Meet The Pierce Brothers!

Jonathan Pierce and David Pierce offer a unique service: officiating weddings, funerals, and memorial services. Their personalized approach reflects the life of the deceased in a way that resonates with loved ones. If religious rituals and/or spiritual language are important to you, Jonathan and David will include them in a meaningful way to you and your loved ones. If you prefer not to include spiritual or religious language, none will be added.

For this quarter’s Keohane newsletter, we spoke with the brothers in detail about their backgrounds and approach to delivering this essential service.

You are both graduates of divinity schools. It's interesting that as brothers, you both chose that path. Was it a calling that you felt early on? Or was there a circuitous route that led you to attending a divinity school?

David Pierce: My route, at least early on, was a pretty straight shot. I had a clear sense that I was going to end up eventually going to a seminary or divinity school. I've mostly worked in parish settings, church settings. Of course, as part of any church parish setting, you do a lot of funerals, you provide a lot of care to a lot of families in grief and in crisis. So funeral services and crafting services and working with funeral homes has always been part of my work, largely through my work in more church parish settings.

Jonathan Pierce: Not at all for me. I went to undergrad at the College of William & Mary.I thought I wanted to study languages and political science or government, and I took a religion course, and that kind of set me on a different path. I realized I love the study of religion. David and I grew up in a family where church and Christian faith were really important, and I took great pleasure in learning to think and look critically at these things that I'd already always only understood in a very personal way.

After undergrad, I realized that I had a lot more questions than answers, and Divinity School seemed like a great place to go ask those questions. And so, it was a very not well thought out, kind of a very selfish, navel-gazing kind of path. I wanted to go to study more, to ask more questions. I really had no career goals in mind. I knew I didn't want to work for a church, and I didn't.

And you graduate from Divinity School, you still have to get a job.

JP: You're not going to be in a church, you've got to pay the bills somehow. I ended up working in hospice chaplaincy, and it was not formally a calling. It literally was, what job am I going to do? And I think I might enjoy that.

If you think you enjoy hospice chaplaincy, it might be the right thing for you, because it's a weird thing to feel like you might be good at. But I enjoyed it, I was good at it, and in fact, I loved it. And I guess it became a kind of calling, it became what I felt like I should do.

And it was through doing that work that I, like David, but through a different means, found myself officiating hundreds of funerals and memorial services over my 15-year hospice career, certainly over 1,000 now. And it was through that work that I first met the Keohanes. My work supporting hospice people on the South Shore brought me into their orbit before David and I started this enterprise.

It must be so meaningful, knowing the impact you're having on a family and friends and the community and the person that's transitioning. That's got to be quite extraordinary to carry forth, although constantly being surrounded by death and dying must be tough after a while.

JP: I would say that as a practicing meditator, someone for whom meditation and mindfulness is really important, being close to death, again, this marks me as a weirdo in cultural terms, but it's a very helpful thing because it keeps me honest about the stakes of living and what matters and being around people at end of life and certainly in communal memorial services.

Yes, people are going through a very hard time, but they're also really trying to be at their best. And that's a very special thing to see. I mean, even when families aren't at their best, it's special to see the ways in which they're trying and succeeding despite failing. There's a beautiful quality. It's never not interesting.

You shared a bit about your background in our opening conversation. You mentioned growing up in a very Christian household.

DP: Faith was sort of central to your lives.

What was that like growing up? Was it church every week and living the faith?

DP: I would say for both of us growing up, the part of my faith that I really appreciated early on and have not stopped appreciating was a really strong sense of a caring community. It took me a long time before I started questioning the values that undergirded that community and started thinking more critically on my own terms about even what the word faith means and how I come to apply that and make space for that in my life. But none of that for me has ever changed the fact that growing up, I was pretty fortunate to be circled by a lot of caring people, people who genuinely wanted to look out for their neighbors. Genuinely, people that fit the cliche of, the people that showed up with casserole dishes on the front doorstep for every death. And I really came to see a certain hopefulness and came to appreciate what that stood for and that the place that it held in the lives of the people around me, came to hold that place for me as well.

And I think for me, a lot of my own sense of, whether you want to call it vocation or calling or just career choice, had to do with wanting to be in community. And I'm still doing in my approach to working with families now through Keohane. A lot of the families we work with are families that I don't meet until I get the call saying that there's a family looking to have a service and they want to find a way to honor their loved one and to tell their loved one's story.

