by Jennifer Wright-Berryman, PhD
Dr. Staci Zavatarro from the University of Central Florida and I met like many people meet: at a funeral home.
Okay, most people don’t meet at a funeral home but given that only a handful of researchers in the U.S. study our deathcare system, it wasn’t an unusual first introduction. I found Staci while I was doing my own research on death care inequities for the LGBTQIA+ community, and Staci, a public administration scholar, had studied the response to the Pulse Nightclub tragedy in Orlando. We met on a lovely October morning for a small conference of people brought together by our friend and colleague, Tee Rogers, a pre-arrangement specialist for Dignity Memorial and advocate for LGBTQIA+ and secular identity funeral equity. Our work that day was to identify the barriers and solutions to death care disparities.
Staci and I come to death care from different perspectives. She investigates public resources involved in death care, such as county coroners and medical examiners, cemetery and other burial land appropriation, distribution and allocation of resources during a public tragedy (such as Pulse), and all other publicly administered services needed at the end of life. This is not a comprehensive list of Staci’s work. Public administration of death care resources is a nuanced and complex area of study.
Conversely, I study death care through the lens of accessibility for all unique identities. As a social worker, my concerns are about people’s ability to find death care options that align with their life stories, regardless of sex, gender, sexuality, race, religion, or finances.
Later, as I built a national team to do the work of addressing inequalities in death care (which is how Kat and I met) Staci and I continued a conversation about how to leverage our scholarship in our respective areas for a broader audience. Within months, Staci reached out and asked if I wanted to co-author a book on equitable deathcare. Of course, I said yes!
Writing is now underway. The book, still to be officially titled, provides an in-depth analysis of death care inequities and solutions to the barriers to equal death care. We explore the current U.S. deathcare landscape, address funeral poverty, religion, deathcare for the LGBTQIA+ community, environmentally friendly options, how to have a “good death,” and many other topics. Our aim in writing this book is to spur a national conversation about how to make death care more accessible, but not only that, how to make death care an opportunity for people to have a send-off aligned with their identity and personal resources.
The book is due in May of 2025 and should be published in late fall 2025.
