November 1, 2023 • 37 mins
Days after the debut of this season, Jessie Lee Ward, who was featured in episodes one and nine, passed away after a short battle with cancer. Jane reconnects with Erin Bies to discuss her former friend’s legacy and talks with Death Coach, Megan Carmichael, about what to make of death when you had a complicated relationship with the person who has passed on.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey, Dream listeners, if you like this podcast, you're gonna
love the book.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I wrote a book. It's called Selling the Dream and
it's coming out March twelfth, twenty twenty four, on Atria.
It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and
some that you've never even heard of. I hope check
it out previously on the Dream. So can I ask
about your style of coaching? I've watched a lot of
(00:45):
your videos and I feel like your style is I
don't want to say agro, but you're very boisterous. You're
very You're kind of tough. Was that a choice or
is that just like how you naturally are?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Can I ask you a question?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah? Do you pay for my coaching?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Do I pay for your coaching?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah? Like, are you in accelerator program?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
No?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
My coaching's not boisterous?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Oh it isn't.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, No, not funny.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Do you tell people that when they sign up it's
like you're not going to get the same thing that
you see on online?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
No, that wouldn't be accurate either. I think that it's
important to realize that what you see on social media
tend to be a snippet of somebody's personality or like
a little glimpse into their life. But inside of my coaching,
it is very tactical. It is super super kind, loving, open,
empathetic listening. It is responsive into what people need, especially
(01:43):
in my platinum coaching. It's super conversational. But I think
I'm really different than people assume I am. From the internet. Anyhow, So.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Two months after the conversation you just heard, and days
after this season launched, jesse Lee died. There are very
few details I heard the same way. I heard that
she was broadcasting our chat through texts from former friends
like Aaron Bees, who we spoke to in episode one.
I guess it was only maybe six weeks after or
(02:20):
when when did she pass?
Speaker 5 (02:21):
September sixteenth?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Okay, yeah, it was about then. Six weeks after I
spoke to her. She was gone. Yeah, and I found
out from you first that she wasn't doing well. Why
don't you talk me through that?
Speaker 5 (02:39):
Yeah? So, actually I didn't. I didn't realize how quickly
the decline would be. On my YouTube channel, I have
members that we have a discord, and we talk pretty
candidly in there.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I don't think my audit discord is just kind of
like a.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
Like a chat. There's different channels, different companies, topics that
we talk about within multi level marketing. There's an empathy chat,
and there's just different areas where we discuss specific things
within multi level marketing. I feel like a lot of
her followers are experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance. And
(03:21):
when I heard that she passed, I immediately obviously thought
of her family and the people closest to her and
how this has to be such a shock for them,
but also for jesse Lee's audience. You know, these people
that have followed her for many, many years, and now
all of a sudden, she's just gone. And the only
thing that they can see is the last live that
(03:44):
she did where she told them that the cancer was
regressing and that her lymphotes were going back to normal.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well, hello, hello everybody, what's going on? It's jesse Lee.
You can call me Boss Lee if you'd like to.
How or the people's mentor I haven't done it live
like in a minute, so well, that's not really true.
I did a coffee and on the floor two days ago. Okay,
I did just get a phone call. I guess it's
been like four or five hours now. I've tried to
(04:12):
make the rounds of people that I'm super close with,
And if I look like I'm exhausted, if you're like,
she looks really tired, like I don't know that is
because first of all, I am okay, I have not
been sleeping well, which has been freaking me out, if
we're being very honest with each other, because I can't sleep.
I'm really bloated from just this extra liquid that's in
(04:35):
my abdomen. I feel like I am I'm scared all
the time because the lymph nodes in the net, like
it is the biggest mind f ever. And I have
the strongest mindset of anybody I've ever met, and I
still am over here on a daily basis, like it hurts,
it hurts, it hurts my my kid, theesus and my kid,
(04:57):
theseus about liver anyway, that the cough scary scary? Why
am I coughing up? Okay, so so excuse me. I
got a call today and mostly my stomach turnover even
thinking about it, And as soon as I saw my
oncologist's number flash on the screen, I had like a
(05:18):
little minor panic attack, like do I let it go
to voicemail or do I not? Uh? So I was nervous.
