When You Die Podcast with Joél Simone Anthony
Grief is not an emotion, it’s an experience. And part of that experience is our emotions. We tend to focus on the emotions of depression and shock and the common five or seven that we’ve been taught. But there’s also bliss. There’s also elation. There’s also release. There’s also compassion on a deeper level than we’ve ever felt before. So, now when I think about grief, I think of it as less than one emotional experience but an experience that encompasses all our human emotions. – Joél Simone Anthony
Johanna Lunn
With me today is the Grave Woman, Joél Simone Anthony. Joél is a licensed funeral director and embalmer, a sacred grief practitioner, end-of-life educator, and a YouTube blogger. Joél was born in Europe and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, the heart of Gullah and Geechee culture. Her professional approach is deeply rooted in ancestral wisdom passed down generation to generation, spirituality, the sacredness of death, and caring for those in transition. Supporting her community through grief has always been an important part of her life. You can find her right now talking with me and at her website, the gravewoman.com. I am so happy to be talking to you, Joél partly because I’m a big fan of your advocacy and your education, and, also, the little I understand of the way that you approach death care. You are truly a compassionate person. As someone on the planet, who, like so many of us that have had significant losses, I know what a difference it can make to have a truly caring and compassionate and spiritual person help guide families in their time of need. So, I’m happy to be talking to you, and I’m a fan of all the things that you’re doing. I want to drill down a little bit on your experiences and where you come from what you think is important going forward.
Joél Simone Anthony
Well, firstly, thank you so much for your support of the work. It is interesting when people say they’re fans, because I appreciate it, and I appreciate your support. Thank you for taking the time to learn more.
JL
I think one of the first things I’m curious about, being that you’re from Beaufort, South Carolina, is what is the heart of, and if I butcher this, I’m sorry, Gullah and Geechee culture.
JSA
Well, it’s Beaufort (pronounced Byufort), South Carolina.
JL
Byufort. Well, right off the bat… South Carolina, and it’s Gullah Geechee culture.
JSA
Beaufort, South Carolina is a part of the Port Royal Sound. I don’t know how much you know about the Port Royal sound, but historically, for 98%, the last time I looked, of African Americans in this hemisphere, not just in the United States, but in this hemisphere, our lineage can be traced to the Port Royal sound, which encompasses Beaufort, South Carolina. This is where we were bought as enslaved peoples, and distributed throughout the United States and Canada, in the northern hemisphere. So, there’s a very, very rich spiritual and cultural essence here that you don’t find anywhere else in the world. I had someone reach out to me last week, via YouTube comment. It was a man who’s traveled the world extensively and performed genealogy research on himself and his wife. And he said that he traveled to where he was from in West Africa. And after traveling there, he came to Beaufort, South Carolina and said that he had never felt so connected to his ancestors and his lineage, even after traveling to where his people originated in West Africa. He felt more at home here and felt more of a connection here than he had in any other place. To me, that was extremely profound, because it reaffirmed what I’ve known, instinctively, and have learned culturally, being from here. So, yeah, it’s a very magical place.
JL
It sounds amazing. I would like to talk a little bit about the role of culture in end-of-life decisions. I have a feeling that oftentimes people think it’s a one stop shop. There are religious differences, but culture plays such a key role in our lives. And television homogenizes a lot of us, and so we forget where we come from.
JSA
A lot of people, like you said, develop some type of identity with the way that they see themselves represented in the mainstream media, without necessarily doing research, either through storytelling with their elders or reading. I remember when I was a little girl I used to love to go to the library and just flipped through the articles and the information that was there. But a lot of us build our identity based on what we see on social media and television. You’re right, especially working in death care, I have to be so sensitive to the cultural nuances of the families that I’m working with, because a lot of times the religions and the cultures go together. Imagine working with a traditionally southern white Baptist family who has cultural ties to Ireland. There are so many different nuances. So, you’re right in that. And it affects so many different things, not just with the funeral planning, but the grief aspect, as well. Like the way we interpret and identify with grief and what that journey looks like for us.
JL
I’m a big advocate of healthy grieving. Being able to be conscious and aware of death is part of life. We have structures around us, whether it’s planning for your death, or that when you die the death care community can make a huge difference in setting the ground for healthy grieving within a family. I do think that starts well before someone dies. But sometimes it only does after they’ve died. What do you think can make a difference in terms of a grief journey for a family?