That's usually the first time I meet them. And I still come at that thinking about, ‘what is it going to look like and what is it going to mean to be in community with this family and to care at the end of the day?’ To care enough to want to know their story, who was their loved one? What were the things that were important to their loved one? What were the things their loved one found great struggle in in their life? For me, those are all elements of community that really, I started figuring those parts out really early on. I think the parts that have more to do with how I now interpret and understand my own faith, and even how I think about what it means to call myself one particular thing, say, a Christian, I think of that a lot more critically now than I did in the community that I grew up in.

JP: Being a part of a religious community growing up, church was a big part of our youth. I mean, going to Sunday school, going to church, going to Bible camp in the summer. We grew up in a little evangelical church, which were outliers here in New England at the time. And as David underscored, the nice part about that, was learning how to be around people that were similar, but also different.

I'm even thinking of being around a lot of older people. Our grandparents, but also all of their friends. And I wouldn't have been a successful hospice chaplain or a funeral officiant if I hadn't learned how to engage intergenerationally. That's a huge plus. And a big part of my college and divinity school experience was getting critical distance from that world. And the end result for me was that world really ended up feeling much too small for a number of reasons.

I took a long time away from church and from spiritual community generally, because I wasn't sure there was one that was big enough to hold the multitudes that is me. I mean, I spent years in psychotherapy. I love psychoanalytic Freudian stuff. And I'm a Buddhist practitioner. I practice meditation in a Buddhist mindfulness way. I've added a lot of self-care community things to my well-being that are not Christian or even religious. They're just as important to who I am in the world as the Christian faith I grew up in.

I also never said no to the Christian faith I grew up in. I never rejected it, but I argued with it. I put it down and I turned away from it. And I just kind of held those things in tension until holding them in tension didn't feel like a complicated thing. I wouldn't say I resolved anything, but I resolved to be someone who, as Walt Whitman said, contains multitudes.

And if I contradict myself, well, all right. And that has been very helpful to me in the work I do, because being a hospice chaplain and doing funerals in the way David and I do them is about being present to anyone and everyone. I've done funerals for non-practicing Jewish people, and I've done a lot of funerals over the years for African-American families where I'm one of the only white people there. I mean, really supporting people across all manner of difference. It’s risky, crazy, scary in some ways--and it's also lovely and fun. I think I love that about being a person of faith, being open to all.

I'll say this now, I’ve organized and facilitated on the South Shore, for the people that might be reading this, a new non-religious spiritual practice and volunteer community. It's really a spiritual community for people that identify as “nones,” and non-practicing people. It's meant to be welcoming and inclusive of people that find traditional religious community a little too constricting.

At a time where religious affiliation is declining and yet there are people following the non-denominational Christian part, people are still seeking in some way. They're looking for answers, but they're also looking for some form of belonging and a sense of something larger than themselves, in whatever form that might take. Most major religions--Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism--effectively boil down to love thy neighbor. Yet we seem to stray so far away from that or to use commentaries as leverage to avoid having to love our neighbors without qualification. And so the group that you're talking about Jonathan, I think people want to be able to explore this in a safe environment to do so, is really valuable.

JP: I think it's worth noting. Culturally speaking, you don't have to be a sociologist to know that most of the people, even the non-practicing people on the South Shore, identify or grew up in some kind of Christian community and/or Catholic. I'm very happy to be both literate but authentically literate in the language those people speak because it's comforting and there's no need to say no to two things just because you are non-practicing or you found other things helpful. There's no need to say no to the things that you have found helpful before or that are part of your family system.

That's just as important to me as being available to people who don't identify with anything but need support at end of life.

DP: Being able for me to come alongside of a family, particularly in in time of death, when you're thinking about crafting a service, is that I'm not looking to interpret for a family what they should be thinking in that moment. I'm not even looking to help provide meaning to the moment for them. I really am stepping into the moment with just sheer curiosity, and curiosity is one of the things that was not part of our faith upbringing. In fact, if anything, I like to think that we were taught to not be curious.

And, I sort of am drawn to your comment about “love thy neighbor.” It’s pretty universal and bedrock. And it's just good human practice. But I think, right alongside of that, you have to be curious about your neighbor. I think for me, it's really also about just asking good questions. If I'm okay with what I don't know in a moment, I find that families are more inclined to also be okay with what they don't know. So, if anything, one of the things that I've tried to grow into is being very comfortable with what I don't know and not feeling like I have to reconcile that.

You know, if I'm trying to reconcile those things for myself, then the family I'm working with is going to feel like they're somehow or another supposed to be doing that as well. And that's not important. That's a pressure and expectation that doesn't have any necessary place in memorializing or celebrating a loved one..

