Today’s episode is a lively conversation with Peter Teahen, a funeral director, mass casualty response expert, and airplane pilot. Garrett and Rasika chat with Peter about the essential concepts of emergency response and the ethics of caring for both the survivors and respondents during an emergency.

Read more about the Flight to End Polio at www.flighttoendpolio.com

Find our previous episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Anya Morozov:

Hi everyone. Before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to note that there is mention of suicide in the episode. With that onto the show.

Garrett Naughton:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to From the Front Row. One major function of public health is preparing for and responding to emergencies. Our guest today has played a major role in some severe mass casualty events, both in the United States and internationally. Peter Teahen is a funeral home director, author, mental health professional, and traumatologist. He is president of Teahen Funeral Home and founder of the International Mass Fatality Center. Peter’s also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Iowa, a firefighter and emergency medical technician. He has years of professional, community, and volunteer experience ranging from community projects, lecturing, developing mental health crisis management intervention programs, and lending his skills, both to disaster operations protocols, as well as, extensive volunteerism in disaster services. I’m Garrett Naughton, co-hosting with Rasika Mukkamala. And if it’s your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about the major issues in public health and how they’re relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field. Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Teahen:

Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Garrett Naughton:

So just getting started, you’ve such an interesting background. You’re a man that deals in grief and misery. So how did you get into this field and what directed you into this path?

Peter Teahen:

Well, as the role of the funeral director, I grew up in it. I mean, my father started the business. We lived upstairs on the second and third floor of the funeral home. So being around death and dying and grief was just a normal way of life. As a kid, I never really realized how different it was from everybody else. I thought everybody had dead bodies in their houses and things. I was the youngest of four. And I actually, through high school, and when I was thinking about college, went with the intent of becoming a lawyer. I had been involved in politics all the way from sixth grade and had worked at that point democratic office, ended up being part of a staff of the US Congressman in high school and early years of college. Got to meet folks like Bobby Kennedy and Averell Harriman and all these big names in those days.

But because it was a family business, my dad had died when I was 12. We ended up left with my mom. That been my only job since then and ended up going to Coe College and went on to mortuary school and became a funeral director. And it’s been really an interesting journey in that sense because it was never thought, when I graduated from college way back in 1974, that I would ever get into disaster work. I mean, that is about as foreign of an idea as I ever had. And back then they started requiring professions to have ConEd. Well, in 1989, ConEd was a big thing, and so they offered us all-expenses-paid, two days to go to ConEd in exciting Des Moines. And it must have been exciting because I took the boat and there’s a big earthquake, the New Madrid Fault Line that lies along Mississippi and they were preparing. At that point, they were saying the risk was like 94% of it happening at any time. So we would be the first responders from Iowa since we’re on the northern boundary.

And so they gave us all this expense-paid trip. I said, “Sure, I’ll go, and listen to lectures for two days and get two days in Des Moines.” And came away from that. They taught us how we were going, the intensity of the disaster and what we’d have to do and how chaotic it would be. That was really the first exposure to disaster talk. And I did, I think what everybody else in that class did is, left there and rolled our eyes and said, “This ain’t going to happen in Iowa with us.” We got 16 hours of ConEd, but this ain’t going to go anywhere.

Garrett Naughton:

It’s what they say. They say, “You never prepare for something that doesn’t happen.” But then it happens.

Peter Teahen:

It happens. And that’s exactly what happened. That was April of ’89. I came home, I threw my paperwork on the back desk and said, “When I have absolutely nothing else to do, I’ll go back and look at the paperwork.” July 19, 1989, I get a call about 4:30 in the afternoon and said, “This is the state of Iowa. You took our training in Des Moines. We just had United Flight 232 crash in Sioux City. There’s over 300 people on board. We need you to respond to Sioux City immediately.” And I looked at the papers at my desk, I said, “Oh, I wish I had read it.”

Garrett Naughton:

Read a little bit.

Peter Teahen:

So I immediately took off. Had to packed stuff up. I think I got up to Sioux City at 2:30 and became one of coordinator of operations for Mortuary Affairs in Sioux City. And that opened the door to a whole new, I think, but still never really thought it would happen.

Garrett Naughton:

Growing up in a funeral home, you probably had a much different perspective on life, like you said. Is that refreshing or do you think you are better off because of it, or do you like the way you think about life?

Peter Teahen:

Well, I think it was refreshing in a sense of, and still is, as we look at the letdown of disasters, I’m out in this chaotic… I always say, you can’t think of any more extreme from the quiet, somber, grieving work in the funeral home to having buildings fall down on me, getting hit by 17 hurricanes. I’ve been shot at, I’ve been held twice at gunpoint by terrorists. And so you go from… That’s about as extreme as you can get. And so you get all pumped up when you respond with adrenaline rush, and then you come back to the quietness. So it’s like a safe haven. But in my role, it was the perfect tools that gave me in, as a foundation of working in a funeral home and dealing with grief and looking at the crisis of things to when I responded.

