welcome to only see the show where we talk about aging issues and their solutions my name is tom callahan i'm a senior living coach consultant and crisis manager one of the things as definite life is death and taxes can be avoided the other one cat but that doesn't have to be something that we avoid talking about in fact it is something you should be planning for my guest today is katie baldwin from the prince an abbey and cemetery kat old st joseph seminary so a lot of people know where that is and it's off of route one you can just take the forest and were right there and it sounds pretty evident what it is from the name book it also a bit more about prin cemetery is part of my company's family a cemetery is my company's name a cemetery management services princeton abbey and cemetery is our newest cemetery and what we're trying to do with this location is make it more than just a cemetery it's really a beautiful chapel the grounds are wonderful that it's on but we want to make that into sort of a community center for everybody to be able to utilize we're having concerts where having lecture series we're doing a lot of educational pieces it's also a place that not for profits can utilize to do for different fundraisers small groups can come and meet there it's a free venue space so that the community can have a place to meet and that we can open different kinds of conversations that as you said we don't always like to have but things that we really need to talk about the abbey itself is quite historic i understand it is it was built in one nine hundred thirty two and the building is just a gorgeous marvel of architecture you walk in it's got english gothic style cathedral written all over it the stained glass windows were done by nickel it isn't sense so who did some of the university chapel windows as well and when you walk in you're sort of transported to a place in europe there's a imported italian marble french and german marble up stairs there's a really beautiful crypt that's downstairs as well that has all different extra altars and the brick work that's downstairs really lends itself well the ceilings to doing a little choral groups and things like that and it's just a beautiful sacred and healing space for people to come into it is the be a particular denomination it was created as of insentient seminary so originally  catholic right now it's a nonsectarian cemetery which means that anybody can come hadn't come and have a service there however what it does for catholic people that are looking for sacred ground to remember their loved ones on it's still sacre space for catholics as well and it seems to be there's a over the past couple years it seems to be that cemeteries are doing so much more than just being a place for and i'm sorry from where say this in a in a way that's not to shore were part of that whole movement of trying to bring back the idea of what a garden cemetery was so back at the turn of the century people decided that cemetery should be places where we're celebrating life they would have picnics there they would have concerts they are and then that kind of fell by the wayside again because the maintenance and things that are really needed to keep up something like that it's has a very high cost but what we're looking at doing here is making a place to celebrate life you can come and have a concert you can come and enjoy you know we have different people doing fundraisers like a pagan sit party there are things that are coming they're doing different kinds of formats to really engage the people that are coming there so that it's not just a place that you visit once a year or that you drive by and say that's where grandma and grandpa are or that's you know my whole family's here it's to experience life together in a place not just remember those that have passed i think that's one of the hang ups people really get hung up on is that when somebody dies it there's this heavy heavy morning harriet i had the opportunity number of years ago to attend a baptist funeral or as they called the homecoming and what it was and you know i expected the traditional funeral and what i got when i walked into was a celebration of the person's life and it was it an amazingly transformative experience for me because my own mother passed away several months later and what i did when i had to put together my mother's memorial service was i refused to do the heavy churchy thing we held it in the church that we'd been raised in but what i do is i turned it into a celebration of my mother's life and i told people they were not allowed to wear black and i love the idea that you're trying to celebrate life and bring back that tradition of you know having a picnic in the cemetery because otherwise people just going there and staring into gravestone i can't tell you how many people have said you know actually i really don't care where i end up because no one's going to come and visit me anyway and that's a real sad thought for someone you know to think that you work so hard to live your life and to make a life for your loved ones and then you say they're not going to come and visit me anyway so we're really trying to make sure that people are going to come and visit you that you will not be forgotten you know this symbol of our cemetery company is actually an eternal flame our mission is to be the eternal flame keepers for all of those families that have placed their loved ones in our care and part of that means doing things like that like you did for your mom the same thing that i did for when my mom passed last year the funeral and we were talking about doing it i said she would not have liked any of us to come and wear black we all wore our favorite outfits we had really great music my son who is four and my daughter who is two they were dancing at the end and so was their cousins and everybody was