in. And if we don't change then somebody is going to make those decisions for us and that may not end well. We're inventing a new conversation for new situations. That's exactly right. This is new. Filmmakers Michael Bernhagen and Terry Caldistal. Their films are called Consider the Conversation 1 and 2. We'll hear both of them again later in the series. So how do you even begin to have these conversations? What do you ask and how? Psychologist Lonnie Leary has sat with hundreds of dying patients and their families. Her book is called No One Has to Die Alone. And she told Steve Paulson that she learned early on the cost of not talking about death. When I was 13 years old my mother had an illness for quite some time. And in my family no one talked

about her illness. It felt as though the rug was pulled out from under us. She was there one day and gone the next. I'm taken to the hospital and I was not able to see her in the hospital. I wasn't able to say goodbye and she was dead two days later. And my father did the best job that he could. But there was no information as to how she died, why she died. So in the absence of information I filled in the blanks. What did you think happened? Well, I was a typical 13 -year -old trying to find my own independence in my own way. And so probably a week before she died I clearly remember. I can close my eyes and still see it and feel it. She was at the kitchen sink and I was passing through the kitchen. She turned around and she said to me, Lonnie, I love you so much. And I just kind of rolled my eyes as a 13 -year -old would and just kept walking. And a week

later when she died in my mind I made up a story that she didn't fight to live because she didn't think that her own daughter loved her. And I lived with that guilt and regret and remorse on top of the grief for years and years and years. And she died in the hospital and no one told me how she died. So she had died. I mean your father came home, your other relatives came home to tell you this chattering news. They didn't explain what happened. No, they didn't. No. I believe that they thought they were trying to protect a child. I know they meant well but it wasn't helpful. I also believed that my mother died alone on the operating table. And it was 15 years later that my father made some mention of being with her as her eyes rolled back in her head and her heart stopped. And my reaction was anger. I said to him, do you understand that

for all these years I had this horrible image of my mother dying alone? So if you could rewind the clock and do it differently, how do you wish your mother's death had been handled? Oh well I wish that after my mother had been taken to the hospital that I was taken in to be at my mother's bedside, whether she was conscious or not, so that I could have told her I loved her or I could have said goodbye. I wish that they had given me information about the illness she had and that it was expected that she would die. So that I had time to get used to that fact and I wish that I had been there holding her hand. And then after she died I wish that I wish the people had asked me questions, what are you thinking? What do you believe? What are you feeling? And just had really been a presence through my grief but I felt very, very alone. And then it's striking of course that you since

have devoted your whole life basically to working with people who are dying. I mean both those who are actively dying and also those who have been left behind who are grieving. I mean that's what you've devoted your career to. And hence the title of my book that we don't have to be alone. We don't have to be alone in our dying and we don't have to be alone in our grief. And when we're not it makes a difference. Well then I know you were very involved years later when your father died. I mean as he was approaching death you and he talked a lot about it. Yes I really spent the rest of my life learning everything that I could about death and dying and grief. And I vowed no matter where I was that I would drop everything if my father became ill. And it happened exactly that way. I was living and working in Virginia and my father was in Hawaii. And I got a call from him saying that it wasn't pneumonia that he thought he had. In fact it was late stage lung cancer. And so I closed my

practice and I closed my university class and I flew home to be his primary caregiver. And we began talking about everything. I laid it on the table and I asked him very direct questions such as where do you want to be? Who do you want to be with you? And let's make a bucket list. We don't know how much time you have left but let's make this quality time. Let's make this the best time of your life. Let's make it intimate. Let's make it rich. Let's make it authentic. Were those heart conversations to have? Not for me they weren't. What about for your dad? No actually you know and my experience with people at the end of life is that they are so hungry for someone to start the conversation. They want to talk about it but most of them feel alone with the reality of what's really going on. In other words there's a big elephant in the room and everyone is walking around it. So the lesson here is communication. We have to have the conversation that probably many of us are more scared of than any other kind of

conversation we can have. And you're saying it's not just talking with people who are getting ready to die. You're saying we've got to talk to our children about it too. I have been talking to my daughter since the time she was five years old. When she was five? Well I'm just interested in the subject. And what do you think your daughter took away from those conversations? Ease. So that even now later she's a 32 year old woman in a very dangerous job on the ocean. What did she do? She's an officer in the Coast Guard and she is the commanding officer of a ship. She's out there on the high seas and so I asked her one day if you could have your perfect death and we know we're all going to die, what would it be? And she said to me without you know hesitation, oh I'd prefer to drown. And so as a mother of a woman who spends probably at least 50 % of her life on the ocean, can you imagine as a mother how my grief will be different if

