When We Die Talks

Content note: this episode centers on suicide loss, discussed directly. If that's not something you're in a place for today, it's okay to sit this one out.

Our caller found their housemate in the home they shared, staged in a way that made sure they'd be the one to find him. He'd also been their romantic partner at one point, and one of their closest friends. The application that got them on this call was written about a month shy o...

This week's caller calls themself a radical death advocate. Not because they think dying is good, but because they see it as a part of the life cycle we're better off accepting than fighting. They're mostly at peace with the first death, the physical one. It's the second death, the one where your name stops being spoken, that they're still working through.

From there the conversation moves through an ofrenda they keep in their home ...

This week's caller was diagnosed as a type one diabetic when they were 22 months old. They've spent their entire life managing something that can genuinely kill them in either direction, and death has been a fact of daily life rather than a distant idea.

From there the conversation moves fast and wide. A reference to Coco and what it means to be remembered. The Big Bang and where the energy to start it came from. Consciousness, and ...

This caller was born into death. Their mother survived a rare, near-fatal condition as an infant only because a doctor happened to be at the house that day, checking on a dying sister. That's the reason this caller exists at all and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

From there, the conversation opens into a full cosmology the caller has been building for years: reflections in a bubble, a lava lamp as a model of conscious...

This caller doesn't come from a place of loss. They come from a place of curiosity, and a theory they've spent years quietly assembling.

It starts with reincarnation. But not the straightforward kind. Not a linear return to another body in the next moment. The caller imagines all points in time as equally available. Past, present, future. When you die, you pick a new life from any of them.

From there, the conversation moves into the ...

This episode includes an open and personal conversation about suicide, suicidal ideation, and suicidality, including experiences from childhood. If you're in a tender place with any of these themes, please take care of yourself first. If you need support, Thrive Lifeline is a great resource. 

This caller has spent most of their life in relationship with death, and they'll tell you that relationship started before they had words...

This week's caller grew up in a Roman Catholic household where death was treated as simply another part of life. Something to be at peace with rather than afraid of. But the conversation quickly turns to something that's shaped most of their adult life: being the one who shows up.

From early childhood spent in chemo waiting rooms to becoming, at 16, the family member who could see what others couldn't (or wouldn't) admit was happeni...

This week's caller is a retired physician who spent decades at the bedside of dying patients and now works at a funeral home. They have been present for death on both sides: as the person trying to slow it down, and as the person who shows up after. Somewhere in all of that, faith became the thing that held it all together.

This is a conversation about what it looks like to build an entire life around proximity to death and come out...

This week's caller is 79 years old and has spent the last three years going down every rabbit hole death has to offer. All in service of a book that's about to come out.

They have lost a husband and a mother. They have survived breast cancer. And somewhere in all of that, they stopped being afraid of dying and started being afraid of being dead.

This is a conversation between two people who have ended up in surprisingly similar place...

This week's caller was diagnosed with a terminal illness at eight years old. They have never not known that death was part of their life.

They are an actor, a writer, a reader, a person who rescues snails and keeps a pet millipede and loves sharks because they understand what it feels like to be misunderstood. They are also someone who has spent their entire life figuring out how to live fully inside a body that makes that complicat...

This week's caller is a pediatric nurse who has been around death long enough to stop fearing it and start getting curious about it.

They lost their father to suicide as a teenager. A few months later, they were the one doing CPR on their childhood best friend after an accidental fentanyl overdose. They were sixteen. They didn't become a nurse because of those losses exactly, but those losses made them someone who couldn't look away...

This one is different.

When We Die Talks is built around anonymous conversations — people calling in to talk about death, dying, and what they think comes next. No names, no faces, just honest conversation. This episode breaks that format entirely, and I think once you hear it you'll understand why it had to.

Don Sires was one of the very first guests on this podcast. Over a year ago he sat down with me, not anonymously, by his...

This week's caller has been living with grief long enough to become a student of it. They lost their mom at twenty-two. Then their cat. Then their soul dog thirteen months ago. 

This is a conversation about grief that doesn't rank itself, animals as family, and what it means to believe your soul chose this life even when this life has been really hard.

We talk about losing a parent young and what it does when no one ever talked ...

Note: This episode includes an open discussion of suicide and suicide loss. Please listen when you're in a good place to do so.

This week's caller has lived through a concentrated stretch of loss that would bring most people to their knees. A beloved grandmother who raised them. Another grandmother, expected but still hard. And then, in March of 2021, their husband — suddenly, traumatically, in a way that left no warning and n...

This week's caller has been sitting with death since childhood. They grew up deep inside Pentecostal religion, the shouting, the standards, the constant weight of what comes next, and instead of finding comfort there, they left with more questions than answers. They've been chasing those questions ever since. 

This is a conversation about ego, identity, and why the thing afraid of dying might not even be you.

We talk about growi...

This weeks caller lost their baby brother on Thanksgiving Day when they were five, and has spent their whole life with what they call "a little bird called death" on their shoulder. They're a death doula, a trauma-informed yoga instructor, a Reiki master, and an adventure motorcyclist, and they're still  terrified of death.

But somehow, that's exactly what makes this conversation so good.

The caller is funny, self-aware, and ref...

This caller grew up without religion, lost their mom to suicide at 13, and spent years in a fear of death so overwhelming they couldn't be around skeletons or eat meat. Then they were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

But somehow, this is not a sad episode.

This week's caller is funny, sharp, and genuinely at peace — not because life got easier, but because they stopped waiting for it to. We talk about what it actually felt l...

What would change if we treated death as a human event, not just a medical one?

This week’s anonymous caller is a death doula. And instead of going abstract, they get surprisingly specific about what the end can look like and what people wish they’d put in place sooner.

A lot of this episode lives in the gap between what we assume will happen and what actually happens when things move quickly: who makes decisions, what fa...

What if death isn’t peaceful, or blank, or anything you can make sense of, but something you’re trapped inside?

This week’s anonymous caller doesn’t come in with a comforting belief or a story about loss. They come in with death anxiety. The kind that’s hard to explain even when you’re trying to explain it.

We talk through what the fear actually feels like when you get specific. Not just “I&r...