For Joél Simone, the work of funeral service begins inside the practitioner — with the essence she first learned from her mother's hands.
Every morning before leaving the house, young Joél Simone stood still while her mother drew a cross on her forehead, her hands, and her feet. The cross was made of oil.
She didn't have a name for that ritual then. Decades later, she does. In early research for a social media series, she came across the word myrrh-phore — from ancient tradition, a sacred oil bearer, one who anoints the body of the dead as a holy act. The moment she encountered it, something clicked. The oils her mother used. The essential resins used in ancient Egyptian embalming. Mary Magdalene anointing the body of Jesus. The pastor laying hands in the Black church, palms warm with oil. The smelling salts a funeral director reaches for when a grieving family member collapses — salts that contain essential oils, that revive not just the body but, as Simone sees it, the consciousness.
"It's not just to wake people up," she says. "You can think about it a little bit deeper as revitalization, or reawakening the consciousness. It's deeper than just an oil. It has spiritual property."
That is the lens through which Joél Simone, licensed funeral director, embalmer, and founder of the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy, understands this work. Not as a transaction. Not even as a service. As something ancient, continuous, and sacred.
The Core of the Work
Simone is careful about the word spirituality. She doesn't mean religion. She means something more elemental: the connection to whatever makes us human, the essence within each individual that persists in relationship with others, with the earth, with the living and the dead.
"When I'm approaching the work," she explains, "my thought process is: how do I best honor that? How do I use the tools of funeral service — whether it be merchandise, disposition method, burial, cremation — to honor the spiritual essence within this individual and reflect that back to their community?"
By that measure, she believes the profession does well on the surface. What it tends to neglect is the practitioner's own inner life.
"We do a really good job of that on the surface," she says, "but we forget — in taking care of others — that we have to nurture that connection within ourselves. And that's how the work becomes deeper."
This is where her mission has taken a turn that surprised even her. The cultural competency work of the MDGCA — grounded in the Academy's organizing principle that culture is the medicine for grief — has always been central. But Simone finds herself increasingly called to something more foundational: helping funeral professionals remember who they are before they walk through the door.
The Cost of Forgetting
She speaks from experience. Before her weight loss surgery last year, she had reached nearly 400 pounds. She hadn't recognized how far things had slipped.
"I didn't even realize I was that heavy," she says. "And what is that impacting? My sleep. My confidence. The way I feel about myself. My organs. My ability to do my job in the best way possible."
As a full-time funeral director, she didn't eat breakfast. She came in off poor sleep, onto her feet all day, disconnected from any practice that might have replenished her. She lost more than 120 pounds in the past year — but the more lasting shift has been internal.
"We don't prioritize our mental health, our physical health, our emotional health, our relationships," she says. "How many funeral directors do you know who are on the verge of divorce? Who don't have a relationship with their kids? Our connections — the ones that make us human and feed us spiritually — we're disconnected from those."
The industry, she argues, has normalized this. It has been the expectation. And when the expectation becomes the standard, no one questions it.
"I feel like it's been normalized for us to operate in unhuman ways in this industry."
Monday Morning
For funeral professionals reading this on a Friday and wondering what actually changes on Monday, Simone offers something specific: ten minutes. Leave the phone in the car. Walk. Don't make it about the distance or the fitness goal. Make it about the disconnection.
"At the end of that ten-minute walk," she says, "you will receive a message from your inner self about the next thing you need to do."
She is the first to say she can't define what the path looks like for anyone else. What she can point to is a starting place: identifying what she calls your unique area of genius — the thing you are genuinely made for in this work, not the thing the role demands of you.
"I'm really good at talking to people," she says. "That makes me a great arranger. That does not make me a great embalmer. And I feel like we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform in roles that have been established for us."
The deathcare space, she notes, is already changing. Home funeral practitioners are serving families in jeans and polos, building genuine relationships through exactly that kind of authenticity. The suit and the black and the formality are not the point. The presence is the point.
"In order to break down those barriers," she says, "I have to be comfortable enough within myself to show up as myself and not be performing."
What the Curriculum Misses
The MDGCA's faith, religion, and culture series recently completed its inaugural cohort. In every tradition covered, one theme appeared without exception: veneration of the dead. The belief that the spiritual realm and the living world remain in relationship. The practice of honoring that connection at the end of life.
"If we're not hitting that spiritual vein when we're connecting with people," Simone says, "I feel like we're not showing up in full service."
That awareness is largely absent from mortuary education, and Simone has been publicly vocal about it. She is also careful to be accurate.
"Our death care system and education is extremely Eurocentric," she says. She acknowledges, though, that she has misspoken on this publicly before — specifically about the pace of curriculum change. Through conversations with Edwin Jackson, Ben Schmidt, and Faith Haug of the ABFSE, she came to understand that revising an accredited curriculum moves through federal systems of education, and the process is neither simple nor quick.
"I have misspoken publicly about that," she says plainly, "and I want to correct that and take accountability for that."
Her position on the underlying need hasn't changed, only her understanding of the complexity: white people are not the only people who die, and most cultures include practices around veneration, hair care, body care, and disposition that current curricula do not address. The gap is real. Closing it is slow.
What Success Looks Like
Simone doesn't define success for the Academy in revenue terms. She defines it in images. Instructors pulling up YouTube tutorials on caring for Black hair in funeral home settings. The NFDA board reflecting the diversity of communities being served. A conversation about spirituality — this one, or one like it — happening in a trade magazine and being taken seriously.
"If we show up authentically," she says, "we give permission for our families to show up authentically, knowing that they're going to be cared for."
And practically, she adds, authentic relationship changes the business case.
"When you have a relationship with a community versus being a necessity to a community, your bottom line increases drastically."
She doesn't think the work will ever be finished. Conversations about race and cultural competency are ongoing. Conversations about identity, bias, and gender-affirming language within the profession are still emerging. As humans evolve spiritually, she says, barriers come down, and new understanding is required.
"It requires relearning and reintroduction and remembering to happen," she says. "So I don't think it'll ever end."
Legacy
Joél Simone wants to be remembered as someone who showed up as herself — and in doing so, gave other people permission to do the same.
She remembers being told, as an apprentice, that she needed to do something with her hair because it was distracting to a family. She remembers holding back from opportunities because she wasn't sure her body was up to what they required. She has been working, slowly and deliberately, to stop doing both.
"Being bold enough to show up and say, this is how my hair is, it grows out of my head this way — but also having the space, the opportunity, and the courage to begin to take care of myself in a way that I'm still learning to do," she says. "That is helping me expand in ways I didn't even know were possible."
She hopes funeral professionals reading this feel some version of that permission. The myrrh-phores — those ancient women bearing sacred oil, crossing the threshold between the living and the dead — didn't wait until they were polished or perfect. They just showed up to do what only they could do.
So can you.
Joél Simone is the founder of the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy and the creator of The Grave Woman platform. Learn more at thegravewoman.com.