This week, Ira Sternberg spoke with Gail Rubin.
Gail Rubin, CT, The Doyenne of Death®, will be speaking on “Jewish Funeral Traditions on Film,” at the Nathan Adelson Hospice – Walter L. Schwartz Center for Compassionate Care on Tuesday, November 18th at 7 p.m. The event is presented by the Jewish Community Center of Southern Nevada. She helps get funeral planning conversations started with a light touch on a serious subject. She hosts the TV/DVD series, A Good Goodbye, as well as a weekly Internet radio program.
As an award-winning speaker, Rubin uses humor and funny films to attract people to a topic many would rather avoid. She also helped pioneer the Death Cafe movement in the United States by hosting the first one west of the Mississippi in Albuquerque, New Mexico in September 2012.
Rubin is a Certified Thanatologist, a designation awarded by the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC). The designation Certified in Thanatology: Death, Dying and Bereavement is a fancy name for a death educator. She has made behind-the-scenes visits to mortuaries and the Office of the Medical Investigator, and takes continuing education courses on funerals, death, grief, and the afterlife.
She is also a Certified Celebrant, a Life Tribute professional personally trained by Doug Manning and Glenda Stansbury of the In-Sight Institute, the leading U.S. organization that trains Celebrants. Gail is also a public relations professional and event planner. Rubin has more than 30 years of experience creating many memorable life cycle events. She is an award-winning speaker with memberships in Toastmasters International and the National Speakers Association New Mexico Chapter.
As the author of “Matchings, Hatchings and Dispatchings,” an Albuquerque Tribune column on life cycle events, Rubin found that the columns on death elicited the greatest reader response, indicating a pressing need for information on the topic. She started The Family Plot Blog, a chipper online resource to provide the information, inspiration and tools to pre-plan a healing and meaningful funeral or memorial service.
Her award-winning book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, provides everything you never knew you needed to know about funeral planning and brings light to a dark subject. The book was awarded Best of Show in the 2011 New Mexico Book Awards and was a finalist in the Family & Relationships category of the 2010 Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Reviews.