In this episode of Across the River, I speak with Lance Houia, a Māori cultural educator and mental health advocate from Rotorua, Aotearoa / New Zealand.

We talk about tangi (tangihanga), the Māori funeral tradition, a multi-day process of mourning that brings family, community, and ancestors together. Lance explains what it means to sit with the dead, to grieve openly, and why practices like the haka are not performances, but ways of releasing emotion instead of carrying it alone.

Lance is the founder of My Soul Warrior, a mental health and leadership framework that combines emotional mastery, somatic practices, and cultural knowledge. His work focuses on resilience, leadership under pressure, and the importance of real human connection , especially in moments of loss.

This is an honest conversation about death, community, and the question of who shows up when life breaks.

learn more about Lance`s Work:

Website: https://mysoulwarrior.com

Instagram: @lhouia

Course: https://mysoulwarriors.teachable.com

In the world of deathcare, your reputation is your only currency. For over a century, the Illinois Funeral Directors Association (IFDA) was the gold standard of that currency—a "family of families" protecting the traditions of the trade. But beneath the somber suits and professional handshakes, a $300 million disaster was quietly being hollowed out from the inside.

This week, we deconstruct the collapse of the IFDA Master Trust. This isn't a story of a shadowy outsider or a corporate raider. It is a forensic look at an "autoimmune disorder" within an institution—where professional courtesy replaced oversight, and "trust" became a substitute for transparency.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Vault of Trust: How a century-old association convinced thousands of funeral directors to hand over their clients' life savings.

• The "Key-Man" Betrayal: The disturbing mechanics of a scheme where the Association used the dead’s money to bet on the death of their own members.

• The Banality of Negligence: How a $100 million hole went unnoticed because no one botherered to read the investment reports.

• The Aftermath: Why, in a scandal that shuttered family businesses and emptied retirement accounts, no one ever went to prison.

When the people hired to guard the gates decide they are above suspicion, the gates are already lost. Join Charon’s Intern as we examine what happens when the watchdog chooses a nap over a shift.

Before the American Civil War, embalming was rare, experimental, and largely unnecessary. Most people died close to home, buried within days by family or community. War changed that.As hundreds of thousands of soldiers died far from where they were born, families demanded the return of bodies across vast distances. Heat, time, and transport made traditional burial impossible. In response, a new profession emerged almost overnight: battlefield embalming.In this episode of Asphodel Archives, we explore how the Civil War transformed deathcare in the United States—introducing modern embalming practices, professional corpse preservation, and the first large-scale confrontation between public health, commerce, and grief.We examine the work of early embalmers like Thomas Holmes, the logistical realities of transporting the dead by rail, and how the death of Abraham Lincoln permanently normalized embalming in American funerary culture.This episode traces how a wartime necessity reshaped civilian burial practices—and how the desire to see the dead one last time changed the business, ethics, and expectations of death in America.

Topics: Civil War history, embalming, death rituals, funeral history, battlefield medicine, transport of the dead, American deathcare, 19th-century burial practices.

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