Culture Is the Medicine for Grief

Hey y’all. Hey y’all. Before I get started, if you’ll allow me, I would like to open up by pouring libations for my ancestors and inviting them to join me here today or to join us here today. While I’m doing that, I’d also like us to take a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the October 12th, 2025 mass shooting that happened in my home.

St. Helena Island, also known as Guag Gah Island.

Thank you. How many of you have heard of Guag Gullah Island? Woo. All right, we gonna find out for real. Okay. This is what we call, call and response. Come and let’s play together. Let’s all go to Gu Island. Gullah Gu. Yes. So for those of you that are not familiar with Gullah Gullah Island, St. Helena Island, we are the home of the Gullah Geechee people and the Gullah Geechee people are what I like to consider keepers of the culture.

My ancestors. And many of your ancestors as well are the living heartbeat of the African diaspora. Here in the United States, we are keepers of sacred wisdom and the spiritual technologies of life and death. My ancestors preserve spiritual science of transition, honoring water as a sacred portal, song and call and response as sacred prayer and earth as a bridge between the worlds.

Our way of death is not about endings. It’s about remembering that the veil is thin and that we keep the culture and the connection to our ancestors alive through veneration and through ritual. My name is Joel Simone, and at the age of eight years old, laying on my grandmother’s floor, I drew a picture.

And it has become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The picture that you’re looking at on the screen of me in a purple suit, red lips, red hair, with a microphone standing in a cemetery, either talking on behalf of or to the dead, has now become the reality that I live in today. I’m now known today all over the world as the grave woman.

Little to my knowledge, at eight years old, I was developing the spiritual gift of being able to communicate with the dead and speak directly to my ancestors. Now I can imagine that may have been a little bit disturbing to my parents, but I’m so grateful for my grandmother who preserved that photo for me because she understood what was happening was a form of connection that would guide me through the rest of my life.

And so those spirits in those ancestors became my friends. They became my playmates. But most importantly, they set the foundation for becoming my guides. And so. This photo or the photo you just saw became the reality that I’m living right now in Gullah Geechee culture. Death, dying, and grief are not just something that we shun away.

It’s something that’s a part of everyday life. It’s a part of work, it’s a part of play. And my favorite form of play was playing funeral with my cousins. And of course, whoever I was mad at that week when we got together on Saturdays had to die. Right? But I got what I considered to be the best job of all.

I got to be the funeral director. Which means I got to hold everybody as they were falling out because we got really dramatic with it. I got to care for the people that were grieving, pretend grieving at that time. But most importantly, I got to play with the dead bodies.

But unfortunately, as children do I, well, fortunately, I grew up. And during that time of growing up and realizing what was different and what made me unique, I quickly learned that talking to imaginary friends and wanting to play with the dead was not so socially acceptable, and it made people really uncomfortable.

And so what I did was I began to forget. So that I could fit in. My spiritual gifts were also muted through being diagnosed with A DHD and put on medications like Ritalin and Adderall so that I could focus and keep still, right? But that, that, that connection was essentially my lifeline. And so as I finished high school, I was still drawn to mortuary science and um.

Becoming a funeral director, and what started happening was that I started having dreams and I started having visions not knowing what was happening. And so I enrolled in mortuary school eventually at the age of 27. And in sitting in mortuary science classes and listening to my professors speak, I realized that there was a lot missing.

There was no education about how to take care of people that look like me, that spoke like me, that had hair textures and skin complexions like me. And so I started again having those visions and those, those, those inner promptings. But what I didn’t realize was that my ancestors were calling back out to me because I was being reactivated.

I realized that there was a huge disconnect between how I had been raised and what I was witnessing as a student and eventually a professional. And so the voices of my ancestors began to get even louder and sharper and. I started having experiences like seeing black women’s braids cut off in the funeral home, or professionals that were supposed to know how to care for individuals that came into their care, trying to comb out locks or not know how to communicate with families of color.