Walt Whitman famously said, be curious, not judgmental. And it's a great approach to life is just to hold that curiosity without having an opinion about it. I'm curious in both of your careers prior to this endeavor that you launched, what led to creating the Pierce Brothers as a service offering, effectively for weddings, funerals and memorial services?

We should be clear that this is this is a part time enterprise for us that exists alongside other full-time work that we do. Thankfully, our full-time work has tremendous flexibility and bandwidth to be able to do this work also, which is economically helpful to us, but also practically what that's worth.

What are your full time jobs outside of this?

DP: I'm still in full-time parish work. I'm still working in a church, in a faith community full-time. And part of what led to this was, I have just found over the last five or six years especially, and I do attribute some of this to the pandemic and to the shifts that occurred in community life for a lot of people during the pandemic, I have just found that I am my own people, if you will, that are sharing space with me and holding space with me as part of my own parish.

They are wandering outside of the traditions and the customs and the practices of their own church when it comes to funeral services. I do very few services anymore inside of any kind of established church building. I find that even with my own congregants, they're not even coming.

They're working out of a funeral home. I was really getting a lot closer in working with funeral homes in the area and finding that they were calling more often. I was getting a lot more calls from funeral homes saying “there's a family and they've had a death. They would like to do something, but they don't know what.” And that's kind of the beginning of it. They would call and there was a sense for them that in calling me and in calling Jonathan, that we would be people that would come alongside of them and help them tease out whatever that what is, in a way that it's going to feel authentic and real for them. And in a way that is not going to feel like they're going to be given something canned or rehearsed.

JP: Yeah, there's absolutely nothing canned at all about what we do. I can honestly say of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of services I've done, I've never done two that are the same. And when I say they're not the same, I don't just mean I switch out the names.

DP: The sense of belonging and intimacy is different in every single service. And more often than not, I find that that's at the end of the day, if you get a family that comes back and they say, Wow, I had no idea that that was the experience we were going to have. And that, you know, that was healing. That was joyful, even. It was meaningful. It was sacred. It was clarifying. I think most often what I hear people say is, “I had no idea. I had no idea it could be that good.”

That's quite a compliment to you. It’s got to be so gratifying to hear that.

Well, I'm usually seeing the same thing about my own experience, quite honestly. I'm generally coming away from it and saying that was lovely.

JP: You know, every time I'm hearing stories I don't know, and am really amazed at people's abilities. On the one hand, I've seen more times than I can count someone who feels like they can't get up to speak getting up and doing it. That happens almost every time. But every time it happens, it's amazing to see that particular individual, who we spent a little bit of time getting to know, doing it.

And it's amazing to see the person who's being memorialized and celebrated, tokind of feel the way their spirit comes alive in the room. As a as a postmodern kind of believer…I don't necessarily believe in miracles because I've never seen one, because as a hospice chaplain, death operated with 100% certainty. Yet, when I'm at a memorial service, there is something that is a little super ordinary. I wouldn't I wouldn't call it magical. I wouldn't even call it sacred, but it's very special. The sense of something alive coming, the sense of love being bigger than death.

And that, wow, we can we can talk through what's hard and challenging. We can we can speak our truth about this person. And even if the person was a hard to love person, which happens. Life's complicated. We find the words to say what we need to say and it ends up being good. And that's the hidden secret. It’s amazing.

DP: People will say that. I think some of that is cultural around our own perceptions and experiences of death, you know, which feels about as powerful a force to be reckoned with as any in the human experience, I suppose. But I think there's a lot to be said for good practice, first off. But whenever someone says that to me, my first response is always to say, “well, what do you do?” You know, and I had a woman who said this the other day. She's like, “how do you do that?” And I said, “Well, what do you do?” And she said, “I teach kindergarten.” I said “well, how the hell do you do that? I couldn't do that.” You know, we assume that what other people are doing must be harder than what we do.

And oftentimes we discover that there's far more within us than we realized.

JP: Yeah, for sure. I don't know if this partially answers that question too but I've been organizing this new community on the South Shore called Mindfulness Plus. And that operates in association with a congregational church in Cohasset, where I'm also the minister.

