Seeing Death Clearly
Seeing Death Clearly is a show that challenges you to think about your beliefs about death, dying, grief, and living life. I am your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. As a death doula, I found through first-hand experience that the more I came to terms with my thoughts and feelings about death and dying, the more present I became in my everyday life and I hope to share that with you too, how you can live a better life by having a healthier relationship with death and dying. Each episode features a guest who shares their beliefs and stories about death and dying. These are honest conversations about a topic most of us avoided talking about our entire lives. I am on a mission to change that, one conversation at a time.
Episodes
In this episode of Seeing Death Clearly, death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen talks with life coach, author, and publisher Mia Godfrey about what it means to rebuild your life after profound loss. Mia's story is one of resilience, but it isn't a story of "getting over" grief. Instead, it's about learning to carry loss while continuing to move forward.
Mia shares what it was like growing up in communist Ro...
When someone dies, the grief is only part of what families are carrying. Along with the emotional pain often comes a long list of decisions, paperwork, phone calls, family dynamics, and practical tasks that can feel impossible to manage while you're mourning.
In this episode of Seeing Death Clearly, death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen talks with Sarah Baldwin, founder of Restfully, about why naviga...
Death doesn't have to be a taboo topic. In this episode of Seeing Death Clearly, death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen is joined by Annalouiza Armendariz and Wakil David Matthews, interfaith ordained ministers and co-hosts of the End of Life Conversations podcast.
Together, they explore how talking openly about death, dying, and grief can reduce fear, strengthen communities, and help people make more...
Host Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant, speaks with Northern California end-of-life doula Lori Goldwyn about death doula work, grief, and end-of-life planning. Lori explains how childhood fear of death, her background in women’s health, and her mother’s death in 2010 moved her from birth doula work into hospice volunteering and then end-of-life doula care after training with INELDA in 2...
Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen hosts Philadelphia-based medical historian Brandon Zimmerman to discuss his 2024 book, “Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity,” about medical students (1880–1930) taking souvenir photos with cadavers and what the images reveal about coping with death through humor, ritual, and discomfort.
Brandon describes mo...
Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant, hosts Seeing Death Clearly and talks with Ralf Ellervee about preserving life stories as a lasting legacy that supports grief, healing, and conscious living. Ralph shares how interviewing his grandfather—an Estonian surgeon deported to Siberia at age nine—showed him how easily memories can be lost, especially with dementia, serious illness, or unexpect...
On Seeing Death Clearly, death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen speaks with transpersonal psychologist Dr. Irene Blinston about her research on grief healing, consciousness, and paranormal encounter experiences. Blinston explains the psychomanteum—an environment of darkness, quiet, sensory reduction, and angled mirror gazing originally developed by Dr. Raymond Moody—where grieving participants ...
In this episode of Seeing Death Clearly, I speak with Lori Rizzo, a death doula in the Philadelphia area, about her transition from corporate leadership and training into end-of-life care. Lori shares how her personal experiences led her to this work and why she has become especially passionate about supporting individuals living with dementia and the people who care for them.
We discuss the challenges many families ...
Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen hosts clinical psychologist Batya Ludman and Jewish educator Gina Junger to discuss their book, The Jewish Journey Through Loss: From Death to Healing, and how Jewish mourning traditions support grief and healing.
They explain active rituals like shoveling dirt at burial, tearing a ribbon or garment, and sitting shiva as a week-long “permission to grieve,&r...
In this episode, I talk with Alexander Josephson, a Toronto-based architect whose father's cancer diagnosis unexpectedly led him into the world of digital legacy and remembrance.
When his father asked him to design a memorial, Alex began thinking about how we honor and remember the people we love. In a time when so much of our lives exists online, he wondered if there was a better way to preserve stories, memories, p...
On Seeing Death Clearly, death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen talks with Wendy Juergens about grief, dying, and healing through writing, including end-of-life planning and conscious living. Wendy shares the story of her son Nick, a Navy veteran who died by suicide nearly 14 years ago at age 32, and how writing her book, Hey, It’s Me, helped her stay connected to him, learn more about his life, and ...
Jill McClennen hosts a conversation with David Zartman and Joanna Franco from Caring House, a nonprofit hospice home in Torrance, California. They explain that Caring House serves people in the final days or weeks of a hospice journey, staffed 24/7 by caregivers, and works with many hospice agencies because it is a non-medical residential care facility.
Families can visit freely, often stay overnight in reclini...
Host Jill McClennen, a death doula, end-of-life care planner, and funeral celebrant, interviews Laurel Hill Funeral Directors Tasha Dugan and Amanda Kyle about what funeral directing looks like behind the scenes. They discuss embalming and body preparation, service planning, costs, flowers, paperwork, and supporting families from the first call through the funeral.
Amanda shares her path from animal rights work...
Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen speaks with Matt Fogelson about growing up in 1980s Manhattan, then losing his workaholic father to lung cancer when Matt was 19 and his father was 46. Matt describes carrying unspoken grief for decades, using pain to stay connected, and how family silence around dying robbed them of meaningful end-of-life conversations.
He shares how music and playing guitar became a ...
Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen interviews Mel Bennett, founder of Life Forest in New Hampshire, a nonprofit cemetery and public arboretum where human and pet cremated remains are buried with newly planted trees. After caring for her mother through early-onset frontal lobe dementia, Mel received her mother’s ashes in a plastic bag and box, which pushed her to create a more meaningful, healing ...
Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen hosts Jermaine on Seeing Death Clearly to explore how talking about death can lead to more conscious living.
Jermaine shares how a conversation revealed his mother did not understand how her 401(k) connected to real choices, which led him to help her intentionally live out long-held dreams through travel before she died suddenly from a stroke. They discuss grief,...
Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennan hosts a conversation with Joy Jolie about how repeated loss, grief, and serious illness shaped Joy’s views on dying, healing, and end-of-life planning.
Joy describes multiple breast cancer diagnoses in her family, including her own, and shares how her mother declined chemo and radiation, while her sisters faced lasting harm and, in one case, workplace press...
Host Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant, talks with Jessica LeBeau-Richman, a South Jersey pet death doula, about the often overlooked grief of losing an animal and how people can stay connected through ritual, keepsakes, and conscious goodbyes.
Jessica shares how her rescue cat Sammy led her from years of nonprofit social services into end-of-life doula work for pets, and how she supports fami...
Host Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant, speaks with Rae Dumont, a Belgian-born pediatrician turned family therapist, about caring for chronically ill children and why connection and honest, age-appropriate truth matter as much as clinical skill. Dumont discusses her novel, “In the Shadow of Silence,” about a father’s depression and suicide and the different ways children and a spo...
In this episode, Jill McClennen speaks with Philadelphia-area researcher and photographer Edward Snyder about abandoned and forgotten cemeteries and what they reveal about dying, grief, legacy, and conscious living. Ed explains how his interest in cemetery art grew into decades of documenting burial practices and the death care industry, including stories of cemeteries destroyed, built over, or only partly moved, le...
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