On this week's episode, Caitlin Doughty discusses the most recent scandal in the funeral industry and what regulatory structures could be used to prevent this from happening again. On August 7th, Chicago police, acting on a tip, entered a funeral home on the Far South Side called South Chicago Chapel, at 2939 East 95th Street in the South Deering neighborhood. What they found inside was the stuff of nightmares. Fifty-six bodies, unrefrigerated, in various states of decomposition, spread throughout the building. The funeral home was operated by Clark and Johanna Morgan. Astonishingly, this was not the first time the Morgans had been caught doing something like this. The Morgans previously ran a crematory called Heights Crematory in Chicago Heights, where authorities found improperly stored bodies — roughly a hundred of them — stacked on top of each other, unrefrigerated, partially exposed. The comptroller's office permanently shut Heights Crematory down in 2025. Clark Morgan's funeral director license had already been revoked back in 2024 for practicing with an expired license and what the state called "unprofessional conduct". And yet here they were, two years later, running a funeral home and doing the exact same thing. We have a lot to unpack in this episode — why these things keep happening, why our regulatory systems keep failing to catch them, and what, if anything, can actually be done about it.

On today’s episode, I’m joined by Anna Jordan. Anna is a funeral director and a certified life cycle celebrant and a member of the board of the Home Funeral Alliance. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Anna on a couple of projects with the Home Funeral Alliance. For the past couple of years, a group of students at Wake Forest Law School have researched and assembled state statutes relevant to home funeral families and complied state by state legal guides that are posted on the Home Funeral Alliance website. Anna and I have been on several calls discussing what research would be most useful to those families. More recently, Anna shared with me the curriculum for a new program she’s launching on behalf of the Home Funeral Alliance – a Home Funeral Proficiency Certification. This online program is aimed at funeral directors to help them better understand and assist home funeral families, and she’s running a pilot this summer. In today’s conversation, I talk to Anna about that project, and about her unique path to and role in funeral service.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ve heard from a lot of what I’ll characterize as “progressive” or “new” entrants in the death care space. We’ve had episodes on green burial, death doulas, natural organic reduction, home funerals, and more. The conventional wisdom that I hear a lot from critics of the funeral industry is that “traditional” funeral directors are rigid and uninterested in change. That’s certainly true of some folks in the industry – they’re hanging on to the way they’ve always done things until they retire. But I’ve also found that some people that you assume will be super conservative are actually really open to giving funeral families what they need, whether that fits the traditional model or not. One case in point is today’s guest, Tim Schramm, Owner and CEO of Howe-Peterson Funeral Home & Cremation Services with locations in Dearborn and Taylor, Michigan. Tim is also a spokesperson for the National Funeral Directors Association.

Anatomical dissection is a fundamental part of medical education. In this episode, medical student Emma Sherman walks us through the use and treatment of donor bodies in medical education in the United States.

Sam Perry is an Associate Lecturer at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, teaching in the Mortuary Science and Funeral Science program. He is also the President of the Green Burial Council International, 501(c)(3).

Alex Gracia, a third-year student at Wake Forest Law School, discusses the intersection between the Catholic practice of creating relics and keeping them in churches and the laws in the United States that forbid "abuse of corpse."

Do you have your documents in order to allow for a trusted person to make decisions about your health care and property if you become incapacitated? This episode walks through four important kinds of documents and explains what each does: (1) power of attorney; (2) health care power of attorney; (3) advance directive or living will; and (4) funeral planning declaration. Whether you have an estate planning attorney or you are DIY-ing, this is an episode that will give you a great baseline understanding of these vitally important documents! Check out the Death, et seq. Substack for more information.

In today's episode, I talk to Stephanie Hopp, EdD, RN, CPN, an Associate Professor in the Undergraduate Nursing Program at Clarkson College in Omaha, Nebraska. Professor Hopp talks about her experience as a nurse at Children's Nebraska Hospital and her scholarship on empathy in health care.