George R. Kelder Jr., CFSP

By now, we have moved past the question of whether death doulas exist in our space; they do. The courts have made that abundantly clear. The public has made it even clearer.

So, the real question going forward is not if we engage. It is whether we’re going to shape what this looks like or wait for someone else to do it for us. Because right now, like it or not, that “someone else” is a mix of the courts, the marketplace and organizations like INELDA, the International End of Life Doula Association.

We’ve already acknowledged the gap: Families want guidance before death, not just after it.

We even tried to build something to address it. “Matters of Life/Matters at Hand” wasn’t a bad idea; it was just 15 years ahead of an industry that wasn’t ready to leave its lane. But that lane is becoming crowded now. (Matters of Life was created by the NJSFDA to make funeral homes a recognized, community-based resource of critical information, providing advisory and consulting services for families preparing for a death, serving as a bridge between pre-death and post-death care. Trained funeral home employees would have functioned as a source of guidance, information and hands-on assistance in navigating end-of-life financial details, making professional referrals and assisting with locating geriatric and eldercare services.)

With consumers actively seeking information prior to death from sources perceived as disinterested third parties, doulas stepped into that pre-death space because it was empty.

Your New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association Board and the Northeast Funeral Service Partnership are now wisely asking us to explore integration. Working with organizations like INELDA to develop funeral home-specific training, establish clear certification pathways tied to funeral service standards and create defined roles inside or alongside funeral homes. Not as a replacement for licensed individuals, but as an extension of what we don’t currently have the bandwidth, resources or structure to provide.

Done right, this doesn’t dilute the profession. It strengthens it. It can give funeral homes: earlier entry into the family relationship, better-informed preneed conversations, stronger continuity from pre-death through aftercare and maybe most importantly, relevance in a part of the process we’ve historically ignored–dying.

There are risks, however. Right now, “death doula” can mean anything from highly trained support professional to someone who printed a certificate off the internet last week. That lack of consistency is exactly why this conversation matters and why we are having it.

If doulas are going to be part of the ecosystem, then we need:

• a defined scope of practice (what they can and cannot do)
• clear referral boundaries into licensed funeral service
• standardized training benchmarks
• possibly regulatory guardrails that protect families without overreaching into constitutionally protected activity

That last point matters. The courts have already told us where the line is on speech and nontechnical support. Ignoring that reality is what got other states into trouble. So, the smarter move isn’t to overregulate; it’s to regulate intelligently. Creating structure where it matters–when physical care intersects with public health, when families might confuse roles or credentials and when services transition into licensed activities.

Everything else? That’s where collaboration, not control, needs to take over.

Let’s address the other piece that both the NJSFDA board and NFSP raised, because it’s real whether we like it or not: workforce strain.

Doulas won’t solve staffing shortages in prep rooms, arrangement offices or at crematories. Let’s not stretch the concept beyond reality. But they could absorb time-intensive family communication before death, support arrangement readiness, reduce emotional labor on already stretched staff and improve aftercare follow-through and community engagement.

In that sense, they’re not a replacement workforce, if anything they’re a pressure valve. Temporary? Maybe. But if we are honest, this feels like the early stages of a structural shift in how death care could be delivered.

The profession has always been good at defending its boundaries. It has not been as good at expanding them. If we wait, others will define doula training standards without us, courts will continue shaping the limits of our authority and families will build relationships outside of funeral service and only come to us when they must.

A partnership of integration increases our bandwidth to support families before and after death, secures us a seat at the table earlier in the process, and allows us to bring structure and accurate content to the doula community, positioning them as advocates for funeral service rather than opponents.

What could this look like? We could create pilot partnerships with organizations such as INELDA. Develop a New Jersey or five-state-specific framework for doula collaboration. Explore certification pathways connected to funeral homes. Begin conversations around measured, defensible regulation. And, most importantly, start testing this inside real funeral homes.

If “Matters of Life” taught us anything, it is that ideas do not fail on paper. They fail when we refuse to put them into practice.

Death doulas are not a passing trend. They are a response. The question is whether funeral service wants to be part of that response or react to it after the fact.

Ryan Buckland, President

The lawn mowers are back. You hear them first, somewhere down the block, that low hum cutting through an afternoon that finally has some warmth in it.

Then you look up and notice the forsythia along the fence has gone yellow overnight, and the trees that stood bare and skeletal through all those gray months are suddenly showing green at the tips. Spring has arrived, the way it always does, without fanfare and without waiting for anyone to be ready.

There is something quietly instructive about that. The season does not hold a consultation before it changes. It simply turns. The earth, which absorbed so much cold and darkness over the winter, softens and opens and begins producing life again. Every year this happens. Every year it is, in some small way, a surprise.

