Death Services - Before and After & How We Got Here

Surprise - life is full of 'em. Some are fun - some...not.

• What is an Administrative Guide for the Bereaved? 
• Do I need a guide after a death?
• Is that like a death doula?
• How long will it take?

In this episode I go over the life change that brought me to offer Administrative Guide Services, how I help clients before and after a death, and some of the assumptions I've heard in the course of doing work.

Thank you to Ciara Ward at ReMax Blue Coast for your support in this and future episodes!

I am not a lawyer or financial professional, none of this content constiutes legal or financial advise. For your specific situation consult a professional. This podcast is for entertainment and education only.

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Have a peaceful mourning.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome

Introduction: Tending the After

SPEAKER_00 0:01

to the Tending the After Podcast. My name is Heather Muchie, and I am your administrative guide to the bereaved. That means that I help families with the paperwork and to-do lists after a death. So today I am testing out some new equipment. Thanks to Sierra Award at Remax Blue Coast Realty. I wanted to talk about what is

What is an Administrative Guide for the Bereaved?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

an administrative guide to the bereaved. Because a lot of people, I introduce my job, what I do, and I get questions, I get assumptions. So some people might think of a death doula, which I'm glad to know what it is, but not necessarily that. Some people think grief counselor, which not technically, no. Um so I'm not really in the emotional side. I I'm in the caring, but I'm not in the emotional progress of grief. And actually, I've had some people think funeral director or a ceremony of life event planner kind of specialist. And those are all definitely important jobs in depth, but they're not what I do. And so I wanted to take this time while I'm testing out some new equipment to talk about what it is that I actually do. Before

Life Before YourJCD

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I was an administrative guide to the bereaved, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University. I was working remotely from Florida and from all around the world. I had the opportunity to work from Asia. I was working in Japan, taking meetings in California. I worked from India, I worked from Peru, all while doing research on adult protective services. And I really loved my work. And it is again another topic area that not a lot of people know about right off the jump when I talk about adult protective services. If you want to know about adult protective services, you can think like child protective services, but for adults. So I started my research with adult protective services by coming from a background in gerontology. So what is it? My I started

Academic Life

SPEAKER_00 1:55

all of this from a very academic standpoint. I've been in school for almost all of my life. And now this is the first time I've been fully out of school for a while. So what was I doing in school? I was finishing my doctorate in gerontology, the study of aging and older adults, with a master's in public health and epidemiology. My dissertation focused on sex differences and mortality rates after hip fracture, depending on diagnosis of cognitive impairment. That was all very interesting. And if you still want to talk hip fracture with me, I am happy to let you know and to advocate for anything that increases your bone density and reduces your fall risk. But after I finished my dissertation, I had the good fortune to meet my PI at Purdue, Dr. Marian Liu, who brought me into the world of adult protective services research. And we worked together various research studies. I was very fortunate to work under her. And I was pretty sure that I was going to continue on in the field of adult protective services, doing research and help getting data to support advocacy for adult protective services. However,

Life Changed, Plans Changed

SPEAKER_00 3:08

in February, when I was supposed to get on a plane to go to Argentina and spend five months in South America, that night my dad died, and we were not expecting that. And so I did not get on that plane. And instead, I worked remotely from my mom's house in a little small town in Florida and learned about all the ways that even people who thought they were prepared still are made to suffer after losing a loved one. And I thought, surely, surely there's someone that can help that because I was still working a job. My mom still had a job. My brother and I get along and he was helping. Um he had a wife and lived out of town and had his own job, and we were all grieving. So I imagine most people in the world don't have as ideal of a setup

Best Case Worst Scenario

SPEAKER_00 3:54

as we did. We had the best case scenario for the worst day of our lives. My parents had only ever been married to each other, so they did have a will that was back signed back in the 90s that said everything went to my mom. Uh so it was very straightforward, and my brother and I get along really well. There was no fighting in in probate or anything. We were just there to support my mom and get us all into some new state of normalcy. Uh my dad was a financial planner, and so thankfully, all of the paperwork and setup for that was taken care of, and we were able to get funeral costs and everything covered. And my dad was really great at building community, and so he built a community that my mom can still rely on of friends and neighbors, people with skills and compassion that can come over and help her win something's wrong at the house, instead of you know, risking some not well-intentioned person coming in and taking advantage of a widow, uh, because we hear horror stories from adult predicted services. So we should have had the best worst case scenario to suddenly lose someone. And it was still weeks