JSA
What I’ve seen, and what I’ve witnessed when working with client families, not just individuals, is that when someone passes away something inside of us clicks. We want to know more about where we come from. I think grief is the catalyst for that, especially with people that are my age, not quite outside of the millennial generation, and not quite Gen Z. Or what’s the next one after that? I can’t keep up. But like I said, with television and social media it’s okay. This is who I am. These are my peers; this is what we do. But then grief snatches us back into reality to say, “You know, what, there’s more to the world than what’s inside of this screen that I look at every day. So, who am I? Where do I come from? What did my family believe? What did my family want?” I think I’ve seen something shift with COVID. Maybe just a little bit before. It’s that there’s been a whole cultural pride explosion. It’s not just black people. It’s not just Mexican people. It’s not just Cuban people. We don’t have to identify with European standards of beauty, European standards of culture, European standards of anything. I want to celebrate who I am as an individual. And I think grief is a catalyst for that exploration as well.
JL
This was certainly true when my father died. From all the stories that people told about him, I realized I didn’t really know who he was or where we came from.
JSA
You mentioned fathers yesterday and it was Father’s Day. I had the honor of reading my dad’s biography for an award that he received through his church for service over the years. And my dad’s been my dad for 36 years. Even as an adult we live together. It almost felt like I was reading his obituary (and he was still alive) and seeing him celebrated. And then people coming up afterwards and saying, “You have an amazing dad,” or “He did this for me.” “He assisted my son with this and that,” or “He taught Sunday school with teenagers, and we’ve seen grades improve.” Just hearing all the different stories, like you said, about my dad really opened my eyes, that, “Wow, my dad isn’t just my daddy, he’s a whole entire person with a whole life.” I think that’s also a part of it, Johanna. We tend to see each other in the roles that we occupy in life. For example, you see your co-workers, as your co-workers. When your co-workers pass away you go to their funeral, you learn about their families, you learn about their children, you learn about their hobbies, you learn about them as individuals. I think that grief and loss cause us to view one another outside of the roles that we portray in everyday life.
JL
That makes a lot of sense to me. In a way, COVID thrust the world into a grieving process. And I found, certainly where I live, but also, because I am also connected to a bigger world, that people had more time because they were mostly home and were working from home. Our lives were reduced considerably, and the activity of our everyday life was reduced. I heard and participated in more curious conversations than I had before, because the background static of going shopping, going to a movie, getting together with friends, cooking, big barbecues, all those things were gone. It was really a moment in our time, I think, when we could connect more as a humanity, as a group of people, as a global community.
JSA
I don’t want to appear to be insensitive to anyone who’s lost a loved one due to COVID, or suicide or any other type of loss during the pandemic. I honestly believe for humanity that COVID is one of the best things that could have ever happened for us, because it made us human again. If you think about people who’ve had to be in the house with their children, their parents, their spouses, I could only imagine you got to know your husband in ways that you maybe had forgotten over the years. I don’t know how long you guys have been married. I’m just assuming. I don’t know if you have children, but maybe you got to know more about your children as adults or wherever, whatever stages they are at in life. You’re forced out of looking at something one dimensionally and start to look at it holistically. I think this is beautiful. Unfortunately, a lot of times grief is the catalyst for that.
JL
Yes, grief is the catalyst for that. And I’m also amazed too, that when people are thrown in to grieving, the big D, big grieving, often there’s so much energy behind it that I’ve seen people write books, and create nonprofits, and do all kinds of positive things for the world with their grief energy. And that’s fascinating to me as well,
JSA
Yes, I think that speaks to several things. I feel like people seem to be more equipped to perform miraculous feats while grieving, because we need something to do with that energy. I talk a lot about that in a workshop that I host called the Chakra Grief Workshop, where we explore the chakras, and how grief affects each one of the chakras. And if you’re not careful, your chakras can become closed. So, building rituals around honoring the grief and the way it affects each chakra is important. It makes me think, what would be possible, and what would come out of us as human beings, if we were taught to manage that energy from the beginning and not be forced into exercising it like an emotional response? What if that were just our natural protocol? You have these feelings. You have this emotion. You have all of this. Because, in essence, we’re grieving constantly throughout life, not just when someone passes away. So, why is it that when we do experience one of those big griefs, like you refer to it, then we’re prompted to respond in that way?
JL
When I was 19 and I lost my mother, I didn’t even know grief was an emotion.
JSA
You know what, I’m going to challenge that, if you don’t mind.
JL
No.