And then my doctor called today and and he said,
and he read my my pet scan from last Monday,
and it's very good news. So for those of you
(05:39):
who don't know, it's very good news. Not a drop
of chemo and not a blast of radiation, not anything
from a single traditional on college except for to read
my scans. And he said that the cancer is decreasing
in my body. Many of my limph notes have gone
back to normal. There's a few hot spots that were
always there, nothing has increased. And he said, he said, oh,
(06:02):
he's like, just get another scan in six months and
we'll see how it's going. And for those of you
who don't know, when I was diagnosed in and went
to and do you understand in March they told me
I wouldn't live to see November. And now they're asking
me to not get scanned for another six months because
(06:23):
the disease is regressing so dramatically. So thank you for
all your prayers. Thank you for you guys who have
sent really encouraging messages. I know I've had weird pains
and my kidney's hurt or my liver or something hurts.
I don't know what hurts, but wow, I love y'all
(06:43):
so much. I appreciate you so much. Keep the prayers coming.
We got a long road to go. Pray for this
back pain to go away, the stomach pains go away
because and keep praying for the cancer to go away,
because your prayers are definitely working. So God bless all y'all.
Thank you for being on this journey with me, and
let's keep this thing going. God bless y'all.
Speaker 5 (07:04):
And so how do you go from September fifth saying Hey,
I don't have to get another pet scan for six months.
You know, essentially the oncology from the sounds from her video,
essentially it sounded like the oncologist was giving her a
thumbs up, and it's kind of like then on the
sixteenth she's passed. And I feel like that was such
a shock to her followers. And that's why I say,
(07:26):
I feel like they're experiencing cognitive dissonance because they know
she's gone, but it doesn't make sense. They don't understand
because of that narrative that she created around her cancer journey.
The way that I found out was from a post
by Eric Worry, who's a multi level marketing quote unquote coach.
So he was one of jesse Lee's mentors and he
(07:48):
posted I think it was on Instagram and I believe
on Facebook somewhere around late February where she was going
in for surgery to have part of her colon removed,
and he at that point said that she had been
diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. So that was how
the world found out about this. It wasn't from jesse Lee,
it wasn't from anybody in her inner circle. It was
from Eric Worry, which is interesting to me because that's
(08:12):
how the world found out that jesse Lee her health
was declining, was because he also posted on Facebook and
Instagram and everywhere, which I find really odd. Yeah, I mean,
is that his place? I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah. So maybe she asked him.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I don't know, I don't I don't know. I just
it's uncomfortable that he did that, you know, because at
the end of the day, this is her story, and
I may not agree with the painting of the narrative
and the lack of truthfulness and the straight up misinformation,
but it was still her story to tell, right, you know. Right,
(08:53):
So that was February, and I saw her kind of
go back and forth based on what she was putting
out on social media and whether she was going to
do chemo or not, and there was speculation, not even speculation.
She said that she was considering doing chemo in May,
and she went to an acupuncturist, and that acupuncturist said,
(09:16):
I don't think you need chemo. You need to go
plant based, and so that was when she switched to
vegetables and all of that stuff. And I watched her
go back and forth between going to I think she
was in Germany and she was seeing a biohacking doctor overseas,
and then she was going to different treatments, which from
(09:37):
what she has said, some of those treatments included ozone
both intravenously and also rectly, and coffee enemas and high
vitamin seed drips and all kinds of other holistic type treatments.
I don't even know if I want to call them treatments,
(09:58):
to be honest. And I feel like we all just
watched her decline on social media while she was smiling
and telling everybody you know, no, I'm beating cancer, and
it created cognitive dissonance within her community and her followers
because they're like, oh, yeah, she's saying she's great, but
you look at her and you're like, but your eye
(10:18):
sockets look like they're you know, drawn in or whatnot.
And you could see a weight loss, a lot of
weight loss. That temporal wasting look was really alarming to me,
and I'm like, how can you say that you're getting
better when when you are, you're physically you are starting
to change because of the weight loss. And it didn't
(10:40):
make sense to me. So I can't imagine how her
followers must have been.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Well, she was selling a weight loss product.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Right, yeah, yeah, even though they say it's not weight loss,
but all of them do before and after pictures, right.
So then I found out she was in the hospital
the September eleventh, I want to say, or twelfth, somewhere
in there. And you know, the next thing we know,
I'm hearing all this chatter about jesse Lea's has passed.
(11:09):
And then people started to post and to speculate, because again,
I feel like people didn't understand what was really going
on because they believed what she was telling them.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
After I, you know, I had interviewed her, I was
following along a little bit more closely. The symptoms she
was experiencing during that time are end stage cancer symptoms, right, Like, Yeah,
the fluid in her abdomen from liver failure, the difficulty breathing,
(11:43):
the back pain even in that yeah, the cough in
that final video she can't fully catch her breath, and
again the continued weight loss. Yeah, all of those things
are very in line with like multi organ failailure. Absolutely
(12:04):
a metastasized cancer, which she did acknowledge that it had metastasized,
right she did.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
In one of her videos that she did sometime this
past summer, early summer, she was talking about how she
mentioned that it was in her esophagus. She mentioned it
was in I believe twenty six lymph nodes or something
like that, of the thirty that they removed during her surgery.