Now, Sioux City was one of the… Well, it truly was. One of the victories from Iowa that came out of that is being funeral directors, we knew how important it was to take care of families and to make them the most important thing. That wasn’t necessarily true in the rest of the population. And we got to Sioux City and the airlines in those days, basically, I don’t want to say captured, but had control of the families. They housed the families at that point, at Broward Cliff College. The only people that families could talk to were airline employees. So they bring in flight agents, flight attendants and ticket handlers and admin people, and that’s who they had to talk to. They were not allowed to talk to anybody else. And they were holed up in the circle. And from our perspective, we weren’t getting the information we needed to identify the dead.

We had 112 fatalities. And so I kept calling United, say, “We need to get up there and talk.” And they said, “You’re not allowed up here. This is all airlines employees.” And as chances go, I was at the morgue operations like two, three o’clock in the morning, I get a call from a flight attendant who was with the family up there, and she says, “I have some questions. Anybody have any way to help me get the answers for these families?” I feel sorry for the flight attendant afterwards. But I said, “Well, I could come up to the college.” It’s really good.

Garrett Naughton:

Find your way in there.

Peter Teahen:

Find my way in. And so it works, many ways in life. And so I went up there. I was there before 4:00 and sat with the family and flight attendant, and she was just so amazed at how beneficial, because she had none of the answers. And she says, “Well, you really need to be up here to help the rest of us.” And I said, “Well, we’ve tried. They won’t let us in.” And so she, “Well, let me go get my boss and see if we can do anything about it.” And lo and behold, 10 minutes later is the exact same person I argued with for the last three days.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Of course it was.

Peter Teahen:

And she said, “What in the, are you doing here?” She said, well, “We’ll allow only you and one other funeral director to meet with all 112 families, but you’re not going to meet with them. You’re going to sit in an office and if our staff has a question, they will walk to your office, get the answer, go back and give it to the families.” And I thought to myself, “Well, that ain’t going to work.” But we’re in the door. And so it happened. And so they announced at 10 o’clock the families weren’t to meet with us, but before we got back to the office, we had families lined out up the door. And what that proved, now why I stress this, because that’s part of the advocacy for families. We fought for the families because we knew how important it was to take care of the families in a death situation, I would assume most of the flight-

Garrett Naughton:

It was your job.

Peter Teahen:

And so we set a precedent that led to a congressional act in about 1994, and it’s the Aviation Family Assistance Act. And it dictated how families were going to be dealt with for the first time in history. But it started in the work that we did in Iowa. And that’s why. I think, it started because as a funeral director, I knew how important it was, and it hadn’t been recognized before that.

Rasika Mukkamala:

No, that’s so true. And to go off of that, I know you’re talking about taking care of families, but when you’re responding to these events, how do you take care of your own mental health and the people that you’re working with? Do you have any techniques or anything?

Peter Teahen:

Go back to 1989 just for a bit, we didn’t know what mental health was back then. It was like, you imagine how are you taking care of these people? Well, we don’t. They just either suck it up or they leave. So when we think of mental health, we think, well, this has been around a long time. In 1989, we had a psychiatrist from the airlines. We were talking about mental health impact. And he said, “Well, there’s something I heard about this thing where they’re helping people in crisis.” But that came later. But what we’ve learned, and that’s how I became a mental health professional, from those horrible experiences where we weren’t taking care of ourselves, what we now call traumatized or PTSD from even the early disasters, was that we have to get there. And we got to respond not only at the time, but we need to prepare people ahead of time.

And so I’ve read, I’ve lectured, I’ve written. We do crisis intervention work and pre-incident education of the workers, but we’re still vulnerable. And I think about the work at World Trade Center. All the airlines were shut down. I was slowing down on a military jet on day two, got to ground zero before the last of seven buildings collapsed. But I’m there as a mental health professional looking around and thinking, I had a staff of some 60 some people reporting under my organizational structure. And people say, “Well, you’re going to be protected because you have all that knowledge.” And I said, “No. You’re as susceptible as everyone.”

And I remember when I lost it. We had multiple threats against our workplace because we were in the command staff area. We had Marines with machine guns outside, police officers and machine guns inside. We had death attack threats repeatedly throughout the day. Every place we went, they checked to make sure the car didn’t have a bomb to it. And we don’t have a lot of bomb threats in Iowa. There were people threatening, but I couldn’t even get in my hotel until they checked for a bomb in the parking lot.

Garrett Naughton:

An exciting life.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. And we were about three weeks in, three and a half weeks in, it was holy cow. And all of a sudden we had a threat for the next day. We were notified there was a big threat. I had two friends coming from Washington, DC who had worked at the Pentagon operation. And I called them up and said, “Hey, I don’t want you to come tomorrow because I think I’m going to die and I don’t want you to die with me. So stay away.”

