In this episode, I spoke with Lori Zaspel, a licensed social worker and co-founder of the Philly Death Doula Collective, which provides emotional, spiritual, and physical support at the end of life. Lori also works as a geriatric social worker, is studying EMDR, and creates really funny videos surrounding grief on TikTok under the handle @phillydeathdoula.

We talked about what drew Lori to taking an academic approach to grief, how she happily talks about the three societal taboos (death, sex, and money) with humor, why shaming and stigmatizing grievers is harmful, how grieving people are going to be shamed regardless of how they choose to cope and the only way to really win is to keep existing, how people judgements because of their own death anxiety, ghosting grievers, why we're told that it’s culturally inappropriate to talk about death and grief (partially because of the lack of control we have as humans), terror management theory (the higher your death anxiety the more likely you are to be conservative), being able to mark one’s grief process by the type of jokes one is making, funny grief stories about having a funeral for a kitten, and having the forethought to make a cast of your partner’s member before they die.

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