Dear Cindy,
I love your social media posts about your mother! My parents are healthy and active - they’re in their 50s - but I know at some point in the future my siblings and I will have to think about their care when they age. How have you managed that?
Back in 2015, I gave a talk to the annual conference of the ICCFA - the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association - on ‘The Future Of Death’. Alas, the ICCFA never posted my talk online, but you can get a sense of it from this interview I did in advance of my talk with Ryan Thogmartin of DisruptMedia, a funeral home marketing company - ‘What Do Sex, Blowing Things Up And The Funeral Profession Have In Common?’
In my talk, I referenced the story of how, many years ago at a conference, a woman came up to me and said, “We both work in the same business.” It turned out she was a hospice worker. She said to me, “The two things nobody wants to talk about are sex and death.”
That inspired me to tell the ICCFA that we need to socialize death, in the same way