Garrett Naughton:

He’s a good friend.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. But that’s how the mental health… And so the one came, the other didn’t, both were fine, but it was… To me, that really hit home. How prepared we are, how many college degrees, or how much experience we have. And I’m thinking, all my staff, even though we talk to them, to take notes, to take time off, to go for walks, watch your sleep, and make sure that you’re communicating with the family back home, we are as susceptible as someone who doesn’t have that background. And so that’s where I became even more convinced how important it is. And so we do that. I’ll tell my staffs now, I said, “What are you doing? Take care of yourself. You’re not working 20-hour days. Are you journaling? Are you reading? Are you listening to music? What takes you to relax?” You check in constantly.

Before in the early years, they just sent you home. You’re sitting there crying on a table, and you can’t control yourself, it’s go home. And we did so much harm by doing that. And that’s why suicide rates and all the other things were so high. And now we say, “What can we do to help you through this? And how can we keep you on the job?” And that makes a tremendous difference in the lives of people that they don’t feel that they were failures. And the education. The positive thing about it over the years is people are more willing to talk about it, at least give it lip service. And you’ll get people who say, “I don’t need that. I’m used to it. And I said, “Well, I knew about it. I got PTSD from it.”

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah. Not many people have to worry if they’re going to die in their line of work. But there’s a select few that take that responsibility.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. And my role changed over in the years. From the early responses of United Flight 232, I was Deputy Medical Examiner, Oklahoma City bombing, and then had a major cemetery disaster. Those, I responded to a funeral director. And then I was Operation Desert Storm, which I think is another lesson I’ll talk about here in a second. Those were as a funeral director. Now, I’ve shifted away from that because I needed a mental health break. I didn’t want to do funeral home here and funeral home here. So then I changed roles and started off with government relations and family service, working with families. And then got up to over 20 years now as a national spokesperson for the American Red Cross. But I’m on the front lines of all these disasters, and that’s domestically, I do it with the Red Cross. When I do internationally, then I’m brought in by other organizations.

Garrett Naughton:

I was going to switch it a little bit here because you’ve been talking about the mental health part about it for a little bit. But switching over to the ethical part of your work, I looked up your article on the ethical guidelines of mass trauma. I wanted to ask, what do you find in these situations, whether it be mass trauma, mass casualty, I feel like those goes hand in hand. But what’s a constant that you observe, and what do you find to be most important to either address or to focus on? What’s your main focal point? What’s always probably going to happen in these situations that you either want to avoid, you want to address, or is just something that you need to take care of?

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. I think it goes back to a philosophy, I have oftentimes, my lecture, I’ll say. What are the two most important parts of a disaster? And depending on the crowds, you’ll get different answers. If they’re firefighters say, “Well, our trucks or we need our equipment.” Some people say, “A response plan.” And I say, “No, go back to what’s the two most important parts.” And they get stumped. And a lot of times, nobody gives my answer, which is the right answer. Of course, I’m the lecturer. But I said, “The two most important parts of any disaster is the victims and the family, and the workers and the family.” Everything is below that.

Now to answer your question, what happens consistently on disasters, they don’t get placed in that ranking. And that’s where a lot of the issues happen. All of a sudden, you get political, politics involved, you get a lot of community dysfunctionality gets involved. You get friction. People get so, “Well, we got to do this. We got to go that.” And they’re in such a big hurry of making these decisions that they think are right, but oftentimes don’t put the respect onto the victims and the families. And that’s where the consistency is. And in a way, it’s still mental health, but it is going back to caring for the families because they’re the ones that are going to have to live with it. Because as responders, we’re there for a short time.

And if you’ve ever been in a disaster, you’ve got all these people flood into an area, but after a few weeks, they go home and it’s you that live in that community. Part of the response team with public health that are going to… Every day after all these responders leave, you’re going to have to run into your neighbors at church or at the grocery store, at restaurants, and they’re going to stare at you. And you’ve got to feel that you protected them and that you kept them a priority, and that they will look at you and thank you for that. If there’s a lot of harm done or people feel betrayed by their leaders or their public health figures or whatever, that’ll be a shame that you’ll have to deal with for a long time.

Garrett Naughton:

Politics really gets in the way, doesn’t it?

Peter Teahen:

Politics gets in a way, in a sense. Politics is such a reality. But I use this example again in class in Oklahoma City. We were at the Family Assistance Center doing death notifications. And the governor came in and he wanted to see all the workers and see the whole spot. Well, where we did notifications was up on the second floor of the church building that we were in. And you had, arm guards were at the stairways elevators. You had to have the right credentials to get up there. He wanted to go up and see how it was done. And we said, “Sure, you can come up.’ The administrator of the facility said, “You can go up, but you can’t go up if the family’s getting a death notification. When they’re there, you can’t be there because of politics.” And he agreed. He went up with an escort. He was going around meeting. All of a sudden his phone goes off and the radio of the escort goes off. He goes to his phone, she goes to her radio and finds out a family’s coming upstairs.