JSA
I had a student attend a workshop. And she said something that changed my perspective. She said that grief is not an emotion, it’s an experience. And part of that experience are our emotions. And we tend to focus on the emotions of depression and shock and the common five or seven that we’ve been taught, right? But there’s also bliss, there’s also elation, there’s also relief, there’s also compassion on a deeper level than we’ve ever felt before. So, now, when I think about grief I think of it less as an emotional experience, but an experience that encompasses all our human emotions.
JL
Oh, that is a really great way to think about it. So, is that to be accessible to that full range? What would healthy grieving be, from that point of view?
JSA
You know what? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think that whatever your grief looks like it’s healthy. However, your behaviors during that time can be unhealthy. You can be having a completely, I don’t want to use the word normal or natural, but you could be experiencing grief, which is experiencing loss, and become an alcoholic. You can be experiencing grief, or having the experience of grief, and become a Nobel Prize winner. So, I don’t know that I necessarily believe in the concept of healthy grief. However, I do believe in the concept of healthy and unhealthy behaviors as a response to grief.
JL
Yes. I think along with that, though, is a cultural agreement that grieving is natural. I think what I was reacting to as a 19-year-old person was that people were saying, “Well, get over it.”
JSA
Really? How did your mother pass away? If you don’t mind me asking.
JL
My mother drank herself to death.
JSA
So, maybe there were some people in your immediate sub-culture, who felt, “Well, she did this to herself. So, we just need to move on anyway.”
JL
Well, that could be. I think more of it was their discomfort with, “Here’s Johanna before death, and here’s Johanna processing her mother’s death.” And that I needed to go through whatever I needed to go through as part of my grief journey. But they didn’t know how to respond to me. I think that we are awkward, naturally, around death, that we don’t often know, “What do you say to someone who’s grieving?” So, the response is, “Oh, could we just go back to normal?” Out of discomfort let’s go back to where we were. It’s ever forward, never back.
JSA
Ever forward, never back. Yeah, I can see that. And there’s the cultural impact of grief that we were talking about earlier. Or the cultural acceptance or denial. I think about what we perceive, here, in this part of the world, to be third-world countries. Those that are so far behind us technologically and in infrastructure and all those things.
However, what they have, that we have not been able to put our minds around on any level, is an understanding of the cycle of life. And so, their culture is celebration. I’ve worked with people from the Caribbean and countries where death is celebrated. It’s a party and even though you’re sad, you’re rejoicing, because you know that this person has in some way elevated or progressed into a level that we all aspire to. Perhaps it’s geographical. But when it’s geographical, it circles back around to being cultural because the culture is so different. Or is it? I mean, this is kind of going out their way in the deep spiritual pool. But could it be that there are just certain parts of the world where the energy of grief flows naturally throughout society? We understand that from birth we’re on a cycle towards death. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Abraham Hicks. Their work is based very closely on her downloads and things like that. They were impacted by a book called Seth Speaks. Have you ever heard of that book? Okay. I tried to read that book about eight years ago, and it kind of freaked me out. But then I picked it back up not too long ago. And one of the most profound things that I read in that book is that from the moment we’re born, we’re dying all the time. We’re just moving constantly toward death. Our cells are dying. Our energy is depleting. Life is nothing more than a constant crawl toward death. And who says that’s a bad thing? So, why should our response to that be so violently sad?
JL
I’m right there with you on that. The first film in the When You Die trilogy asks the question, “Does consciousness continue after death?” And I think exactly what you’re saying is that things are constantly transforming or turning over. We’re continually not who we were, from a biological point of view; our cells are constantly dying and regenerating.
JSA
Right? That question, is there consciousness after that? I believe so. I definitely believe so. Because I believe that everything is one. And maybe it’s not in human form. But the trees have been here a lot longer than you and I have. However, if you’re still enough and quiet enough, you can tap into their energy, or the ocean or the beach, or the sun or the moon. So why wouldn’t there be a continuation for us?
JL
I know that you put it out on your YouTube community about what would 15 seconds of not grief, or relief of grief, feel like, and what would the button look like? I’m getting that backwards a little bit.
JSA
Oh, no, if there was a button, you’ve hit it on the head. If there was a button that gave you 15 seconds of relief from whatever your grief experiences were for that moment, what would that look like for you?
JL
And so maybe it’s those things? Maybe it is a robin that lands on the bird feeder?