Partly what I'm trying to do across the board is create new spaces alongside the old and familiar and offering this church I'm working for a chance to reconnect with new people in the community in new ways via mindfulness practice. One of the reasons I was drawn to spiritual organizing spiritual community and left hospice was, as David and I have done this work-and it's going to sound like a brag, I don’t mean it to—but people seeing a funeral or memorial that is done with care and that privilege is the language in the spirit and the sense of spirituality that they already bring. And it starts with, as David said, with curiosity, people would, after a service, ask, “do you have a church?” And I know these are people that don't go to church. They're like, “wow, I'd like to be a part of like this.” I don't know what they're noticing exactly. Maybe they're noticing that curiosity or that openness, or to compare it to what they knew growing up and what they left. There’s sort of a fixed image in their minds of what church is.

And when you are somewhat radically apart from that, it changes their entire perspective. “Oh, I didn't realize that it could be this. I didn't realize a funeral could look like this.” I remember one of the very first funerals David and I ever did was our grandfather's, a number of years ago. And one of our uncles, my aunt's husband, he grew up, Catholic in Fall River. And he saw David. I don't think he'd ever been in our Protestant church. I think his parents told me you should never go inside it. And, he ended up leaving his Catholic faith. But I remember that day when he saw David and I standing up front, praying out loud and he saw that and said, “I had no idea ministers could do that. I had no idea ministers could get up and walk up front without having to be scared of being struck by lightning!” People don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re amazed when they see freedom and curiosity.

Storytelling is at the core of what you do, whether it's a wedding, a funeral, memorial service. How do you develop the stories for each of these? David, at the beginning of the conversation you mentioned that every service is unique. Jonathan, you affirmed that as well. How do you develop the appropriate stories for these events?

DP: I think the best way to answer that is to give you an example. I did a service just a couple days ago on the South Shore and I spoke with the spouse, and sometimes when I make connection with a family, there's always one person that you come through the door to. But then after you meet that person, they'll connect you with a daughter or son or son in law or cousin. But in this case, it was just the wife of the deceased man. I was curious in all the ways that I'm curious and she just didn't offer much. She didn't have a lot to say and I got the sense that not having a lot to say was because she didn't want a lot to be said.

I came to find out after the fact that they had a couple children, but they'd been estranged and she didn't share that with me, but I started getting the sense as she was talking about him, but not mentioning them. I asked, what's the one thing that you would say if you knew that it was never going to be told? The story then became about how we all have a story with unpublished pages. Every life has got some unpublished pages to it.

All we were able to do with the service was for me to invite people to think within themselves quietly. It was a very small service, which allowed some space within the service for people to sit quietly and to think about their own page of this person's story. And we didn't speak it, which was very different for me.

In some ways, it's a counterintuitive thing for me, because you might assume that when people call us, they're looking for someone to do some talking, right? For me to then lead a service and just give them space to think about who this person was to us, and to particularly sit with the pieces that we would not want to ever say out loud…she told me afterwards that that was particularly powerful for her because no one had given her the permission to do that. And so that became the story--the story actually became the story we didn't tell.

It was an interesting twist. Now, this woman, interestingly enough, when I asked her about other pieces of the service, and whether she wanted to include any music, she said he was a huge Beach Boys fan and that he loved the original Beach Boys stuff, like “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Little Deuce Coupe.” And she said that we're not going to play that at the funeral. We ended up playing a Beatles song instead, “I'll Follow the Sun.”

I asked her, why not? Why can't we play a Beach Boys song? And that too, with just that simple question, freed her to think about how we go about making these decisions. How do we sum up a life? Who tells us that you can't do that, or you have to do this? That's a big part of the work, creating the space where people can find a little bit of freedom.

And it's interesting that she said that no one had ever given her that permission before, when so often, this is more philosophical than anything else. But in life, so often, we wait for someone to give us permissions, as opposed to recognizing that we inherently have it and just need to grant it to ourselves to take whatever action step we want to take.

Jonathan, do you have anything you want to add?

JP: My role is to create welcoming, warm space and put people at ease so they can tell the story they're there to tell. I usually encourage families, in addition to having one or two people who are going to speak or give a eulogy, to open up the floor for other people to speak. And usually when you do that, there are special things shared. Part of the way I create that safe space is when I'm listening to a family before the service talk about their loved ones.

I’ll share a few things that I know in my words of welcome. I’ll share a few things that are told to me. And I'll also make it clear that I only know the person that we're celebrating through stories, that stories are the means by which at which I know this person, and it's important to tell these stories. I don't try to make more of the person than I'm able to make.

I don't try to hide my interest in it. If I've been told something that's special or fun, I make clear that I enjoyed hearing it. If the family told me the person’s death was hard, I make room for people to feel the heaviness of it because that's what they need to feel. And then I I encourage them. I invite them to tell their stories and model how to do that a little bit at the beginning.