there was this life that you could feel instead of it being just a heavy mourning period there's obviously a time for that and a place for that but it doesn't have to be right when somebody passes you know what is your job at the cemetery so i'm sort of the everything person because cemeteries in jersey are not for profit it's really a twenty four seven commitment and it's making sure that you're trying to take care of every single part of it so i'm the manager there so i both talk to families and walk them through the process of what pre planning is and what it does in selecting spaces and i also sit and i plan all of the different events that we're doing as well so i'm constantly looking for different musicians different groups that want to come and actually use the space because that's really part of our marketing program is to try and get people to come in and utilize the space i also do a lot of planning tonight we're holding our first course which i'm very excited to have you as a guest because i want the cemetery to be more than just the place i want it to be a resource place for everyone to come and ask questions and get questions answered because we have all of these questions there are so many things that happen in the second half of your life that we need to sit down and have the conversation about what he wants to do it true the church my firm we specialize in the fact that people don't of crisis management about preplanning the king or so the pre planning of a funeral and the cemetery space is something that really should be done typically when you're talking about getting life insurance or when you're talking about doing your well when you preplan a funeral preplan a cemetery space the cemetery space is transferable so i hear a lot of people say i don't want to preplan i'm not ready yet i'm not dying tomorrow we never know when we're going to pass obviously my birth mom died at the age of forty suddenly in her sleep and i can remember the one thing that we do for all families for pre planning is give them an eternal memory guidebook what that book is as a planner that is designed to be pulled out when somebody passes it's got everything listed in it that is necessary in all the bank accounts you have to call the all of the memorial instructions the insurances that you have to call and cancel the policies that you have to actually cash in because most people don't even know when somebody has a policy and when i gave that book to my birth mom she went i am not trying to mar you putting me in my grave unfortunately she passed forty's later you know none of us know when it's going to happen so the pre planning process is really simple it's the first step is looking at that book they air for each average age of the person that preplanned with us is actually only fifty two you fill out the book with us it's something that you take home we don't need your bank account information or anything but you take that home and then i am looking for people to really find a space that is meaningful to them my goal is not necessarily to get someone to preplan at our cemetery my goal is just to get someone to preplan to get someone to think about this church this cemetery that hill this tree something that has meaning to them and say you know what this is something that we can take and do we can pay for it over time and we can really choose the investment option that best fits our needs because if you don't do it then when you have to do it in grief everything has to get paid for it once people spend more money than they should we know that people at the time of death pay more than forty five percent higher than if they had pre planned because then emotional decisions are coming into play guilt is a big factor you're thinking about this is the last thing that i can do for someone and that person might not have wanted the twenty five thousand dollar casket just because you could get it right and there are so many benefits to pre planning just like you said somebody has a mother twenty five thousand other casket if that's what you want then you know tell somebody that's what you want but getting the conversation started is so difficult but i will tell people that once you do get that conversation started and you see it through once it's done it's done there is a huge weight off your shoulder and it also takes a huge huge burden off of your loved ones who are left behind because suddenly in grief they have to make major decisions for you which they can't turn around and ask you there's nothing that they can turn to and say well mom did you want this or did you want that but the book has everything in there in their handwriting in their handwriting plus on top of that you said it yourself sometimes they'd miss that mom had an insurance policy lo and behold all that information is in there it's so much better than having to go hunt and find and you know just try and get through the funeral first and then a year later discovering that there was a policy for me that's how long have you been working in the city street so i actually only started in june and it was told late we moved here from my husband to go to school and i had no idea what i was going to do for a career i always wanted to help people and i had been working in churches but the income level was not something that was going to support the family so i said what what the heck am i going to do with my life and through the universe putting the right person in front of you all the time it was it was a really god thing i met the president of our company and he said you know what i have this beautiful space i need a manager for it will you do it and it was not the first thing on my mind as a twenty nine year old to be doing was to be managing a cemetery but it happened at just the right moment my passion and my real understanding of the job came from the