JSA
Yes! I think, for me, that button would look like 15 seconds of the sun warming my body. Outside. And then that makes me think, as well, about culture. In my culture, we believe that the ancestors, those that have passed on, still communicate with us daily, or in any moment, and we can call upon them for guidance and direction and help. There has to be a level of consciousness there if we believe that they’re responding to us. Or is consciousness a very limited term for what we can interpret in this realm? Perhaps it’s just a state of being that looks different than anything that we can conceptualize. I think the older I get, the more I realize how much unnecessary emphasis we put on our bodies. I think how we said grief is the catalyst for looking at others through a lens that differs from their role in our lives. I think age is the catalyst for looking at ourselves through the lens of our essence and not necessarily our physical form, if that makes sense. I know that there are several cultures throughout the world, that put no emphasis whatsoever on the physical body. Like the Tibetan monks, they’ll throw the bodies of those that have passed away from the mountain, as a sign that the body is nothing, the spirit is free. Now, there’s no fear in us doing this. There’s no disrespect or disregard for human life. Because this was only the vessel for the form that the spirit took for this realm or this period of time. And now it’s free.
JL
I know that there are many cultures that like to leave the body after death for a day or three days. I think that’s an interesting practice. Have you come across much of that?
JSA
Yes, there is a group in Atlanta. I haven’t worked with them specifically as far as caring for their deceased. However, they did reach out to me, because they wanted to perform home rituals and vivid visuals and such. I told them it was something that we would happily provide. But I don’t think anyone has passed away since that conversation. And so, we haven’t had the opportunity to perform the service. But that was one of the things that they were having a hard time finding, was a funeral home that would allow them to access the funeral home for three days nonstop. Or a funeral director that would be in the home with them for three days. Just performing their rituals and letting the body be. I think that’s an interesting concept, as well, because I can tell you from personal experience, not like on a ghost or paranormal level, but there is an energy around deceased bodies, especially when we were picking them up from the hospitals, and they passed away just a few hours earlier. Or retrieving decedents from car accidents or passing away in their home. There definitely is an inner energy present, and it travels with the body. I don’t know whether it is the spirit of the individual, the spirit of the angels and ancestors, the spirit of God. It could be anything. I don’t know. I don’t want to put a name on it. But I think that there’s validity to that practice. We talked about culture and societal influence. Death care has become so rushed. Like, how many people can we embalm in a day or what’s our bottom line? And this person who just passed away, and we need to get them in and get them in the funeral home and get them embalmed, because we have 10 other families coming in today. I think that there’s a need for more pause, to allow families to spend time with their loved ones, perform rituals. I encourage families to participate in final cleansings and doing hair and dressing and things like that, as much as I can within the law. Right? I think that the process is so rushed, you have to rush into the funeral home and make all these decisions and arrangements, which further complicates that experience of grief. Right? Because it’s almost like, yes, this person has passed away, but then they’re literally being snatched through this process, and I don’t think that’s good for their energy or ours.
JL
And I think that brings us to another topic. Another thing I think that you’re an advocate of is pre-planning.
JSA
Oh, definitely. As much as you can. And I want to clarify you don’t have to have money to pre-plan. You don’t need to shy away, in my experience, from the conversation because you think, “Oh, I don’t have the money to do that.” Well, it’s called pre-planning for a reason when you get into talking about money. That’s called prefunding. So, I am a huge advocate of everyone taking autonomy over their end-of-life decisions, as much as they can. Because the bottom line is that anything can happen to anyone. There’s a saying that I love: “The leaning tree is not always the first to fall.” So, someone could literally be on what we identify as their best deathbed. We’re going to visit, and we get in a car accident and pass away, and that person’s still here. So, yes, I encourage people to have conversations about what their desires are. Do you want to be cremated? Do you want to be embalmed? Do you want to be put in the ground? Do you want to be put in a mausoleum? Do you want a more earthy feel? Or a more contemporary feel to your funeral? Do you want to wear a dress? Do you want to be unclothed with just a sheet on you? There are just so many different nuances that people don’t think about, down to the musical selection or flower colors, or do you not want any of that? Do you just want something completely still and more rustic?
JL
Because death is also a time for life. It’s a real gift, isn’t it to not have your family have to think of those things for the first time ever?