she were to drown? Yeah. And so that's a gift. I asked the question, we had a conversation and she gave me the gift of her values. You see, I know more about her you know. And as we have conversations at the end about the end of life, our values do come out. Let's talk about, let's say adults who feel like they need to have this conversation with their aging parents. What if their parents don't want to talk about death? Actually that comes up a lot in my hospice work. It may not be that they don't want to have it. It may be that they don't know how to have it. So I begin with myself. And I'll say mom you know the other day my 60 year old friend died suddenly. And it occurred to me that I had never told my husband how I wanted to be buried or what I cared about. So I've started having this conversation with my husband and I want you to know that I want to be cremated. And I want my ashes to be spread out in the water. And I want just a small private memorial service.

And this is what I hope you remember. So again, I'm just talking about myself and I'm modeling that conversation. And by the way, we don't have just one conversation. We go back to it little pieces, little pieces, little pieces. But at the end of this conversation, then I might say to this mother, you know, I don't think I know what you really care about. And I want to follow your wishes, but I don't want to guess. And I wonder if as a gift to me, you would tell me what you care about most. This is really about developing your relationship. In other words, it's not just helping her talk about how she's going to deal with death later on. I mean, you might change it in the process as well. We all win. Oh, we all win. We all win so that at the end of my, when my father did die because we had these conversations, my grief was so different than

the grief I felt after my mother's death. What I said to myself after my father's death was, I gave him what he wanted. Not only did I give him the death that he wanted, I gave him the life that he wanted right up to the moment of his death. And I did not have the regret. I did not have the remorse. Of course, I had grief. I missed him. I still miss him. But I feel full. I feel grateful. I feel as though the experience was as much for me as it was for him. So everybody wins when we have these conversations. Yeah. Now, there's another kind of conversation as well. And that's with people who are dying. I mean, who are in their final days. And you've talked with thousands, literally thousands of people. And you've been at the bedside hundreds of times at the moment of death. I mean, you worked in hospice and other places. What are those conversations like? Rich.

They're very rich. They're not superficial conversations. They really get down to pretty much the five things that people need to say at the end of life, which is thank you. And I love you. And at the end of life, also, people have conversations with deceased loved ones who they report are in the room with them. And one of the things that I try to do with families is to encourage them to validate that experience. And I can hear the dying person sigh as though someone believes me. And it's not uncommon that soon afterward they do let go and die. So these are common. These kinds of thoughts. Very common. Yeah, pre -death visions are very, very common. And my response to a person who says, you know, Johnny's in the room. Johnny's here. And I might say, who's Johnny? And the woman says, oh, my husband, my husband. My response

is, well, of course, he's here. Where else would he be? Whereas other people might say, oh, you know, Hush, Hush, it's just the medication you're hallucinating. Why would we take that comfort away from someone? What do you think for people who are dying? What are their biggest fears? Or their biggest worries, do you think? In my experience, most people are ready to let go, but they're concerned as to whether their loved ones are going to be okay. And so as family members, one of the things that I coach is to be specific and to let them know, dad, this is what I'm going to remember of you. You have a legacy. You'll always be in my heart. And I would think that would be so important. I mean, you know, the person who's dying wants to know that their life is head meaning. Their life had meaning. Yep. And they will not be forgotten. And they will not be forgotten. Yes. Well, Lonnie, this has been a gift to talk with you. Thank you. Thank you. That's Lonnie Leary talking with Steve Paulson. She's a psychotherapist and the author of No

One Has to Die Alone. So a few months ago, I was having dinner with friends. And one of them said he had a question for all of us. And three choices. The question is, how would you choose to die? And these are the choices. One, you die in your sleep. Two, you're alone outdoors and you have some kind of accident and you die within an hour. Three, you're diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a year to live. Which would you choose and why? You can share your choice on our website at ttbook .org slash death. I'm Ann Strainchamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our series on death is supported by the Newer Foundation dedicated to exploring meaning and commonality in human experience, more at NewerFoundation .com and by Promega Corporation providing tools and technologies for research in life science. We're talking about reckoning with death in this hour and people have different ways of doing that. In Waterville, Maine, Chuck Lacon builds coffins that double as pieces of furniture. So, kind of the coffin collection here. This is just the plain pine box. There's the toe -pinscher coffin.