And her job was control the governor. And turned to the governor and said, “Governor, a family needs to come up. You need to leave. We need to get out here.” And he put his hand up to her and said, “Just a moment.” And pushed her away. And I say, “What are you going to do? You’re the public health figures here. You’re representing the families. What are you going to do with this influential person whose it’s his state, he is in charge, and you’re the escort and you got a family coming?” And it’s interesting, sometimes families say, “Well, I’ll just tell the family to wait. Let’s not keep him number one.”

And so this escort did, went back to the governor and said, “Governor, you must not have heard me. A family’s coming and you need to leave.” Now that’s twice, and twice he said, “Just a moment. I’ll get back to you, I’m on the phone.” And a lot of people would give up. And so she didn’t, and it’s an example, I think all of us need to learn, because it goes back to the essence of what you’re saying. She said, “Governor, hang up the phone right now, or I’m going to take it away from you. A family’s coming and you’re leaving.” And I would hope each of you and everyone listening to this podcast would do the same thing. And he looked at her, looked at his phone, looked at her one more time, and went back to his phone and said, “Mr. President, I will call you back.”

Rasika Mukkamala:

Oh, my gosh.

Garrett Naughton:

That’s a good part of the story.

Peter Teahen:

That’s a true story. But that is a classic case of what goes wrong. And what goes wrong is if she had held the family back, then the families weren’t number one. Once they are not number one, then it cascades into worse situations. And for the workers reviewing, who’s got their back at that point? They’re trying to do their job, and you keep the politics out. And so that’s what happens, politics gets involved, old habits get involved, and people just can’t keep focus on the victims and families, workers and families. And it’s a big price that gets paid by both those groups when they’re not.

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah, I think that’s definitely the philosophy that needs to be taken much more approach, for sure.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yeah. I just wanted to add. I’m in the Masters of Healthcare Administration program, and one thing that we talk about a lot is when we’re learning about how to change procedures or anything, how does it affect the patients? How does it affect their families, caregivers? And I think it’s really important to remember why we are in healthcare or public health is to help people. And so keeping in perspective who’s important and why are we all here? It’s all about the why. So I really love the story you shared, and that must be super popular story with Mr. President. But to add on to Garrett’s earlier question, I wanted to talk about what are some of the biggest ethical challenges that you face when working with mass trauma context?

Peter Teahen:

Big ethical challenges. You’re always getting pushed to hurry up, and you’re always getting pushed by the concept, this is a big disaster, and we don’t have time for this. Going back at World Trade Center, again, a lot of classic stuff came out of there. When we showed up on the scene, it was total chaos. You couldn’t see a quarter of a block down the road ahead of you. They were filled with dust, debris, concrete smoke. It was horrible. But if you needed to go past a certain point, you needed a helmet for one, and there was no helmets. The only way you got a helmet was if someone came out and threw it on the ground. You picked it up, you wore it. It took five weeks before we got respirators. And so I spent a lot of hours there in other locations that were polluted.

You’d walk out of there hours later blowing your nose and blowing up all this concrete. And so the ethical thing is, no matter how horrific the event is, how do you put your workforce into that environment day after day after day, and feel it’s ethical? And we were constantly being told the air quality is good. We’re testing it, we’re testing it. I think I just heard that coming out of Ohio from a train wreck a couple of weeks ago. And you think back, I’ve got five friends who died who were working with me down there because of that exposure and what we sucked in and breathed in those early weeks. And that’s why most of the responders, I am getting ready for my annual physical, they put us through all sorts of physical because there’s so much cancer occurring. And so many of our workforce is dying. Because there’s more workers who have died in the aftermath than actually died on 9/11. And that’s critical. That’s the ethical part.

Garrett Naughton:

An interesting perspective. I’m a young guy, I was born after 9/11, so I can’t even imagine the kinds of changes that came even from, whether the policies that you had to work with and I guess the improvement of your field. I don’t want to say that, but the notice for importance.

Peter Teahen:

Well, and hopefully we learn. And sometimes you show up in a disaster and you scratch your head, and we really haven’t learned, I mean, the ethical part of… I think of a hurricane that was coming into Galveston a few years ago. And we were there evacuating Galveston. And the president, the governor, the FEMA director, everybody, mayor was saying the threat was so huge. They had a horrific hurricane that went through, it was early 1900s that killed hundreds. Hundreds of people in that island. Says, “If you stay, a certain death will occur.” So they were pushing people. They did a much better job than when we were in New Orleans with Katrina. And I was there also for that. But as hard as they pushed, they brought in buses and hauling out, and I was looking at the place where people were loading on the buses get out.