You’ve both led a lot of celebrations in a variety of settings. What the most unique memorial service you participated in? And how do you help people in refining their ideas?

I did a memorial service in the clubhouse of a condominium community, and the only thing they had for me to place my papers upon that I had brought with me for the service was a keg. And it was totally clear that they thought that that was not only totally appropriate, but completely awesome! So I just played into it. We talked about what it was about that space and about the choices that were being made to have the service where we were having it and having a keg for a pulpit. This family was very specific that they did not want any prayers offered. It's not unusual to have a family say, because I'll always ask, “would you like me to offer any prayers in the service?” Sometimes they'll say no, so we, as part of the service, instead of offering prayer, we offer toasts.

JP: Like David, I've done on boats, I've done them in backyard barbecues…in the spirit of what David said about toasts, I did a service once at a Knights of Columbus. The guy was part of a biker club and died in the 60s. They had an open bar all throughout the service.

It was the kind of service where people were mostly sitting and listening to what was going on, but they had their drinks and were eating food. And, when I was sitting at the front, the guy's son played “Wish You Were Here” on the guitar as his tribute to his dad. It was amazing. As I'm up front looking out, there's this huge picture that had been blown up near the bar of the deceased, leaning against his bike. He was like holding up his favorite beer.

At the end of the service, when it came time to give a final blessing, after looking at this picture the whole time, I said, “if you've been to a funeral before, you'll see the priest, when they give the final blessing, they put their hands out like this.” And I picked up a Budweiser that was there too! I was like everyone else, when Rome. I picked up my Budweiser and said, “how about this?” And I held up my arms like a minister would, with the Budweiser in my hand, just like the picture of the guy. I gave my final blessings, trying to mirror back the words and the stories people shared. And that felt so right.

Of course, everyone was thought that was the funniest, coolest thing. But really, I was doing as everyone was doing and owning that in the moment. I'll never forget that ceremony.

That's the most spiritual use I've ever heard Budweiser!

DP: If I can just to add in, to go full circle on my own story…one of the things that I take as great compliment, and I use that word humbly, is if I've left a service that was in a condominium clubhouse with a keg for a pulpit and, someone says, “you really helped me today to find something very deeply meaningful that I can walk out of here carrying my heart has a fullness to it that didn't have before. To use religious language: if someone even says, “wow, I had no idea that God could be found in these types of places, doing these types of things,” to me, that's a great compliment. Because at the end of the day, we're trying to show that, particularly around funeral services, the ground beneath us is still there.

How did you end up coming to work with Keohane and be the go-to resource when people are looking for an officiant? 

JP: I'm very grateful to Dennis in particular because it was through doing a service with him that the idea came to me to offer my services with David and then to formally make a business out of it.

It came from working with Dennis on a particular service. I had done services at Keohane over the years with hospice patients, but a colleague of mine in hospice, her daughter died. It was a very tragic death, and it was a very big deal that rocked the community of that colleague of mine. Her daughter was 18 years old, and it was going to be a very hard and challenging service for the mother and all the people that loved her.

It was one of those that's very hard, and my colleague asked me, because I worked with her, and she knew me as a chaplain, and there was a sense of safety and rapport with me, and, her grief, as we say in hospice words, was very complicated. She had a lot of anger and definitely a big giant middle finger poked up toward the skies, like why?

Which, in that case, that was the question. For me to try to answer that would have been a height of insensitivity. That was the question we had to ask, while also making room to celebrate this young woman's life, and all that was beautiful in it, and so I did that service, and there were hundreds of people crammed into the McDonald-Keohane home in South Weymouth. I can imagine that that was a challenging service for Dennis as the lead funeral director. A lot of people, a lot of energy, and a lot of emotion, and that service, I felt—and I don't mean it in a professional sense-- I felt good after, because I was able to give my friend and all those gathered the opportunity to do something they needed to do. A couple of weeks later I had coffee with Dennis, and I was said “maybe I should be more forward in offering this support, because many people need an unconventional kind of support, and I know how to do that, I've done it a lot. Why not be intentional in offering it?” That experience was powerful, and in that sense, there's something here worth being more forward in offering rather than waiting for it to come. John and Dennis and their team call us regularly, because we want to be able to help people with this.

The Pierce Brothers can be reached at https://www.piercebrothers.org/.

Jonathan Pierce’s community organization is Mindfulness Plus, a non-religious spiritual practice and volunteer community supporting the South Shore. Of particular interest to people in the Keohane orbit is the Living With Loss Community Support Group, which happens weekly in Hingham, open to all at no cost.