Actually, I think the first coffin was sort of a gimmick. I woke up in the middle of the night and the idea came to me for one. You can stand this coffin up with five shelves in it. It's a display cabinet. You can put it on its side in the first third and fifth shelves. Turn 90 degrees so you can use it as an entertainment center. And when you turn it on its back, the five shelves become the lid. One of my friends has one of those in her living room and she just loves having new friends over for dinner because it's some low on the conversation during the evening. She'll drop in the fact that that's her coffin over in the corner just to see what happens. And she, you know, always starts a conversation after the initial shock. Of course, it's a different topic that people don't talk about, but they discover that they have something to say, usually, or they have something they need to say. This is the bookcase coffin. Back here, you can see the handles bolted on one side.

There's only a couple of people that I know who have one of my coffins that you're being used as a piece of furniture. And one of them is right here in town who bought a coffin, the one that you can store flat and assemble it just in a couple of minutes with using just wedges. But she had me put three shelves in it. She uses it as a quilt storage rack. She had in her bedroom until her husband made her take it out of the bedroom because it was creeping him out. But she gets a kick out of it. The beginning really was my father's death. This was in 1979. He was home for the last six weeks of his life, and I'm very privileged to be able to say that I was there for the last month of that.

And he was in his own bed with his wife and four kids touching him when he died, and had been a very personal experience up until that point. And I wanted to be a part of whatever happened next, but I had no idea what I could do. And so we called the funeral director. He arrived promptly, zipped in a body bag, holding him away, and four days later we got a box of ashes in the mail. And I was very uncomfortable with that disconnect. I wanted to be there with him. And then I really wanted to make his coffin. It would have been a very comforting way to say goodbye. One coffin, I shipped to a woman in Iowa.

She just mentioned that it was a birthday present to herself. And so I hadn't tried the time it so it arrived the day before her birthday. I think if you're unprepared and been ignoring it, the most death is a tragedy. It's treated like a tragedy when it's a natural process. I know I'm very intellectually and I have no idea how I will respond emotionally when the time actually comes. But I think I want to get to the point where I can treat my death as an adventure. Chuck Lincoln is a woodworker and home funeral educator. He lives in Waterville, Maine. Does it seem strange or even creepy to live with a daily reminder of your own mortality? Because people used to do it all the time. Victorian homes were full of objects we'd find ghoulish today. Unless you have a taste

for the morbid. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder and director of the new Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. It's a space filled with objects that reveal just how much our thinking about death has changed over the years. Steve Paulson stopped by recently and Joanna gave him a tour. I'm interested in object lessons from the past that make us think differently about the presents. So for example, looking at things like the anatomical Venus. So 18th century reclining wax woman life -sized, dissectable, real human hair pearls tiaras. They were made in the 1790s. They're made of wax, beeswax, turpentine, and they have real glass eyes. They have real human hair. And they dissect. And if you see by her feet, all of those organs. So you can kind of unpack her and dissect her. And she was intended to teach the general public about human anatomy in the late 1700s in Italy. Then we have a skull here. We were with human skull. That was a donation from a man whose wife didn't want it in the house anymore. This is true. We get a lot of things that way, which is one of my favorite things. So just for the

uninitiated, just sort of looking at this. I mean, you have photos, you have glass cases, stuffed with things. You have all kinds of odd pictures. It's kind of an old -time cabinet of curiosity. Yeah, we're definitely inspired here by pre -rational museums. By cabinets of curiosity and kind of museums before they solidified into what we now think of them today. So what would you say is the animating idea behind the morbid anatomy museum? Maybe do you have a mission here? Our mission is to educate about and exhibit objects that fall between the cracks. So things that aren't taken seriously by other institutions. If you have a moment, I can take you to this. So this is the temporary exhibition space, and this is called the Art of Morning. And here we have a hair art shadow box. And do you see that wreath of flowers there? Look closely. This is all human hair. Wow. Wound very tightly. And that photo in the center, as you can tell by the black band around it, is a morning photograph. So it's saying that girls in that picture are dead. So their hair is woven into this wreath. It's probably woven with other family members' hair. And we should mention, I mean, the weaving is elaborate in sort of bows and...