And I talked to the mayor staff, I said, “Where are the disabled, where are the people with handicapped and stuff.” And they said, “Well, we don’t have anything in our plan to evacuate them. We’re hoping their friends, or we hope they’ll get out or their caseworker or someone will get them out because we don’t have that in our plan.” I said, “How many people do you think have disabilities or handicap or needing assistance?” And she said, probably five to… I think in a town of 50,000, I think on that island, they said, “Probably five to 6,000 people.” I said, “So five to 6,000 people are at risk of dying here today because nobody has a plan to take them out?” And it was shocking that years after 9/11 and years after what we think we’re learning, we abandoned this class of people.

And it was after the incident, they do a review of good things, bad things. And part of the ethical thing was, what do you do about the people with disabilities? Because they’re often, very often, and they still continue to be some of the least paid attention to no matter how much we talk about it. We saw that in Orleans. We saw that there. We see it in every disaster. They had a checklist, and it was evacuation of pets, excellent. Care of pets, excellent. People with disabilities, needs improvement. Evacuation, needs improvement. Everything about the special needs needed improvements. But the pets, perfect scores, they had given so much thought to that. And the ethical question is, where’s our focus?

Rasika Mukkamala:

And I think it’s super important to have people like you working in the field to advocate for these people and to make sure that changes are being made. Because when you’re in the situation, you’re probably so focused on the situation at hand. It’s not until after you review it that you realize, oh, there’s a lot of improvements to be made. And having people with your expertise continuing to improve these standards and make things better for the community. So thank you for that.

Peter Teahen:

Well, thank you.

Garrett Naughton:

And I think another question I want to ask you is, obviously you can’t predict an emergency, but what do you think is most important to prepare for if you’re making your disaster plan for the end all be all? What is it going to be consisting of and what do you think we should focus on the most?

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. I think you take a realistic look of where you’re at. I mean, in Iowa City, people think, okay, we haven’t been affected by a whole lot. But you had a massive tornado go right through campus and down-

Garrett Naughton:

The derecho?

Peter Teahen:

Well, that was before the derecho. This was like 12 years ago. I don’t remember the dates. I was here just an hour after it hit. But it took tops off of a lot of the… What’s the street that comes off of the capitol going east? But it damaged a lot of those houses, several churches were destroyed. We didn’t have any deaths, but we had injuries. That’s a practical thing to think. Now, you can worry about a nuclear bomb, but that’s not… So look at what’s really logical or practical for you and prepare for that. Prepare for the fact that you’re not going to have any outside help, probably for 96 hours at a minimum. In COVID, and in the derecho period, it was a lot longer than that because you couldn’t get from anywhere to here. So what are you going to do to take care of yourself and your family?

What do you need? What kind of food? What kind of medicine? Do you have an elderly parent or a grandma or grandpa that you have to take care of? How are you going to communicate with them? Everybody says, “Well, I’ve got my cell phone.” Those are one of the first things that go offline. Because the cell towers come down, they get overloaded. You lose power because you have no electricity. That’s why you sit down, even with a simple house fire, you sit down with whoever’s in that house and you say, “In case of a fire, you don’t try to do this. You call 911. Well, you get everybody out of the house and then you call 911.” But people think, “Well, I’m going to stick it out, or I’m going to put it out with a towel, or I’m going to throw a water on it.”

There isn’t anything in that house that’s more important than you. But get them out of the house, figure out where you’re going to meet, just the basic response. And then what do you do after that? Where are your documents? Where are your valuables, your paperwork? What’s really important to take with you and have that in your plan? In the floods of ’08, there was a massive devastation in Cedar Rapids. We’d have families call up at the command center and say, “You got to help us.” “Why?” And they said, “Well, we had to evacuate our house, and it’s completely underwater. But our daughter died several years ago, and her urn was sitting on the mantle of the fireplace, and somebody’s got to go get her.” It ain’t going to happen.

And so you’ve got to prioritize what you need and get a plan. I remember several years ago now, probably again, 12 years or 14 years ago, major hurricanes swiped across Florida. Hurricane Ian was this year. Evan back there. There was Charlie.

Garrett Naughton:

It can get confusing.

Peter Teahen:

Oh, yeah. And you live through them all. And this was the seventh hurricane to hit Florida and hit the Naples area. And the governor was online, and people were yelling at him, “Where’s our gas? We don’t have gas. We don’t have water. We don’t have food.” He said, “The hurricane just happened yesterday.” But he says, “We’ve had six other hurricanes this year. Did you not learn that you need to prepare?” But as much as we lecture about preparation, people don’t prepare, people won’t evacuate. I’ve been involved in evacuations of millions of people out of their communities, and you always have the people, I’m not going. I’m going to have a party. It’s not going to happen. We’re going to stay around.