Exasperation

SPEAKER_00 5:03

and months of paperwork and staring at a phone, knowing you had to make a phone call to a company that didn't care but was still gonna charge you money if you didn't call them to cancel this subscription that only your dad wanted and no one else cares about. And you have to fight your Doro call, and then you finally get a person, and that person isn't qualified to deal with what you need to talk about, so they hand you up to the next person, and every time you get a person, they ask, What are you calling about? And you have to say, Hi, I'm calling to cancel because the owner of the subscription is dead. Well, what is your relationship? Hi, I'm calling to cancel because my dad died and he was on your uh program. And this is like the first month of losing someone very important to you. How is there no one that was gonna help with this?

New Reality

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Like I said, we still had jobs. We we had other stuff we were doing, and so that was February. My postdoc contract was coming to an end at the end of October, September, anyway, somewhere in there. The funding landscape, particularly for social services, was changing at the time, and so it didn't feel like the easiest, most natural fit to keep fighting in academia. But there did seem this natural fit for filling in this hole that I had found. And people can call it niching down. And so I said, okay, you know, I saw, I saw the problem. I have the skills to facilitate the solution, and I want to be the person that can help people. So what do I do?

Before Services: End-of-life Planning/death prep

SPEAKER_00 6:29

I separate my services into before and after. So before is helping with death prep considerations, conversations before anyone is even worried about dying. I get a lot of questions from people that think that this is primarily for hospice or for people in hospital. And yes, you'll probably think about it more while you're there. And I can absolutely come in and be of assistance. But this is for any adult who has people they care about. And yes, that includes anyone who

Yes you, Milliennial, should think about death prep

SPEAKER_00 7:01

is a millennial maybe or younger and thinks, I don't have anything. Um, you know, I don't have a home, I don't have a mortgage, I'm renting a car. You have stuff. Uh, you have stuff that people need to be able to get into, shut down, change, handover. You might have a life insurance policy that your parents or grandparents signed you up for years ago. You you might have debt that someone might have co-signed for and is now a mug for. So it's not an I have nothing. If you have someone you care about, you have something. Uh, because even if you legitimately have no tangible responsibilities in this world, it will become their responsibility to put you to rest. And that's a big job that they might not have necessarily signed up for or were ready for when that time comes, because they don't

After Services: Administrative Guide for the Bereaved

SPEAKER_00 7:52

know when that time is. So that's before, and I can get into that a little bit later. And then after is helping with the administrative guide. So as I start, as I started in the beginning, people think, is that like a death doula? Is that like a funeral director? Is that a grief counselor? Good guesses, but no, I am an administrative guide to the bereaved. So I help with all of the paperwork and phone calls and to-do lists and organizing and the things that in the brain fog of grief, A, you don't feel like you can do, B, you don't want to do, and C, you're not sure how to start doing. On my website, www.urjcd.com. I go into detail about what all is covered in that. So it's 20 hours of hands-on support. Me, ideally, especially for my Florida clients, I like to come in and do at least a first meeting in person so we can see what documents we have, what we're missing, look around for other things that might trigger an idea.

What Support Usually Looks Like

SPEAKER_00 8:55

And get people off to a good start. You know, you for better or for worse, you really only have about two weeks to a month where even the people who love you the most really deeply understand that you're suffering loss. And it's not that people are cold, it's not that people are callous, it's that their life keeps moving. And technically yours does too, even if it doesn't feel like it. But you only have that first two weeks to a month to really get the full benefits of your community coming around and being a support to you. Um, and if you get more time than that, then just be grateful and cherish it. But for most people. So in that time, I want, I want my clients to be able to lean on their community for the emotional support and for building back a new life, not spending their time on robocall phone ladders and dealing with minutiae deadlines and questions and just canceling subscriptions that do take hours, hours of your life. Um,

