Death and Dying - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 1/27/25

Published Jan 28, 2025, 10:49 AM

George Noory and author Mandy Benoualid discuss her work helping families cope with the dying process of loved ones, how technology is changing the way we honor and remember deceased family members, and the increasingly high costs of paying for a funeral.

Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.

And welcome back, George Nori with you. Mandy ben Belieda back with us as the president and co founder of today's leading online obituary websitemkeeper dot com, and is also the co founder and editor of the death education platform talkdeath dot com. She works with the US Department of Veteran Affairs the National Cemetery Administration on the Veterans Legacy Memorial Project, which memorializes millions of American veterans and was recently featured as an industry innovator by the American Funeral Director's magazine. Mandy, welcome back, have you.

Ben, I've been good. Thanks so much for having me, George.

And by the way, thank you for what you do. I mean, it's very honorable that you pay attention to the dead, and you do it with such class and grace. We really appreciate it.

Oh yeah, thanks. It's it's honestly, what more an honor for me to be helping families during a time of need. Honestly, it's it's been like a calling and it's been a really amazing experience. The last so it's been eleven years now that I've been doing this type of work.

Start.

Honestly, it was a really simple experience, probably just like any other that someone experiences when they start a business. I was actually at a cemetery and I was in a mausoleum and there was a glass front niche, which is basically like an area where you'll have an earn and families can put little mementos alongside the urn. And in there there was a photo of the individual that had passed away. There was like a pen, a piece of paper, and then I actually saw a blank CD, you know, like the one from from the nineties Silver CD, and it had the words Dad's work written on it in sharpie and I was super intrigued by that. I've never seen, you know, a CD rom in cemetery before, and I tried to like look up who this person was and try to figure out what could possibly be on that CD, and I couldn't find anything. Of course, you know, this is back in twenty twelve, and it made me realize that this person's legacy, their work was so important to this family and they wanted to not only preserve it, but they wanted to share it with other people. Who were at the cemetery, and it made me realize that we don't have a way to do that today. So what we had done was, you know, we thought, what if you could walk around to cemetery and learn about the life story of every single person when you're at the cemetery. How amazing would that be? And so that's how Keeper was founded. And we actually started out by putting QR codes on monuments and you could just scan a QR code and learn about the person's story and it was a really wonderful project and we're just still doing that today. We actually stopped doing QR codes, but now the pandemic folks love QR codes and we're actually bringing them back funny enough, So that's that's really how howsible of a founding story we have?

Do some people leave a dying video for their family and friends.

So what's interesting that we're actually kind of really just starting to see more uptick in folks starting to create what we call a living memorial page, and folks are starting to want to preserve and like tell their story and their own words. So it's not something that we saw before as much. And I think it's because a lot of folks in order to initiate saying I'm going to you know, act they sit down and make this video. Unless you're you know, on hospice and you know, you know your time is coming very soon. Folks try not to think about their own mortality, to be perfectly honest, and so we're noticing especially since COVID, which might sound morbid, but after COVID, we actually saw a really big uptick in folks starting to use our living Memorial feature where they can make their own memorial page on our site, and then they can assign someone to be a keeper of the page who's they feel like, an administrator of the page. So then hold on to that account so that when they pass away, they can take it over and publish it. And we actually just launched with the BA the NCA on Veterans Legacy Memorial, which is the site where we host all of the veteran stories. They actually just came out with a Living Veteran feature which comes from that, and so if you are eligible for pre need at a burial at a VA National Cemetery, then you can actually use this feature to tell your own story, share your military history, all of that online before you passed away and then it starts securely with them and then they'll publish it once you pass. While it wasn't popular, is now.

No one time, Mandy. When people read newspapers, the obituary column was one of the first places people went.

I think that still happens today. I mean, I know that I'm very lucky to still have my grandmother around. And how that changed a little is now she just goes online to her local funeral homes website and she refreshes, you know, every day, every couple of days, and tries to figure out who passed away. I think that that still happens very often. Not as much on the newspaper though, And I think that's just because newspaper obituaries I'm a lot less accessible in that, you know, they're so expensive now.

Right, Tell me the difference between my keeper dot com and talkdeath dot com.