Bowes, flowers, there's butterflies up there. There's all sorts of things. And this is a part of history, an important part of the Victorian era that really people don't talk about anymore. You know, what is it? Is it art? It's not really art. Is it folk art? It's kind of folk art, but it's not what we think of as folk art. And this is the photo of these two girls who've died with this elaborate wreath made of human hair. What would people have done with this? Why would they have created this? They would have hung it on their wall. So Emma, was everything you've seen in this room? Was either to be worn on the body or exhibited in the home. And it was to express mourning and loss. And working with hair takes a long time and it's really hard. This was probably over a year's work of somebody that would be seen as pathological today. Okay. Well, what else do we have here? Do you see that beautiful brooch right there? And that white woven bit, that's human hair as well. Wait, that's human hair. That's human hair. Yes, that's human hair. My god, it's so fine and tiny. And beautifully worked, right? And then if you look, this is what I learned putting this exhibition together. Cepia was also a process where you would dissolve the hair of the beloved in liquid of some sort and

paint with it. So that's actually human hair, that brown paint in there. And here we go over to this part of the room here. So this is a collection by a local collector named Stanley Burns. He's one of the preeminent photography collectors in the world so far as I know. And he had been finding all these photos like this one here of sleeping children. And he's a doctor. And at some point he realized, no, these are not sleeping children, these are dead children. This photo of this, I mean, it does look like a sleeping child. But then when you say it's a dead child, oh my god. And then you see it, right? You look closer and you see that that's what it is. And that this was actually a very common practice in the 19th century. And again, it looks strange to us. It looks morbid, you might say. Right. But clearly it was not seen that way at the time. Right. Okay, so what do we have in the cabinet here? Yes, we're here. This is kind of a chilling photograph of a husband and a wife holding it. What you can tell when you look is a dead child. Yeah. Yeah. Also a dead child right there. I mean,

there's this photo after photo of parents with their dead children. And I will tell you, I went through boxes and boxes of these to select them for the exhibition. The contrast between today and then is so startling. I mean, we would never do that today. We would never... We would never commemorate the dead. I mean, for one thing, we would really commemorate death at all. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, death has gone underground, I think. I mean, at this time, even if you wanted to deny death, you could not. You know, three and five children died before reaching adulthood. People butchered their own animals, generally speaking. Horses were being used for carts, and they were dead in the street. This idea that death is an exotic other, which I think is how we feel about it now. I think it's very new to our time and place. I don't think there's ever been a time in history when it's been that way. I mean, in this time, people died in the home. As you can see by these photos, people were having funerals in the parlor, which then becomes the funeral parlor, and the parlor at home becomes the living room. This all becomes outsourced. People start to die in hospitals. The dead aren't seen as much, and I think this is where this big shift comes. So was that part of your mission here then to kind of bring death

out from the shadows? Yeah, I mean, that's been a mission of morbid anatomy as a project for a while. I think my own history is that I grew up in California, where images of death were pretty much relegated to youth subcultures, the Goths and the Heavy Metal Kids, and horror movies and that sort of thing. And I went to Europe for the first time when I was 16, and I saw churches in Germany, and I saw the winged death heads, and I saw the jeweled skeletons and churches, and I saw the paintings of martyrs, crucifixions, and other ghastly assassinations. And I had never known that beauty and death could go together before. And when I saw these images, it really made me ask a lot of questions, and that's kind of inadvertently what led to this project. Obviously, you have a fascination with the morbid. I mean, are you kind of a morbid person yourself? Do I seem like a morbid person? No, I'm not. See, I would actually argue, part of why I use the name morbid anatomy for my blog is, for the longest time, I have been called morbid, and I thought a lot about that. I accepted that for the longest time, and then I began to think,

well, is it morbid to think about death? And in my opinion, no. In my opinion, it's morbid not to think about death. We're all going to die. We all know we're going to die. To me, it's the most essential human problem there is to come to terms with that. So suddenly, we're in a period when it's considered inappropriate to have a serious discussion about death. We're allowed to watch horror movies. We're allowed to listen to heavy metal, but we're not allowed to have serious conversations about it. And I think there's something really wrong with that. Joanna Ebstein is the founder and director of the new morbid anatomy museum in Brooklyn. You can see some of the things she and Steve looked at on our website. And speaking of photography and death, we're excited to be partnering with Flak Photo Editor Andy Adams to present online galleries featuring work by four contemporary photographers. They use the camera lens to give us a visual perspective on mortality and the end of life. You can visit the galleries on our website at ttbook .org slash death. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International.