Garrett Naughton:

Been here for 30 years.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. Never hit my house yet. And then afterwards, you find those same people that say, “I’ll never do that again.” We say, well, if you don’t evacuate, you’re on your own. When we know it’s going to be really bad, we handle a permanent marker. Well, what are we supposed to do with that? Put your social security number on your leg and on your arm, because that’s how we’re going to identify you afterwards. And they just won’t believe it. And I remember one where we were off from the coastal areas, and we evacuated the outer banks. And a woman was there with family, and they were going to their neighborhood having a party. Well, in the middle of the hurricane, she’d called, she had just gone into labor. She was eight months pregnant. There was no way to drive off the outer barriers. But now she wanted rescue teams or helicopters to come in and rescue her. No, it’s a hurricane. We’re not coming.

And so think about what you really need and what’s really, really important for you, and come get it. When we talk about disaster losses, I say, what’s a disaster loss? And for what you lose, that’s important to you, it’ll be different than you, and different from each of the listening to the podcast. I had one guy that was so distraught, and we asked him, “Why are you so distraught about?” He says, “I lost all my roses.” Now there is massive destruction. There were houses destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people not out of their homes, but he was distraught about roses. Does that sound a little odd or a little silly?

Garrett Naughton:

A simple guy.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. Well, but think about what’s important to you may not be important to you or to him. And it was more simple than just, “I lost my rose garden.” His great-great-grandfather had grown a strain of roses, and that had been passed down from generation to generation to generation, and had been entrusted to him to perpetuate it.

Garrett Naughton:

I feel like you had to cage those up or something. You got to put a top on it.

Peter Teahen:

Well, yeah, but it was a hurricane. Everything was destroyed.

Garrett Naughton:

That’s a good point.

Peter Teahen:

He couldn’t move it. But to him, that was so important because he felt that he betrayed every previous generation before him and failed every generation following him. And that’s part of what we tell people. Don’t judge someone about what they’re upset about, because it’s their loss, not your loss.

Rasika Mukkamala:

And it’s also about, you don’t know what people are going through or you don’t know… Like you said, you mentioned the roses. There was so much family history with that. We might think, oh, it’s just a flower. But to them, it’s much more. So just remembering meeting people where they’re at and putting yourself in their shoes as well, and providing empathy. I think that’s super important in public health across the board.

Peter Teahen:

And public health really has ended up taking a role of keeping the public health, the mental health, keeping it in focus. And that’s what I enjoy working so much with public health, you become one of the strongest advocates for people in disaster. But that’s why those listening probably have a very interest in public health and responding, but you become the voice of those who can’t speak for themselves. And you have to make sure that you go in with the right mindset and get as much experience as you can so that if I’ve got 30 some years of experience of it, and you’re the next generation coming up for replacing us.

Garrett Naughton:

We’re trying our best.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you guys did awesome in COVID and all the politics that involved and all the uncertainty and all the naysayers and all the people who didn’t know the answers. Somebody has to keep the bean drum going consistent. And that’s why I ask people, “What’s the most basic need of people?” I’m the lecturer, I have the answers, and you can hear all this other stuff. I say, “The most basic need for people is the need to feel safe.” And that’s the role of public health. Helping people feel safe and they feel safe when it’s a consistent message and something that it makes sense and something that they can achieve. You can’t set a goal that’s unachievable to them. So you got to work at it at their level, at their resources, and make it so they can feel safe and feel that somebody’s watching their back.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Definitely. I know you’re doing research with some faculty here at the College of Public Health. Can you tell us more about that? And I just want to hear about your project.

Peter Teahen:

Oh, yeah. Over the years when I’ve written books or we’ve done research papers, I was always amazed how there’s very little, very, very little information about those who care for the dead and the care of the family of the dead. And so when COVID broke out, I thought, this is a perfect storm for this study to come to fruition to figure out what we can capture because it’s consistent across the whole country. And so I have friends who work for Department of Health and Human Services in DC and Laurie Walkner and Rima Afifi now here. So I think I called Laurie first and I said, “Hey, I think we’ve talked about it before.” She and I have worked together for a lot of years. I said, “I think we’ve talked about it before, now call them the Last Responders. They’ve never been looked at or talked about.”

And she said, “Yeah.” And so I pitched this idea. “That’s a great idea.” Says, “Is that something public health college could back around?” And she said, “I think we can make that happen.” We had to work on funding. So then I called my friends at Department of Health and Human Services, and I say, “This group called Last Responders never been paid attention.” And they said, “Peter, you’re wrong. We have studied every group in society structure. There’s information out there.” I said, “Well, then you go find it.” And they said, “Well, we’ll go find it.” I said, “If you don’t find it, then you’re paying nice to have a study time.” “Sure we are, but we’ll find.” And they call back a couple of weeks later and says, “My God, this group has never been studied before. We can’t believe how important they are.” That they-

Garrett Naughton:

How much money you need.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah, exactly. And so Walkner and Seth got involved, and the college got involved, and we put together a plan and they supported it. And it’s a study of the Last Responders and the Last Responders is everyone from basically the time of death. So the morgue attendant at the hospital, the medical examiner, coroner, death investigator, funeral director, the cemetery people, and the crematory people, all of the key components of caring and disposing of the dead and their families. And people were just getting in the industry, were just getting excited. They said, “We’ve always wondered, but no one’s ever found the time.” And they pooh-poohed it, they said, “Well, nobody’s going to respond. We’re in the middle of the COVID, and they’ve never been asked this before, so they’re unlikely to do it.” So we went out with the college and we found all these organizations that represents all these groups and got them on board.