Yeah, of course. So my keeper dot Com is the online memorial platform where you can create a memorial page for yourself as you just talked about or for love them that's passed away, and it's essentially like a digital lock box of all the memories, the stories, photos, videos, biographies. We even have a tool called like a map story, where you can have a map and put pins all over the map and make a story around that. So all the places that you traveled, or that your loved one traveled, or let's say there were a marathon runner, and you can put pins and all the different locations. So it's just basically a storytelling platform. There's also a full genealogy in family tree feature where you can tell your whole family history and you could even have direct locations to where your loved one is interred at a cemetery, or let's say you scattered their ashes in the ocean. You could put a pin and say this is where we scattered our loved one and people could go there if they would like. And so that's really a platform you built for storytelling and tools. Whereas talpdesk dot com came out of that because we started writing articles. I mean, I honestly was the one that started writing the articles back in twenty thirteen to sort of write about the funeral industry and death care because I realized that as someone who was kind of from the outside coming into this world, there really wasn't a lot of education and information about it, and it was all kind of a mystery to me, and so I wanted to start writing about it to kind of bridge that gap between the public and professionals and the industry. And as I started writing, I actually was writing it you under the Keeper blog before folks just became really interested in it. And so over time it evolved, and you know, we've grown to hundreds of thousands of followers, and we just kind of gave it its own name because it took on its own world. And we just write about different subjects around death and dying, from hosta's care to you know, medicalate and dying to you know, how you can have your own home funeral. But then we dive into more like political subjects as well, and there's it's amazing that in over ten years of writing, we still have so much to talk about. The death and dying experience really is quite.

Expansive generally, Mandy, when somebody dies, let's say they die at home, what happens? You call nine to one one, They come and pick up the body. Where do they take it? Then? What happens?

Yeah? So I mean if your loved one dies at home very suddenly, of course, the first thing you need to do is call nine one one as soon as possible, and obviously you know, hopefully there's a chance of potentially saving that loved one, and if not, what would have to happen is a corner would have to come to the house and there may be some type of you know, investigation to understand what it happened. Right, So that's more like the hopefully odd scenario where someone passed away suddenly. If let's say you're on hospice and you have the benefit of having home hospice care where you know that you know your time is coming and you've been ill for some time, then when you pass away at home, you know generally you're there will be hospice nurses in the hospital system. You know, they'll know that you're in that process. What I like to say and what you know, folks who there's actually on being called death doulas who you know help and sit bedside with the individual is you don't have to just like panic and call nine one one, Right, this is something that was expected that your loved one was sick. My first recommendation, if it's something that you're comfortable with, is to kind of just sit there with your loved one that's passed away.

How long does the body how long does the body stay there?

Well, it can stay as long. So it's interesting. You do not have to like have your loved one get scooped up right away and be taken to the funeral home immediately. You don't have to do that. You can stay with them for hours if you would like to, and just hold and just sit visual fit space some space with them for a moment and just to like take that in. But generally it would be the funeral home that would come take up your loved one.

Or well, let's go back to let's assume it was a sudden death at home and you didn't have time to pick out a funeral home, then what do you do.

Then generally your loved one would be so there may have to be an autopsy, an investigation that's done on your loved one's body. In that case, the corner would come and would take your loved one's body to the morgue and then there would be an autopsy that would be performed and the body would then need to be released to the funeral home. So that's generally what would happen if it was a sudden death.

How many people die generally in any given metropolitan city daily.

It's a really good question. I don't have a numberrough top of my head, but it's in America. I mean, it's definitely very high. I don't know the actual number on the top of my head.

Could it be twenty people a day? Fifty?

Oh more than that?

Really?

Yeah?

How many funeral homes are there in a city?

I mean in a city, there's definitely a handful. I would really depend on the city. There's like probably about thirty thousand funeral homes in America.

At least they're doing good business. I bet their business is not dying, is it.