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Our series on death is supported by The Newer Foundation, dedicated to exploring meaning and commonality in human experience. More at www .newerfoundation .com One thing we're hearing over and over from people is that death is like birth, a life transition that's deeply personal and private. But Dan Pirati and his wife Judy generously invited us to share the end of Dan's life and we'll be bringing his story to you throughout this series. Here's the first installment from freelance producer Seth Jovag. . . Dan Pirati knew for a long time that he was going to die. I guess we all do, but Dan, he really knew. In 1988, when he was 59, a valve and Dan's heart collapsed.

Since then, I've never been given what you would call a clean bill of health. The diagnosis is that I have congestive heart failure. Now I've got a fancy face maker with a defibrillator and so on. I can hear the valve clicking all the time. That's Dan in 2012, more than a year before I met him. He was talking to Judy, his wife, who was recording his life story in their living room in Madison. Dan, when and where were you born? I was born at 33 and a half park avenue, came Pennsylvania on October 27, 1929. I was born at home in the very bed that you and I slept in at one time. In those interviews, Dan told story after story about his long, full life, about growing up in the Allegheny Mountains during the Depression, becoming a Lutheran minister, and later deciding to leave the church. He talked about marching in Selma with Martin Luther King, Jr., about preaching to a packed congregation in Queens after JFK's assassination. In

middle age, he launched a second career, helping small cities renovate old theaters across America. Along the way, he was married twice and had seven kids. I've always had a kind of holy mackerel feeling about my life. You know, this skinny little kid from Cain, Pennsylvania, and here I am with seven children, six grandchildren, living a very comfortable life. It's really rather amazing. When he was a minister, Dan buried hundreds of people. In a way, death became just another part of the job. But he told Judy that his first lesson about death came as a kid, when his dog was hit by a car. Sport was with the family before I was born. And when I was young enough to see over the top of the nameltable in the kitchen, Sport was hit by a car out of the park Avenue. And dad brought Sport in and laid him gently down on the nameltable

and stroked him and just kind of was with him until he died. And I have that image of my father. Not much said, but he took care of Sport. Nearly 80 years later, when Judy asked her husband about his own death, Dan was a matter of fact. Death doesn't bother me anyway. It's part of life and I don't even think I worry about that. I'm not looking forward to it, but I certainly don't care. You spent many years preaching about God. How do you envision God today? I don't. That's not true. The problem I have with that question is that whenever anyone asks you, do you believe in God, they've already got something in their head they're talking about. Whatever the image is that they've got. They never have the right image. You know, enough of a scientist or have enough interest in science to understand that you can't destroy a matter. It becomes

something else. It becomes energy. You can't destroy energy. It becomes something else. And that's what I am. I'm just a bunch of matter and energy. But together in a certain way. Do you believe in an afterlife? No. Whatever I am, all this energy and mass and stuff. It becomes something else. Maybe I'll be a tree. Do you think that's what you'll be? I have no idea. If you had your choice, what would you like to be? Nothing in this world because I've done this. I just have some energy floating around doing something. That's Dan Pirati and his wife Judy. Not long after these recordings were made, Dan fell out of bed and he hit his head. There was bleeding in his brain. And that marked the beginning of a new final decline. Seth Jovag will bring us the second installment next time.

The truth is, we don't all get the luxury of planning our own death. Tyrone Muhammad is the funeral director at Peace and Glory home for funerals in Newark, New Jersey. Known as Muhammad the Mortician, he's using some surprising strategies to show people the true effects of the epidemic of violence that's killing young black men. Charles Monroe Kane sat down to talk with him. You recently wrote on your Facebook wall, tired of embalming so many young people. It's sickening. I wish you could all see my world. Show us. What do you want us to see? I want you to see that when the young people come into the funeral home and the countless hundreds. Shall I say nearly into the thousands that I see on a continuous basis. Most people see when they come to the funeral home, they see the person, the deceased looking, serene, very peaceful.