fact that that week that i took the job the end of that week was our open house and the night before that open house when my mom passed suddenly it was that experience that led me to understand what families go through i had never planned a funeral before i had experienced death i had experienced that grief process but to sift through and actually try and sift through all the paperwork right to go through all of the drawers to hope that you find everything unfortunately she's actually still sitting on the mantel piece of her mom because one of the other things that happens is that sometimes people can agree on what is going to happen if in this case she was cremated and her husband said oh i want her in my family cemetery and my grandmother says no she probably would have wanted her ashes scattered so they can't agree so now she's sitting on a mantel piece where i know that's not what she would have wanted but we can't have her tell us what she actually wanted converse lee what happened about a month and a half after that so that was my birth mother my mom who had been ill from cancer for a year i knew she was in her final stages i flew down to north carolina i brought my the journal memory guide book with me and i sat down with my dad and i said we need to fill this out we need to just have this conversation and it's so much more difficult when somebodies in it than if you're removed from it but we were able to sit down fill everything out we were able to pick the funeral directors we were able to figure out what she actually wanted that was the biggest gift that she could have given to all of us because when she passed not a long time after that my dad called me i made the call to the two funeral directors and it was all taken care of he had that book as a guide she had her little note that she had written in it and it made the whole process so much easier sure we were still all grieving but the guilt factor was not at play we knew what she wanted it was some of it was already paid for which was great and it just made everything so much easier so that's why i have the passion for this and why it means so much to me to be able to talk to families and really have them understand that pre planning today saves you from an immeasurable amount of grief and  later and it's not i would say it's not that difficult to do the pre planning what's difficult is getting that conversation started craft would voice can you offer to somebody to get the conversation started so the advice that i can offer is trying to pick something light to think about with it right when i talk to families and were saying you know i understand that this is a really difficult conversation to have or a lot of times i have a wife that wants to do it her husband doesn't want to do just that how am i going to get him to the cemetery most of what we do is not at the cemetery will go into the home because that has a little bit of an easier feeling to it when you're sitting in your living room we're try to bring in how long have you been married for if it's a couple of it's not a couple it's somebody that's a single talking about what are your favorite moments in life talking about the things that are important to them and what they really want to be remembered for and then funny stories will follow from it bringing a brevity not of their bringing the lightness to it is something that is so important and something that will make the conversation easier i had a couple that they bought cemetery property right before christmas and for them they were more than happy to do it the kids didn't want to talk about it they had brought it up a couple of times that kids and i will tell you that ninety nine percent of the time when i hear couples say well let me talk to the kids about it first and then we'll get something the kids don't want to think about the passing so the funny part of this conversation was they wrapped up the deed to theirs terry property in a christmas present and they gave it to their kids on christmas and and she took a picture of it for me and e mailed it to me and i laugh so much but the kids then were able to laugh about it instead of it being this depressing thing preplanning so only time that you can see it you can laugh and have a funny conversation about this so my suggestion is to bring some humor into it at some  point i know i was sitting with family one time when they were planning out a funeral and they asked the gentleman you know what did he want to wear and he told the suit and his wife just kind of looked him and said i don't know why you'd want to be wearing that suit i would be caught dead in the night he says but apparently you would be and it's those light moments that do come out of it you know it's there can be it doesn't have to be h things maybe you end up paying more as you've stated than you do whereas if you start planning this thing out you start gathering your information together might get some money back at the end you never know it's a good thing to do and it is a difficult conversation to start and sounds like you certainly had as the queen once said i think about nineteen ninety three she had the and these horrible you certainly had it this year as well  year i can understand as well that was my two thousand and six this just call it was like last call for the elder family members only right and i was so glad that when my mom did pass where she had given us some information of what she wanted we didn't have anything in writing but we had discussed it and so we knew and i know when i went to the funeral home to start making the arrangements i could see where the funeral director was doing his job and trying  up sell and do things like that and i was like now right and i could see also my sister was actually kind of like almost going for it but we just like you know this is what mom wants and again