We put out a mass. We said we had to do a blind study, so we sent it to the organizations. They sent them out to their members, and people said, “My heavens!” I took the test questionnaire from a perspective. It took me over an hour to do. It was a long questionnaire in real detail. I made it, and I was still hiring. And they said, “Nobody’s going to take this much time.” And I always get pumped up when I got an idea that everything’s going to work. And they said, “Now be careful because we can put all thousands out, and you’re going to get very few back. You’ll be lucky to get a hundred questionnaires back. Quite honestly, if you got a hundred, you’d be lucky.” And we had asked them to fill the questionnaire out. Then we asked them to volunteer that when COVID was over six months later, which we know now isn’t true, but at that point, would they take the questionnaire again. And would you be willing to do an oral interview?

And so I’m thinking hundreds and everybody else is saying, “No, you’ll be lucky to get a hundred responses. You’ll get very few that want to do a second survey. And we need 30 people to do an oral interview. And we’ll be lucky in most cases to get those kinds of responses.” Well, I kept my fingers crossed. We had 700 surveys responding. After they went through and sorted out with some that were incomplete, we ended up with a clean almost 550 completed surveys. And we had about half of them willing to do the second survey. And we had well over, I think almost, and if I’m not accurate, it was almost 200 people that were willing to do the oral interview.

Everybody was… They said, “We can’t believe this. This shows how big of a need is.” And so great results in questionnaire, stunning findings out of the original questionnaire, the oral interviews are just so powerful. We have college staff and researchers that are doing the interviews, and they were being so moved by it. We ended up bringing in mental health people to work with the interviewers because of the information that they were receiving was so moving to them. And the response for the people telling their stories, they were penned up of all their lifetime career that no one’s ever asked them.

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah. I think real quick, I just wanted to follow up. Do you think that this lack of awareness for the Last Responders comes from the cultural part of America? Americans, we don’t really like to think about death. We like to push it off. We like, ah, it’s a later issue. Do you think that’s the reason? We just don’t really want to put those people who want to work with the dead bodies away. We want them to, don’t think about that.

Peter Teahen:

Don’t think about it.

Garrett Naughton:

The people who put the dead body, but I think obviously, they’re very important. They deal with traumatic things probably on a daily basis.

Peter Teahen:

You’re absolutely right. But I expand that because you said people in America, it’s really all around the world. People don’t want to talk about death or dying. I find that a lot of times when people ask me what I do, and it’s amazing when you say, “I’m a funeral director.” They squirm. They don’t want to talk about it. And they immediately put you in a corner over here that someone that is… And that’s out of the Bible. They talk about a person caring for the dead is unclean. And that comes out a Bible verse. And people, they just get the willy-nilly, and they don’t want talk about it. And then I tell them, “Well, I’m on the faculty of the University of Iowa as adjunct. I do all this research.” And then they don’t know how to balance it out because they have this perception what a funeral director does or a corner does.

And I don’t fit that mode in many cases. And they’re puzzled. But I’m always amazed at the difference. We had, for instance, in oral interviews, people were hurt because they were volunteering in New York, which was one of the hardest hit areas. People were coming up, restaurants and stores, like World Trade Center. First responders, free meals here. And they go in and they say, “Are you a first responder?” “No, we’re last responders.” Well, you don’t get free meals then. And they were doing things nobody else wanted to do. A lot of we heard is that dismissive. We had a hard time getting PPE, the protection wear. They said, “What do you need it for?”

Garrett Naughton:

Then you need so much more.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. If you lose us as a caretaker of the dead, then you’re going to have a back-up. And we saw that in New York and California. LA had to shut down their crematories because they were cremating so many, and they’re worried about air pollution. But people never understood what the role is. And that’s part of what we’re identifying. The public’s vision of what those Last Responders are, and hopefully trying to improve it.

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah, for sure. All right. Before we wrap up, I’m going to let you loose on this flight that you’re planning here. It’s very interesting, for sure.

Peter Teahen:

Oh, well, thanks. It’s called Flight to End Polio, and we take off in about six weeks or seven weeks. It’s the May 5th we depart. It’s been a long time coming. We started planning back in 2019, and we’ve been canceled two years now because of COVID last year, because of the invasion of Ukraine. The big thing here if you look in historical perspective, 4,000 people have climbed Mount Everest. 500 people have been in outer space. Only 700 pilots have achieved what we’re setting out to do at taking a single engine airplane around the world. And in the world right now, there’s only less than 270 pilots that have achieved this goal.