So it's actually interesting. It's you're saying it's not dying, but there's been a huge shift in the funeral industry, and actually in a way that the funeral home industry is not dying, but it's changing a lot. There's first of all, consolidation, consolidation being there's these really large conglomerates that are purchasing all of these sort of bomb and pop funeral homes all over the cost locales. Yeah, yeah, and they're putting them under these brands and they are consolidating them and running them from a higher you know, from a head office somewhere in the US. But what has really kind of taken in the funeral industry by storm is cremation. So before, when individuals were passing away, I'd probably say maybe fifteen years ago, you were generally having You're generally gone to the funeral home, having a full service. Your loved one would often be in a casket. There would be a viewing of your loved one and they would be embombed, and you'd have a service, maybe some lunch after at the funeral home, and then you would go all travel, travel to the cemetery and bury your loved ones. Now with cremation, that has changed significantly.

Do they all have creatoriums?

So funeral homes will either have a crematorium that they are associated with. So what happens a lot of the times, which has also created a lot of issues and challenges for some funeral homes that increasingly enough competition will be like one crematory and let's say a city like Seattle, and the funeral homes will employ that create crematory to create the families that they're serving. And some funeral homes though and some some cemeteries will have crematories on site or will own crematories. Different states have different laws, so for example, in New York, you cannot be a cemetery and a funeral home in one a cemetery has to be separate than so it depends on the state law.

They don't want a monopoly.

I guess they don't want to monopoly, but interestingly, and have monopolies are still happening, But cremation has just completely changed the way that we're having funerals today. Now the biggest shift is what's called direct cremation.

So what's cost many.

The cremation can cost anywhere from seven hundred dollars to three thousand dollars just for their cremation itself, not counting a specifically nice earn you know that comes with a free urn or a lower cost earn. No service, you know, there's transportation involved transporting your loved one's body from home from the more to the crematory. So that's like a really basic service, and it's actually competition for who can have the cheapest cremation.

But I saw a movie where they put the ashes in a coffee cup and the guy accidentally took the coffee home and drank it.

Oh my job. Honestly, it's gotten to that point where folks are like, just cremate me and just like throw my ashes in the sea. I don't care like.

Our I mean, it's got to be expensive. How much is a casket a good basket?

I mean the average price probably for a good casket is around three thousand dollars. But I don't know if you know this or if any of your listeners know this, and the funeral homes listening will be not very happy with me. Is that you can actually buy your casket at like Costco Costco self caskets, and the funeral home, by law, needs to accept the casket that you purchased, even if you purchased it outside of the funeral.

So you buy the casket, you buy the lot for the funeral, for the burial. How much does a headstone cost?

Headstones range from probably another like three to obviously you can go as high as ten thousand dollars if you'd like. There's very if there's a range for everything, right, But you know, the cheapest casket you can probab by today is about one thousand dollars. And there are certain headstones that are more like footstones. So they're like small, smaller kind of plaques that go flush with the ground, and those will be less expensive as well. But it also depends on the cemetery you go to.

Now, what is a cost at the funeral home.

So the average, like full service funeral in the US today, you're probably looking at around ten thousand.

Dollars the whole thing.

The whole thing. Yeah, and no, sorry, that does not include the plot. Generally, the plot. It's kind of like the plots like real estate, right, the plot will really depend on the cemetery and the location of the cemetery, et cetera. So plots are always considered separate than the full service. A full service funeral would be all of the services of the funeral home and funeral director gives you, which I have to say, you know, it's a lot more work than folks expect. They used to work as a funeral director's assistant and I work at a funeral home. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of service. So know that if you are working with, you know, a reputable funeral home, you are going to get but service. And that's the most important part of that. I know.

When my father died thirteen years ago. He was a World War Two veteran and the Veteran Affairs brought him a flag and gave it to my mother. That was classy.

Yeah, yeah, the VA, and I don't think a lot of veterans realize that benefits that the VA can offer. I don't know it in a ton of detail, but you know, between they can there's like a VA head so you can choose like a private cemetery. Let's say there's a cemetery that is meaningful to your family, you can go there, and then the VA can, if you're eligible, send you a marker, so they'll pay for the marker, they'll provide you with fund to have the funeral you can have, uh, you know even obviously of course the intern at one of the national cemeteries, which I'm sure so many of your listeners have been like, they're beautiful.

Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot com for more

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