i can't stress the importance of having these things written down because they do they're they're a guide for you to say ok mom wants the blue dress with the pink shoes she wants it on a thursday and all the when it's sunny you know she wants to be at the fifteen thousand spaces in the abbey it's called the columbarium so it's like a muscle iyam that's just for ashes so there are a wide variety could be in the the wooden panels the sewer johnson actually a from the grounds for sculpture has designed this really gorgeous bronze piece that access someone's urn and that's an option if stained glass windows or something that you really enjoy there are niches that are right in the stained glass window sell so that you can be memorialized right in front of your favorite saint or if there's something in particular that has meaning to you in in your religion that you can pick a spot inside the abbey there's also the glass front niches and what i always talk about with people is what kind of memorialisation are you looking for do you want a really beautiful urn the glass from the front niches are really great a way so that if you have a really nice urn that you want everybody to see and it's your personal expression it's your form of a tombstone and you have it and it's sitting there and you walk through and then you can see this wide array of this is what that person was like and that's what this person was like and it's a really nice personal expression so there's that inside option and also we have several different cremation options outside as well so there are eleven acres of ground outside and there's the traditional in ground burial there's what we call underground public mausoleums which is a just a fancy term for the fact that in ground you need a vault and most people don't realize that maybe they want to funerals back in the seventy's or it's something that you're not really looking at unless you've gone through the process the underground public mausoleum is nice because it has altar ready built in so families don't have to purchase that from a funeral home so it's kind of like two things and one and then there's the above ground mausoleum which is like three things in one because it's the space the vault and then the memorial is on a granite front and the mausoleum buildings are small they're not the kind that you walk in that you'll see at other cemeteries they're just crypt fronts they match the outside of the current abbey building the stone was actually all  campus of the abbey for the main buildings but the rocky hill quarry nearby has the same kind of stone so that's what the mausoleums will be built out of and then there's a really beautiful cremation niche wall that's going behind where the mausoleums are there's a water curtain that's there there's also a burning urn which a lot of asian families used to do burnt offerings for their loved ones after they have passed and there's a really beautiful stayin glass feature and for three architects is designing all of that for us so it's really going to be a beautiful space outside because we're is the princeton abbey and cemetery so if you go right down nassau street continue into kingston and take a right onto academy you can either get into it from seminary drive or you can go on to mapleton the other way to get to it is just on forestdale exit off of route one will just continue straight they actually redid that intersection yes so right by where princeton windrows is if you don't continue there you go straight and then we're right on the left hand side it's a really gorgeous campus to come and visit the addresses seventy five facebook i do post different events on there as well you can come join us for the course it's every other wednesday evening and what that course is is designed for you to be able to come in and ask any kind of question that you might have a financial advisor of a lawyer of somebody that deals with seniors all the time you can come in talk to tom and it it'll be a really it's a really nice ongoing event that we're having wednesday evenings six thirty this wednesday not next week and the week after but you can get all the dates on our facebook page and on website and and the website once again is w w w dot princeton abby dot org any piece of parting advice you'd want to give our viewers i really have to say that although this is a really difficult topic to talk about it's one that none of us can plan for when the time is going to come so we all need to prepare for it and it's something that you can do you really simply it really is three easy steps to do it it's gathering the information of what's important to you it's looking at the different spaces that are available to you and then it's signing a piece of paper and people don't really know how much that actually weighs on you it's like if you haven't written a will yet for me i have two young kids and thinking about what would happen to both of them if god forbid my husband and i pass at the same time it's these things that run in the back of your mind that you don't necessarily know are there but once you do them it is as you said a huge burden that's lifted off of you so i encourage everyone to take the time to plan take the time to have the conversation and make it into something happy make it into something about celebrating and picking how you'd like to memorialize the life that you've worked so hard to live the life that you've worked so hard to provide for others and just take the time to do it and i'm going to do that take the burden off of your loved ones you know i have to decide in an extreme moment of grief kitty thank you for joining me  only seniors thank you so much for having me thank you for joining us here in only seniors and remember preplanning isn't that hard it actually leads to a lot of rewards on the tail end tom callahan thank you for joining