Garrett Naughton:

Really looking to go to the history books here.

Peter Teahen:

Go in the history book. And so we’re taking this singular engine airplane flying now 25,000 miles around the world. And they’re like 33 countries to raise awareness and funds to help end polio. And that’s why it’s called Flight to End Polio. 100% of the money that we raise goes to Rotary International, which is an international club, and they are the leading agency since 1984 to eradicate polio in the world. And they’ve got it down to like 99 point some percent of polio’s gone. But the only other virus in history of mankind, that’s been a limit-

Garrett Naughton:

Smallpox.

Peter Teahen:

Smallpox. Exactly. And so this would be the second.

Garrett Naughton:

I feel like this would be more impressive because the thing with smallpox, it can’t infect anything else, so it can’t really change. It only infects humans. But polio, I think it has a different bacteria reservoir-

Peter Teahen:

Crippling children, long-term crippling. And not only, we got the polio relapsing. I had a woman crying in a restaurant thanking me for this because her husband had just died from polio relapse. He had it as a child, never was affected. But as he got old, got into his lungs, got into his orifices, and it’s on the death certificate, he died from polio relapse. A powerful implication. We need to eradicate it. Our goal is to raise $1 million. 100% of what we raise goes to Rotary. My fellow pilot and I will be in the same plane. We’re paying our expenses completely. You don’t see too many fundraisers like that. And what’s even more exciting is Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $2 for every $1. So if we raise a million, they’re giving 2 million for 3 million. So you can go to flighttoendpolio.com. We have a GoFundMe, the people who donate to, and you can go on our site. We have a map and stuff, but it’s got to be a 90-day journey.

Garrett Naughton:

And what I had heard is you’re going to bring a camera.

Peter Teahen:

A camera?

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah. What’s your plan in terms of documenting this endeavor?

Peter Teahen:

We’ll do blogs hopefully every day. Put it online. We’ll do video. Not every day doing video because I’m not that good at it. And some of the areas we’re going to have our problem uploading. Uploading and getting it down. Resources, just like fuel. 40% of our places, we have to ship our fuel in by 55 gallon drums and then hand pump it in. So that’s going to take me a while. My arm gets sore. I’m going to be able to pump it so much. But it is one of those exciting adventures that this truly could impact the children. And right now, as you know from public health, we’re at the lowest vaccination rate in the world we’ve been in in years.

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah. That’s a whole nother-

Peter Teahen:

And they say we don’t eliminate polio soon, in the next 10 years, 200,000 children can become effective with polio. And we need to stop it and we need to stop it starting right here.

Garrett Naughton:

Yeah. Right. Rasika, you want to ask the last question here?

Rasika Mukkamala:

Yes. So this is something that we ask all of our guests, but what is one thing that you thought you knew but you were later wrong about? And it can be about your past or it can just be about life lessons you’ve learned.

Peter Teahen:

You hear those questions and you think about it. I think what you thought and later learned was wrong, most of that came from our parents. It’s like if you cross your eyes, they’re going to stick that way. I remember as growing up as a teenage boy, they said, “You can’t take a girl across the state line. She can’t have her shoes off.” Now, I don’t know what shoes off going across state lines are-

Garrett Naughton:

I haven’t heard that one.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah, that was the old one, the cross eye one. And then as a pilot, perception of the public is planes. If the engine stops, they fall out of the skies.

Garrett Naughton:

That’s not true.

Peter Teahen:

No, they become gliders.

Garrett Naughton:

Scary.

Peter Teahen:

Yeah. And 1993, I was flying the plane I had until just past November. We were flying 9,500 feet over St. Louis. We had five people on board. My engine blew up. I had no engine. And we were now became a glider. And that’s where I learned, hey, they do glide and we glided at 10 miles, put it down at an airport with no injuries and no damage. We had to replace the engine.

Garrett Naughton:

Professional. Right. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Obviously a very interesting man. A very, very diverse background, you got for sure. With helping the 9/11 incident up until COVID as of recently. You got diverse background, makes for a very interesting lecturer and speaker on a podcast. But I want to say thank you very much for your time and your dedication and compassion over the course of your career. We’ve really appreciated you on the show. If you had any final remarks, what would you want to say?

Peter Teahen:

For those who are going into public health, embrace it, challenge it, don’t get burned out by it and continue the belief that we talked about earlier. Keep your clients and your families as number one. As a responder, keep you and your family up in those one in two spot, because without keeping that focus, that ethical focus, then you’re really losing the reason you’re being in public health. Don’t lose it. You’re too important to a response.

Garrett Naughton:

Well, this has been Garrett and Rasika from From the Front Row. Thanks for tuning in.

Rasika Mukkamala:

Thanks everyone. See you next week.

Anya Morozov:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Peter Teahen for joining us today. This episode was hosted and written by Garrett Naughton and Rasika Mukkamala, and edited and produced by Anya Morozov. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook, and our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team, you can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.