When death is your career

This Is Uncomfortable

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What does it mean to make a living from death? From a young age, Joél Simone Maldonado was fascinated by mortality, leading her to a career as a funeral director, embalmer and sacred grief practitioner. In the final episode of our miniseries on grief and money, Reema Khrais talks with Joél about her profession: the tough conversations around money, the toll it takes on her mental health, and why she advocates for more cultural competency in death care. Also, Joél offers tips to financially prepare ourselves for the inevitable, and Reema reflects on the personal impact of her recent experiences with loss.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi I'm Kai Rizdahl the host of How We Survive
0:03.4	It's a podcast from Marketplace. In 1986, before I was a journalist,
0:08.3	I was flying for the Navy.
0:09.7	Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
0:14.4	It was the cold war, and my first deployments were intercepting Russian bombers.
0:18.6	Today, though, there's another threat out there, climate change.
0:22.5	This could be the warmest year on record.
0:24.6	Climate change is here.
0:25.7	Temperatures here are warming faster than anywhere on Earth.
0:29.5	And while the threat seems new,
0:31.6	the Pentagon's been funding studies on climate change since the 1950s.
0:35.9	I think we will put our troops and our forces at higher risk if we don't recognize the impact of climate change.
0:44.7	This season, we go to the front lines of the climate crisis
0:47.5	to see how the military is preparing for the threat.
0:51.0	Listen to how we survive,
0:52.3	wherever you get your podcasts.
0:55.0	When did you first realize you're interested in working in death care?
1:01.0	How did that come about? Oh my gosh when I was a little girl.
1:05.2	Really? You knew that young? Yes and I had this obsession with autopsies.
1:10.3	Remi. sees Rhema. Joelle Simone Maldonado's fascination with death began when she was just five years old,
1:19.3	at her great-grandmother's funeral.
1:21.7	And I can remember asking my mom and my grandma why are we watching her sleep why is
	...

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