JSA
Yes, it is a tremendous gift. And I don’t want to say a relief of a burden, but it is a relief of a burden. I think more so, let’s just take everyone else out of it. It’s taking control over what you want. I teach a course, or I have a course available online, called spiritual funeral planning, one-on-one. And yes, we go through all the estate planning terminology and instructions for your funeral and all those things. I teach you how to do those things. But more than anything, I think what’s important is having your spiritual essence represented, representing yourself in your true light. Because remember, we talked about how, as a mom, maybe, you’re only seen as Mom. Maybe your kids don’t know. You know, my passion was acting. And I became a mom and mom can’t travel to California and star in movies. And maybe just having that known will say, “Oh, give that piece.” Like you said, you didn’t know what your dad was, really. Wow, I’ve got to learn this about Mom, or you’ve been a wife for 50 years and your passion was home economics. And your family just thought “Hey, Mom kept a really nice house.” But my passion was creating safe spaces for people. So, really, talking about those intangible things is important. And a lot of times we just don’t know how to have those conversations with family. So, we dive deep into that. expressing our spiritual essence and sharing our light, even in death.
JL
That’s great. That is helpful for so many people, me included. Thank you for that.
JSA
No problem. It’s self-study. And I encourage everybody, you’re gonna pay for it, bring your family in on it.
JL
How do you break the ice with your family? If you want to have these conversations? Because sometimes people don’t want to. They say, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, you’re, that’s, you’re young. That’s not going to happen to you.” How do you see your whole business? What kind of direction is the funeral industry going in? End-of-life industry? Death-care industry? Where are we going? Do you see things changing a lot? Or is it opening a lot?
JSA
You know what I always tell people, is to break out the family photo albums the next time you’re having a family dinner, because I can guarantee you there are going to be people in that photo album who have passed away. And that conversation is going to shift to what this person did, did not, or who remembers what about their funeral. And if you are a savvy listener, instead of just asking Mom or the kids or the husband, “Hey, what do you want to happen when you die?” you start taking little mental notes and asking little, just suggestive questions, like, “Oh, I couldn’t stay. They had too much makeup on Mom. She didn’t even look like herself, as though she looked like she was sleeping.” Well, she didn’t look like she was sleeping. Is that something that you think you would like as far as to see you and get the peace of feeling like you were sleeping. Or “I just hated being in that church. It was 110 degrees outside, and the air conditioner wasn’t working.” So, if you pass away in the summertime, would you prefer that? Maybe we have a graveside service, where we put a tent outside where the breezes flow. And we all gather at the graveside instead of being in a hot building. Just ask those little prompting questions and make mental notes. And then bring those little notes back, instead of the big question of what do you want to happen when you die?
Okay, so here are two different angles. One, as my personal journey, is my industry observation. I think that the death-care industry is opening a lot, which is a good and a bad thing. In the past two years, I’ve seen more individuals pop up, who don’t necessarily have formal training, myself included in this. I’m not a mental health professional. I am not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. However, I am a sacred grief practitioner. And that was a title installed upon me by my ancestors. And there are many individuals like me who are providing holistic and spiritual guidance for families, which I think is beautiful. I do worry that without some level of professional backing, there’s the potential for more harm than good to be done. For instance, I’m a licensed funeral director, so I can speak professionally from that perspective and incorporate the spiritual guidance from that perspective. However, if someone is just saying, “You know what? I lost my mom and I want to help others through this process.” Maybe you’re in a state that doesn’t recognize what you did for your mom. So, you’re giving people a sense of false hope. I think that our industry is going to become a lot more regulated. I think that people in the next 10 to 20 years are going to be seeking resources to deal with a lot of unresolved grief stemming from the fact that they couldn’t truly practice their cultural traditions due to COVID. There are going to be a lot of mental health ramifications of that. I believe that. I don’t know what the funeral industry’s response to that will be. But I also see, and I spoke about this about a year ago, transhumanism is going to change the way that we’re trained as professionals. And what I mean by that is that there’s a lot of technology that’s going to be going into the bodies. And our chemicals may not respond the same way with those devices or with that technology in our bodies. It’s going to cause the way that we practice, and what death is considered to be, to change drastically.
JL
It certainly would have an effect. I hadn’t thought about embalming fluids and human implants and such. I know it can affect cremation. But it is a whole other way of thinking about what it is to be human, isn’t it? Or what it is to die?
JSA
That’s just a rabbit hole that we could talk about for another five hours.
JL
Yes, I don’t at all feel qualified to talk about those things. But I’d love to listen to it.
JSA
And I think that is going to change cultural, religious, and societal perspectives. I don’t know whether it’s going to be for the better or for the worse.
JL
Well, I think one of the other things that’s really challenging our end-of-life scenarios is the fact that medicine has come so far that we’re able to diagnose many, many potential ways in which a person could die. So, you might have dementia, for one. But then you’ve also got heart disease and a particular kind of cancer, or whatever it may be, and people have to choose their care at end of life. Because our sophistication with diagnosing changes a lot of decision making that we individually might make, or as a family might make.