How to Know When You Need A Guide

SPEAKER_00 9:58

so that is what I do. That's what I do now. And through my work in the after, I hence the name of this podcast, tending the after. I realized that, first of all, especially for the people who work with me, they really say it's a great service, and I didn't know until I knew. And other people, when they're trying to explain it, and say you don't know that you need it until you know. And I totally understand that. Which is

Peaceful Readiness Journey

SPEAKER_00 10:25

part of why I started my end-of-life prep course, which is eight weeks of topical lessons, where we go over home, health, finance, legal. I'm not a lawyer. Uh, we just get everything ready that you might need to talk to your lawyer and make that conversation expeditious. Among other topics, I can do a whole separate podcast on what the end of life prep course

Why 8 Weeks?

SPEAKER_00 10:51

looks like. But I did have a very well-meaning and thoughtful person mentioned to me that like eight weeks, that's that's a really long time. I don't I don't know if everyone, I don't know if people would want to sign on for something that long. I thought about it. I took that advice deeply to heart and I really considered it. And the problem is that I could shorten it. I could shorten it to maybe about two weeks. But in that two weeks, you would be thinking about debt every single day, every single moment in order to be as prepared as we would be. And so the point of the eight weeks is to give you the information, answer questions, send you off because you still got homework. Yeah, you have to actually go out and do the thing, and then provide a chance to come back if you ran into obstacles, if there was a conversation you were supposed to have that was really difficult to start, and you weren't able to fully sit down and flesh that out a week and come back and problem shoot that together. And so you can still go to work and do your hobbies and go to the gym and have your family and get ready.

Can I Speedrun It?

SPEAKER_00 12:08

And so, yeah, it does it does take eight weeks. I also had someone ask for the eight-week program, like, well, what if someone has things pretty well prepped? Like they're they're pretty good. Are there any weeks that they could look at ahead of time and say, Oh, I don't need that one? Or I can just skim it and step out. For example, one of the weeks we go over funerals and funeral planning. So this person had asked

I Think I Have My Funeral Plans Though

SPEAKER_00 12:34

me, okay, well, what if someone has like they they've prepaid for their funeral, they have their funeral plot, you know, they're they're ready to go. Like, those are great steps. I'm so happy for them and their family that they have that planned and they have that ready. There's still more to do. There's more to think about, there's more to orchestrate. There is more to potentially pay for, depending on the type of ceremony or ceremonies that you want to have. So unfortunately, to be fully prepared eight. Eight weeks is how long it's gonna take. And maybe I'll do some micro episodes on helping people really think about what is in all those eight weeks to really understand, like, oh yeah, okay, maybe it will take

A Group Program Benefit

SPEAKER_00 13:23

that long. Um, but we do it together, we do it in a group. Some people feel like you know, death is really private, these are really private documents, and I understand that. I do. But there are benefits to doing a group, and namely, it's that there is so much, there's so much to do that you'll probably get a really amazing list. You will, if you did one-on-one, you would leave much more prepared than when you came in. You would at least, at least be 80% prepared. But have you ever been sitting around in a conversation and someone brings up a topic that you kind of weren't really talking about, but it reminds you of this really important to-do list item that you're like, oh, I need to write that down and do I need to remember to do that. That is the benefit of one of the benefits of working in group, is there's just so many unique circumstances and there are so many things to plan for and do that I can make the best curated course that I can, and there will still be items for individual situations that no one thought about until someone else asked. Um also there is an emotional component to getting ready. There are conversations that need to be had, there are personal values that need to be assessed because a large part of our death, dying, and our legacy have to do with our values and how we live. And oftentimes we think we know what they are, we feel them very deeply, but we haven't put words to them. And that can make it difficult for others to enact them on our behalf. They can try their best, and we love them for that, and we appreciate that. Um, but it's really helpful when we're specific for our loved ones, especially at a time of loss. So

Closing

SPEAKER_00 15:11

I've been going on for a bit now, but this was a test of some new equipment here at the Remax Blue Coast office, and I appreciate Sierra Award for letting us try it out. We may be back here, maybe with more guests, mic number two, and I'm excited to bring you actionable content that can help us all be ready to tend to the after. So for now, I'll wish you a good night and a peaceful morning.