But that's really just an illusion because before we put them in the casket, they're riddled with bullet holes. People need to see that when these young men come into our funeral home, who have actually been murdered, they're coming in with bullet holes, their heads are almost shot off. And our job is to give their family the last memory of them. So they need to see what we see. We need to see when them holes got to be patched up with that cold cream and that mortuary wax and that hot heat that I take from a stove that a woman will use to do their hair. As I melt the makeup and put them and put that on there to cover up the bullet wounds and how we plaster their head back together, we do reconstruction on their faces. And really looking to the eyes of the deceased because a lot of these young brothers, particularly black men, that I see on a continuous basis, once again, their eyes tell us a story. A lot of them was afraid because when they get murdered, oftentimes they get stuck and locked in their frozen into that deaf look. And then you can kind of actually interpret it what they were seeing prior to them being

murdered. So when you see what I see, and I'm overwhelmed, I'm passionate about this platform, I shed tears most of the time. Because you're in the front lines? Absolutely. Absolutely on the front line. Now you've taken this to the streets and to the internet, I want to start with the streets. Can you please describe it for our listeners? Can you describe your van? I have a van, a cargo van that I turned into. I'm going to stop the violence campaign van. Where's that is wrapped with a picture of two pockets of coal on it. It says, stop the killing and we have an article that was placed in the star ledger about the murder of young black men wrapped around it. It's very beautiful. And also I have a casket mounted on the top of it with flashing lights. And everywhere I go is a show stopper. I don't do it to be a show stopper. I do it as a shock value to let the people know that this is the type of state of emergency that we end. And inside that van, I also have another casket. I also have pictures of people I am bomb. I show the bullet wounds. I don't show the person face. But I get a very often close pictures of the bullet wounds.

And I'm telling you, people are moved by that. I've seen people tear grown men, the hardest thug, the hardest so -called criminal young black man in the street. I see them moved by that is very compelling. Now you have in addition to taking your van out and doing what you do, which is extremely strong and powerful. You have an amazing Facebook presence. I want to read a couple quotes just just just recently from your Facebook page. Message to the youth and bombing fluid was not made for human consumption in this one I like. Swag counts for nothing when you're laying in a casket. And one that's very powerful. Don't let your son's first time putting on a suit be in a casket. Wow, it seems like such death in the violence. I'm going to keep going forward here, Charles, with this message, with this platform. I believe that the ancestors have given me this message. And I'm going to take it wherever I go. In bombing fluid, like you said, why you want to smoke in bombing fluid? Bombing fluid create habits on your brain cells is irreversible. When you smoke dip as our young people smoking in bombing fluid mixed with marijuana and other messages that they smoke it. Why do you want to smoke that? Where your brain cells

can't come back to itself. And you're never going to be the true person that you once was. Why you want to smoke in bombing fluid? Swag counts for nothing. I don't care how cool you is. I don't care how cool it is to be in the game to call yourself a cripple or a blood to be out there thinking you about that life. Because Swag counts for nothing when you land in the casket. All that is done. Your home, he's ain't there. But when there's a funeral at your funeral home and this is all spinning in your head. And you're angry and you just fixed up a bullet hole in a young man's head again. And you get to the funeral and there's the kid in the gang colors. Kovacier that he wants to pour in the thing or a joint that he wants to put in the casket. What do you do? Oh, girl, man, that's awesome question. I immediately go to the parent. And matter of fact, when I'm making funeral arrangements with the parents when it comes to a murder homicide, I tell the families, for my experience, this is what's going to happen. You're going to have an influx of a lot of young friends, which is host friends that come there, they're going to have bandanas and t -shirts on. They're going to want to take pictures. Now, this is the crazy thing about that, Charles, is that they taking pictures now with their faces next to the dead person face. It's

called the selfie. Right. And putting it out. If that is not foolishness, putting in drones, throwing up gang signs, putting their bandanas on there. Right. So I tell the parents what you want to do. And a lot of times that the parents do, they tell us they don't want that. And how I get the message across to them without putting myself in harm's way with them. I tell the mother to come up. And the mother stands up and tell them, she don't want no bandanas. No foolishness going on. No drugs. No Hennessy. No pictures taken. So the mother will tell them that. And I'm going to tell you nine times how to tend to repeat respect that. Wow. You know, I listen. I'm listening to you talking and I'm thinking and anthropologically almost in my head. And I think, oh my God, have funerals become a right of passage to manhood for young black men. Yes. Absolutely. But unfortunately for young black man, it's not the going to do the go to college and do some great for the community and for self is either going to prison or going to the cemetery. That's the right sort of a passive. If you ain't doing that, you can sit in a punk. If you ain't