JSA
Very true. I’ve recently joined the board for an organization called Compassion and Choices. I think that medical aid in dying is going to become more accessible for those that are suffering at the end of their lives. And not that that’s all that Compassion and Choices focuses on, but I think there needs to be a conversation about autonomy in medical care. I feel like the medical industry and the death care industry seem to be polar opposites. But really, they’re one and the same. Because you can’t have one without the other, one is truly fighting away from the other. And one is in response to the other. You talked about medicine and our treatment, not just our diagnosis. But treatment is going to be impacted by technology. And again, what is it going to mean to die? Just because you have heart failure, perhaps your brain and your lungs and your respiratory system still work? So, is somatic death still going to be a thing one hundred years from now? What does it mean to die?
JL
Well, I’m sure we’ll find out. Maybe just not with this body.
JSA
There’s a cool video on my YouTube page. I had the opportunity to speak with an advocate, participant, and representative for cryonic suspension. As far-fetched as it seems, I think we’re going to find out whether cryonic suspension works or not sooner than we think. And I feel like that is going to change things. Because say a person passes away and a death certificate is issued because they passed away. But then they’re reanimated. I think where it ends is the funeral home, right? Or at the cryonics suspension laboratory. But then it’s also going to change what birth is defined as if that person is reanimated. And then, through a spiritual lens, there is the circle of necessity, the 3000-year journey that the Egyptians believe the soul went on after passing. And seeing some of the rituals that have been performed in the past year, like the moving of the mummies from the pyramids to the museum in Egypt, shows to me that this journey, well, perhaps I don’t know where we are. Planet time, maybe, is completed. And perhaps now reanimation of corpses that were interred in Egypt may take place. I mean my mind is open, so I can go in different directions. It’s just I don’t know how far you want to go.
JL
Well, the thing I love is that we don’t really know that. I think this is also why I’m so interested in the idea of consciousness. Because, if you look at near-death, someone can be clinically dead. I believe you could be dead for at least 20 minutes, now, in a hospital setting. If a person has the right conditions, on ice and so on, they have brought people back. And you have to wonder, well, are they the same? Did something else come back? There are so many things we don’t know. It’s fascinating. People who have had near-death experiences are not the same.
JSA
No, no. Even not as far as near death. But it could be a spiritual awakening.
JL
Yes, that’s right. You don’t even have to die, right?
JSA
You have non-traumatic spiritual awakening. I’ll just use the Bible, for example. Perhaps we’ve taken the literature too literally. I’m reading this book now called the Compendium of the Emerald Tablet by an author named Billy Carson. And he talks about Thoth, and how Thoth was reanimated several times throughout history to take on many different forms. We study these animations historically. But where does this knowledge that these individuals have, come from? I don’t think this is a new conversation. I think this is our (I don’t even want to say error), but it’s our season to begin to be open to something that’s as old as time. Our consciousness, I’ll use that that word, our consciousness has expanded. And 2020 was full of cosmic and universal and even planetary alignments that have not occurred in thousands of years. There must be an impact on our consciousness, on our beings, on our essence. I don’t think that it’s just cellular, where we have this experience of humanity. It’s oneness. And I feel like death is just a part of that conversation. I think our society, our culture, our belief systems have cut off at death. And now it’s time for us to understand that there’s more. So, what happens when we die?
JL
It’s the great mystery. And it’s a beautiful thing to have time to contemplate our, I don’t know, you might say holiness. I like that word. If you think of it from the point of view of a whole, not a hole you would fall into, like a rabbit, but a complete. What is it to be complete? I know I don’t have you forever. I also know we could keep talking about this, because there’s a lot in this world that is fascinating to me. And to all of us. I think it’s part of the gift, in a weird way, of having been in lockdown for so long. Perhaps materialism has gone as far as it possibly could, and then we’re in lockdown. And there isn’t a TV set big enough to fulfill all our needs. Well, maybe almost all our needs. So, we’re coming back around to loss opening us up to so much.
JSA
It’s been so wonderful talking to you. We could talk about this, I could talk about this, for days. Maybe we’ll do it again. Maybe I’ll have you as a guest on my podcast.
JL
I’d love it. And someday, perhaps, we could have tea together! [Yes!] Joél, thank you so much. And we’ll have all the links to all your social media and your website where people can see some of these great educational courses that you’re offering. Thank you.
JSA
Thank you. I’m the Grave Woman everywhere. Just type me in Google and I’ll pop up. Thank you for having me.