I started hearing inappropriate jokes about black male genitalia, and I also experienced a lot of racial, racial exclusion and racism while just trying to learn how to care for. The dead and their families. And so through a lot of prayer and through a lot of just reflection, I realized that death care had become disembodied by what makes us human guided by the wisdom of my ancestors, I begin to question, how can I bring culture and ritual back into death care?

And they answered. I was instructed to start the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy. Where I host workshops and courses designed not only to help myself but other professionals that work in the end of life, learn how to take care of people from a cultural level. I’m standing before you here today as an innovator, but my form of innovation is not about what’s new and exciting.

It’s not about some new medical breakthrough or advanced technology. My form of innovation is about remembering what we forgot. Reimagining death care is something culturally rooted, personally informed, and spiritually affirming is the mission of the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy.

Innovation to us, is an invitation. It’s an invitation to welcome those who have been excluded in the wisdom that they carry. Because culture and ritual combined in community is a radical act of healing and bravery,

centering traditions and embodied practice and ancestral wisdom is inviting culture and ritual back into death care.

How many of you actually work with those that are dying or that have passed away? Okay, that’s about everybody in here. I hope you recognize the power that you carry with you in every room that you enter. The warmth of our hands remind us and remind those that we take care of that they’re not alone.

Familiar sounds and songs like we just sung and voices, they unlock memories and they also soften the heaviness of grief and loss. Smells unlock core memories. Our sight reflects reverence and presence and can provide reassurance. My favorite taste, the taste of a favorite meal or a treat, becomes a bridge between worlds when someone is transitioning.

And our most important portal is our intuition. Our intuition guides us when to speak and when to simply be still, when to touch and when not to touch. And engaging in these senses and recognizing them as the portals that they are not only for us, but especially those that we care for. Transforms routine task into ritual.

Through engaging our senses, we return to the ancient understanding that healing and honoring begins and is offered through the body, our bodies, and those that we take care of. My work in funeral service has been guided so much more by intuition and connection to ancestors than it ever has been, but by anything that I’ve learned in mortuary school.

And I’m not saying that traditional education is not important, but what I’m telling you is that you have the power through ritual to tap into something deeper. Your intuition. I can give countless examples, but the one that comes to mind is mixing a lipstick color for a woman who had passed away. It was like an orange and red mixture.

It was probably the ugliest color I’d seen in my life, but when I was in the embalming room working with her, something inside my spirit, my guides, that same guidance that I felt as an 8-year-old on my grandmother’s floor. I told me to mix those two colors together and put it on her and it felt so wrong mentally, but something inside made it so.

Right. And when I presented her back to her loved ones, they were so moved because they were like, how did you know this was her color? She wore this color every day. How did you know? I didn’t know. I knew. Another example is picking and creating playlists that families resonate with deeply. Not having any prior connection to them or knowing their taste of music, or what the deceased enjoyed listening to and having them move beyond tears by hearing something that unlocked memories for them.

This, to me, is proof that my ancestors still guide the work that I do. Reconnecting with our bodies and opening our senses as vessels of comfort and compassion turns what we do into divine care. Our sight truly becomes sacred when we see what is truly in front of us. Touch becomes healing when we approach each person and each body with reverence.

I stand here for before you today because I chose to remember. I chose to listen beyond training, beyond protocol, even sometimes beyond the law to be guided by something older and wiser. What we refer to this as in my culture and in many other cultures is Sankofa. Sankofa is an African proverb. That means go back.

And get what you forgot. It reminds us that the wisdom of the past isn’t lost. It’s simply waiting to be remembered through the work that we do, through the lives that we touch, and through the rituals that we choose to restore and honor, we’re shaping the future of what death, dying and grief look like for generations to come.

My intention in being here and coming all the way from Gullah Gullah Island to Los Angeles, California during the rain, might I add like, what the hell, um, is to invite you to remember? I want you to remember that curious 8-year-old child that sang that song we all sang together. I want you to remember your families, your ancestors, the land, the taste, the music, the sounds, the sights.

I want you to remember your roots,

and I want you to remember, most of all, if you take nothing else from anything that I’ve said today, I want you to remember that culture is the medicine for grief. Thank you.