doing that, you can sit in a cell out or clown and everything else. You understand what I'm saying? Yes, I do. But it seems like for young black men that they've become desensitized. That community has become desensitized to death. That is absolutely correct. Of course. Well, because they were made to be that way. I mean, when everything right now is glorifying death. You understand what I'm saying? We all got to die. But we don't need to die this type of death. If this was going on in any other community. If it was going on in the white community, Italian, Jews, Asian, Hispanic. If they was going on with a long array of men that's dying, the way they are in the black community would be an outreach. Did you think when you entered this profession, and you were called to be a funeral director or a very honorable thing to do? That this could be this political for you? That this made you into a radical? Is this a surprise? No. It has not surprised me because I've been this way all my life. I am a funeral director and a community activist. I've been this way since I was 12 years old. And the reason why I was this way, my father was murdered. My father was stabbed to death in Jersey City.

He was murdered. And at 13 years old, my mother brought me a microphone in the speaker box. And I was on the corners of Jersey City, speaking out against violence. I didn't really know too much what I was saying at that time being that day. But all I knew was that I didn't want to see another person such as my father who was murdered at a hand of another black man in this type of situation. So when I became a funeral director, I was already a community activist. So this can compel me to put the two together. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. Is there something you feel like you'd want to say right now to the community that's listening to this, which I think mostly is the white community? Some of you want to say to them so they can understand. Well, absolutely. And Charles, I thank you for the opportunity for allowing me to be on the platform, man. So those who are listening, particularly in the white community, we all human beings, man. We all separated by whatever ethnicity, but we all human beings are the end of the day. And I know there's a lot of sincere white folks out there. I just want to let you know that we are in a fight for our life, for our survival. We are dying by the

tens of thousands. We are putting so many young black men into the graveyard cemeteries due to violence. We have a long and red of young African -Americans going to early demise. We buried over $57 ,255 black men between the ages of 18 to 24 in the cemetery. And out of those 57 ,255 black young men and the numbers still rising, 90 % have been murdered by other black men. So we are asking you to join on to this very important mission. Because if we don't all start caring, if it's just the black community, certainly the black man and woman is going to be up in the Smithsonian Museum. And people going to walk by and say, who was there? What type of people was that? Well, they're going to tell them there was African -Americans in America. And they're gone. And they're going to say, well, how did they go? Why are they not here no more? Because they killed themselves. Well, thank you very much, Tyrone. God bless. God bless you, too. Thank you, Charles.

Tyrone, Muhammad, is the funeral director at Peace and Glory home for funerals in Newark, New Jersey. And he's also the founder of Morticians That Care. If we've inspired you to think a little bit more about death and dying and talk with people in your own life, we've put a whole bunch of resources and the information on our website at ttbook .org slash death. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison, it's produced by Sarah Nyx, Raymond Tungacar, Doug Gordon, Charles Monroe Kane, and Craig Ely. Our theme music is by Steve Mullin from Walk West Music. Carille Owen is our technical director. Steve Paulson is our executive producer, I'm Ann Strange Amps, and the last word this hour goes to the poet, Nikki Giovanni. I'm reading untitled for Margaret Danner. It's actually one ounce of truth

benefits like a ripple on a pond. One ounce of truth benefits like ripples on a pond. One ounce of truth benefits like a ripple on a pond. One ounce of truth benefits like ripples on a pond. As things change, remember my smile. The old man said my time is getting near. The old man said my time is getting near. He looked at his dusty cracked boots to say sister, my time is getting near. And when I'm gone, remember I smiled. When I'm gone, remember I smiled. I'm glad my time is getting there. The baby cried wanting some milk. The baby cried needing some milk. The baby he cried for wanting. His mother kissed him gently. When I came they sang a song. When I was born they sang a song. When I was saved they sang a song. Remember I smiled when I'm gone. Remember I smiled when I'm gone. Sing a good song when I'm gone. We ain't got long to stay.