Langston Hughes, one of the most luminous voices in American literature, wrote, “Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.” Those lines carry the kind of wisdom that settles into you slowly. Hughes understood that grief and beauty are not opposites. They live in the same house. And the ones who learn to hold both are the ones who find their way through.

Those of us in funeral service understand that tension intimately, because we witness it up close. We serve families in the moments when moving forward seems not only impossible but wrong, when the idea of the world continuing to turn feels like an offense against the one who is no longer here. We stand with them in that frozen place. We do the sacred, careful work of honoring the life that has ended. And then we watch as, slowly and in their own time, the families we serve begin to thaw.

Spring does not heal grief. Nothing heals grief quickly, and anyone who has sat with a grieving family knows better than to suggest otherwise. But spring does something important. It demonstrates, without argument, that life has a will of its own. That the ground that seemed permanently hardened will soften again. That things buried in the dark have a way of coming back up toward the light.

That is the hope we carry into our work, even when we do not say it aloud. We carry it in the way we prepare a family for what comes next, in the way we handle every detail with care, in the way we show up fully for people in their most undone moments. We are, in our own way, part of the season's turning.

The flowers are coming up. The mowers are running. Change is here, and it is good, and the work we do is part of what makes it bearable.

Following allegations that a funeral home which also ran a pet cremation business had stolen money by not providing services requested, the Pennsylvania General Assembly has unanimously passed a bill to regulate the pet cremation industry.

The measure would establish standards for the handling and cremation of pet remains, including cremation or refrigeration within 48 hours of receipt, and make violations of those standards subject to the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law. The bill, called the Companion Animal Cremation Consumer Protection Act, also calls for stronger recordkeeping by pet cremation businesses. Repeated violations of the standards by funeral directors who operate pet cremation businesses could result in penalties.

“Grieving families should not have to wonder if the cremation provider they trusted handled their pet’s remains with care and dignity,” Representative Brandon Markosek said in a press release. “This legislation is about protecting families during a vulnerable time and making sure the goodbye they paid for is the one they actually received.”

Patrick Vereb, who owns Vereb Funeral Home and Eternity Pet Memorial, is accused of the theft of more than $650,000 from consumers from whom he allegedly took money in exchange for the cremation and burial of family pets. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said Vereb dumped the bodies of pets at a local landfill. The offenses, which took place between 2021 and 2024, involved more than 6,500 victims located in western Pennsylvania, the Attorney General’s Office said.

Pennsylvania currently has no regulatory framework for overseeing pet cremation businesses, according to a memo circulated by Markosek when the bill was first introduced.

A companion bill has been introduced in the Pennsylvania Senate. It has been referred to the Consumer Protection & Professional Licensure Committee for consideration.

The former co-owner of a Colorado funeral home where more than 190 bodies in various states of decay were found was sentenced to three decades in prison for abusing the corpses, bringing to a close part of a sordid chapter in the state’s funeral industry.

Carie Hallford, who owned Return to Nature funeral home with her husband, Jon Hallford, apologized during the April 24, 2026 sentencing hearing, saying she had lost her moral bearings and deserved punishment, according to an article by the Associated Press. Her husband previously had been sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the case.

A plea agreement agreed to by Carie Hallford recommended a sentence of between 25 and 35 years. Judge Eric Bentley split the difference, settling on 30 years in prison, which the judge said was still a “staggeringly huge sentence,” the AP reported.

Jon and Carie Hallford were charged with scores of counts of abuse of corpse following the discovery of piles of human remains stacked in their Penrose-based Return to Nature Funeral Home in 2023.

The Hallfords had promised families that decedents would be cremated, but an investigation found that the Hallfords sometimes returned dry concrete mix to family members instead of cremated remains.

Outraged families repeated urged the court to consider sentences of up to 200 years in prison, one year for each body found in the funeral home.

The couple also both pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud in October 2024 in connection with the fraudulent acquisition of Small Business Association loans designed to provide relief for businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Hallfords’ case was cited as one of the reasons for an overhaul of Colorado’s funeral industry regulations, which were among the most lax in the country. Funeral directors in the state were not licensed, a fact that led some advocates to point out that, although the Hallfords faced criminal charges, there was little the state could do to sanction them as funeral directors.

Researchers examining the DNA found on the Shroud of Turin found an unlikely substance: food. A Florida city is considering building a columbarium as burial space dwindles. And “fantasy coffins” are all the rage in Ghana. These stories and more are in the week in funeral news.

NEWS

Unexpected Food DNA Found on Cloth Believed to Have Wrapped Jesus, Study Reveals
By Andrea Margolis (Fox News)
Researchers recently identified food DNA on the Shroud of Turin–a finding that suggests the burial cloth believed to have wrapped Jesus Christ may have been contaminated over time. Read more here.

