Death, et seq.

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.

In this episode of Death et seq., Professor Marsh talks to Wake Law student Spencer Maher about Jeremy DeWitte, the man who turned a Florida funeral escort service into a viral masterclass in policy impersonation. As the owner of Metro State Special Services, DeWitte patrolled Orlando streets on decommissioned police motorcycles, wearing a badge nearly identical to the LAPD's and carrying a pepperball gun that looked exactly like a service Glock. Find out what happened to a man who took "playing cop" way too far.

In this episode of the Death Esq. podcast, Professor Marsh welcomes Jay Doshi to discuss the outdated regulatory structures of the American funeral industry. Doshi explains how the industry stubbornly protects traditional, full-service embalmed funerals while consumer preference is rapidly shifting toward cremation and non-traditional burials. This disconnect is largely fueled by outdated single-license frameworks that force funeral directors to become licensed embalmers, creating significant barriers to entry. Doshi highlights how expensive mortuary school tuition and low-wage apprenticeships have led to an employment crisis, with only 1,600 graduates available to fill 5,700 annual job openings. To revitalize the industry, Doshi discusses pragmatic solutions like dual-licensing frameworks and externship programs. He even advocates for the complete elimination of occupational licensing requirements, arguing that a market-driven approach would lower consumer costs, spark innovation in deathcare, and naturally weed out bad actors through reputation and tort liability.

On this episode, I talk to Suzanne Kelly, chair of the Town of Rhinebeck, New York Cemetery Committee about green burial. The Town of Rhinebeck Cemetery opened a Natural Burial Ground in 2014, only the second municipal natural burial ground in New York. Suzanne is also the author of the 2017 book "Greening Death – Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring our Tie to Earth." The research for this episode was developed by Wake Law student Madison Chance.

“Riches do not so much exhilarate us with their possession, as they torment us with their loss.”

This quotation comes from Robert Burton, a 17th century Oxford scholar and clergyman who understood that our attachment to possessions is often less about enjoying them and more about dreading their loss. This dread, or as he describes it, torment, persists for some in the face of death.

In this episode, I’ll be talking to third year Wake Forest Law Student Grace Mohlin about grave goods. As she explains, everyday people insist on being buried with items from this life – expensive jewelry, sentimental objects, and, as we’ll learn later, powder blue convertibles – not because they can take it with them (as we know, “there are no pockets in a shroud”), but because the idea of leaving them behind is somehow unbearable.

But sometimes an object matters just as much, if not, even more, to the living then it does to the deceased. Imagine a person owning papers or artwork of historical significance. During their live, they have every right to destroy these things, no matter how much society might lament their loss. But death changes this dynamic. When someone demands an object be buried with them, burial, in effect, becomes a form of destruction. What could be tolerated as an act of a living owner might not be permitted as a request from a dead person.

In this episode, we discuss the retention and disposition of human remains after they are seized by law enforcement as part of a criminal investigation. We’re not talking about what happens to a body after an autopsy is conducted as part of an investigation. No, we’re talking about what happens to body parts (or things made from body parts) after they are seized as evidence of the crime itself.

For context, think Ed Gein, the prominent 1950s criminal who made furniture and clothing out of human skin he harvested from graveyards or his victims. Or Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer/cannibal whose apartment contained the dismembered body parts of 11 young men, including several skulls, hearts, and other organs. Or, more recently, the Harvard Morgue Case, where multiple people across the country were implicated in a scheme to buy and sell human body parts that had been unlawfully removed from cadavers in the medical school’s morgue.

In each of these cases, investigators discovered and seized human body parts when they were searching the defendants’ premises. But what gave them the legal authority to seize these remains, if anything? And what did they or will they (or even should they) do with them after the case officially ends? These seemingly unsettled questions are what we will be unpacking and attempting to understand today.

When a person dies while incarcerated, what happens to their remains? Do incarcerated individuals receive as much respect in death as other individuals? Third-year Wake Forest Law student Katie Koesters explains the web of applicable state and federal laws and regulations.

In this episode, third year Wake Forest Law student Connor Crotty compares the processes of cremation and alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation), discusses the chemical composition of cremated remains, and describes a number of memorialization options.