Shots Fired After Toddler's Funeral in North Carolina
By WRAL
A shooting at a funeral home in Burlington, NC, following a toddler's funeral led to a chase and crash, according to police. A man and a woman face charges. Read more here.

Ghana’s Fantasy Coffins Are a Colorful Celebration of Life and Legacy
By Misper Apawu (The Associated Press)
A giant pink fish, a colorful peacock, an airplane painted with the national flag. These are just some of Ghana’s fantasy coffins, known as Abebuo, which translates to “proverb.” Each piece is crafted not just to bury the deceased, but to embody the essence of their life. Read more here.

I Brought My Husband Back for His Funeral as a Hologram
By Shiona McCallum (BBC)
When Pam Cronrath's husband Bill died last year, after nearly 60 years of marriage, she knew what she wanted to do, but not exactly how. “I promised him a super wake,” she told the BBC.  What she didn't expect was that keeping the promise would lead her into the world of holograms, technology more commonly associated with celebrities than memorial services in rural America. Read more here.

Virginia Commonwealth University to Create Memorial for People, Most of African Descent, Whose Remains Were Dumped in a Well
By Allen G. Breed (The Associated Press)
Virginia Commonwealth University will spend $3.6 million on a memorial for dozens of people, most of African descent, whose bodies were stolen from their graves, dissected by medical students and then dumped in a forgotten well. Read more here.

Fernandina Beach, FL, Eyes $1.5 Million Columbarium as Cemetery Space Runs Out
By Mike Lednovich (Fernandina Observer)
Fernandina Beach, FL, City Commissioners are advancing plans to build a columbarium at Bosque Bello Cemetery as traditional burial space dwindles to what staff estimates is a five-year supply. Read more here.

I Quit Journalism to Care for My Sick Mom; My Experience in Both Led Me to Become a Celebrant at Funerals
By Jane Ridley (Business Insider)
In May 2019, my life was turned upside down when I received a call at work saying my active, 81-year-old mom was in the hospital. She had a massive stroke without any warning and, when she was discharged three months later, was still unable to move or really speak. Read more here.

A lack of funeral planning will likely leave many Americans in debt, providing more evidence of the value of preplanning and prefunding end-of-life arrangements, a new study has found. 

The study, conducted by CardRates.com, an organization dedicated to educating consumers on credit card usage, found that 58 percent of all adults surveyed said they would need to borrow money to pay for a funeral. The study also found that 26 percent would use a credit card to pay for services, exposing the purchaser to often burdensome interest rates.

“Without enough funds available, you may use a credit card you have on hand for all the expenses,” said Erica Sandberg, a consumer finance expert at CardRates.com. “But is it the best financial choice? Not necessarily. Adding $8,000 to a credit card with a 24 percent APR will cost $2,151 in interest if you paid it off in two years.”

The study indicated that 34 percent of consumers would take out a personal loan to pay for funeral expenses. Another 31 percent would borrow the money from family or friends.

The results of the survey highlight the advantages of prefunding funeral arrangements, which advocates have said lifts what can be a weighty burden from mourners already dealing with the emotional toll of death.

“Shock and grief can cause you to not think clearly,” Sandberg said.

Prearranging a funeral and prefunding, either through a Trust account or use of an insurance policy, relieve families from having to figure out financing on the fly, a decision the survey shows can save thousands of dollars in interest payments.

The need to eventually borrow money for funeral arrangements cuts across all age brackets, the study found. A total of 71 percent of respondents identifying as Gen Z said they would need to borrow, while 58 percent of Millennials said they would need to take on debt. Even older generations are not prepared, according to the study. A total of 51 percent of Gen X respondents and 52 percent of Baby Boomers would need to borrow.

While younger generations’ lack of preparedness is understandable, the failure to play ahead by Boomers and Gen X is concerning, the study reported.

“These are Americans in their peak earning years or approaching retirement, if not already retired, who have had decades to plan, yet still more than half have not,” the study said.

Having discussions now about the eventuality of death and the costs associated with, even if part of the conversation is about which family members can help financially, is optimal, the study recommended.

And begin saving, Sandberg said.

“A monthly deposit of $350 … will total $8,400 in two years,” Sandberg said.

The survey pointed to what could be a severe financial liability for families as Americans age. Approximately 7,000 Baby Boomers are dying daily, according to government statistics.

“Our data makes it clear: While death is inevitable, millions of Americans aren’t preparing themselves for the costs associated with it,” the study concluded. “End-of-life planning is an essential part of financial planning, but most people don’t treat it as such, even older Americans.“