(12:30):
She mentioned areas being lit up on a scan, you know,
And this was all after she had had the surgery,
so she was very aware that it had metastasized.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
I don't know when she started saying this, but she
would introduce herself on almost every video as welcome to
jesse Lee beats Cancer. Holistically. Is that yep. Okay, yep.
So it was kind of a branded experience sort of.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
Yeah, And I do think that there's a place for
holistic type treatments, but I think that we also have
to depend on, you know, what we know works best
against the scenario that people are facing, and you know
that would be for cancer, it's it's chemotherapy. And I
also but.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
You do all of that and then you go, Okay,
maybe I'll just like pound the turmeric juice or whatever.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Yeah, but or things that can help with the symptoms
from you know, traditional treatments, things that can help with
nausea and you know, different things like that. So I
do think that there's a place for that.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
So she had had she been anti chemo those kinds
of things prior to this, I think, do you know,
I know, I saw one video where she was telling
people not to get mammograms.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
Yeah, she was definitely telling people not to get mammograms.
She was telling people they didn't need ultrasounds. She was
telling people, you know, just trust your body and know
your body, and you can know your body and know
how you typically feel and miss a life altering thing
diagnosis or whatnot. I don't know how I want to
(14:16):
word that, and that's why they do a lot of
screening things. So if anything out of all of this,
I really hope that people get screened when they have
risk factors for anything like this. Just go to the
doctor and get those things checked out, get the screening done,
(14:37):
and just you know, I guess, be vigilant about that.
I hope that that's the message out of all of this.
At the end of the day, jesse LEAs she was
still a human being, and to think about her being
in as much pain as she was, knowing that there
could have been you know, palliative care to prevent some
of this, to slow down her body's response to the
(14:59):
pain and the spreading of the cancer. I didn't know
that that was a thing. I didn't know that. I mean, obviously,
nobody should be in that kind of pain, you know,
and we don't want other humans to experience that. But
to understand, like the physiological aspect of what happens when
somebody is in late stage cancer and then they're in
pain and they have a fever and their blood pressure
(15:22):
is up and how that just basically accelerates them passing
is heartbreaking to me.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, yeah, that you can't catch your breath essentially, and yeah,
it must have been brutal.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
I think that the spreading of misinformation in these last
six and a half seven months that she has has
given on her platform is extremely alarming. I know how
commercial cults operate, and how they look at their leader
and believe everything that their leader is saying. And unfortunately,
(16:00):
you know, there's probably people out there that are going
to listen to her advice, you know, because we could
get into a whole conversation about well, if I am
only going to be given nine months, or if I
do chemotherapy, I'm going to be given ten months. There
is a very distinct difference in someone saying I'm choosing
to live my life the way that I want to
live for these next nine months or however many months
(16:22):
i'm given. That's not what she was doing. Her whole
brand was, in my opinion, villainizing the medical community, villainizing
the oncologists. At one point she was calling them chemo pimps.
And you know, I understand that that is probably a
(16:42):
very personal journey for people, a very personal decision on
whether they want to fight this with chemotherapy and all
of the symptoms that may come with that or whether
they want to live their life on their terms for
however many months they have. But what she was doing
was in my opinion, medical fear mongering. And she was
telling people prior to this, you don't need to have ultrasounds,
(17:05):
you don't need to you know, get MRIs and these
are all very much what she was doing to monitor
her cancer journey. We have medicine for a reason. And
if she had the way that she had presented herself,
would have been like, I'm choosing to do what I
want with the rest of the time that I have here.
I don't think any of the creators in the anti
(17:27):
EMLM movement would have said a word. I think they
would have sent her well wishes and we would have
continued to cover MLM leaders and companies. But because she
was doing it in a way where she was spreading
misinformation and doing what I feel like I call it
shock marketing, where she says or said things that were
really offensive and then right after she would pitch her coaching,
(17:49):
or she would pitch Keytones, or she would be packing
up keytnes at the same time, which is representing the
MLM company at the same time that she's saying these
really atrocious things, and the fact that some of her
followers might listen to her advice even though she passed
from it, and then seeing some of them saying, oh,
she cured cancer. She didn't cure cancer.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
She had saying she cured it.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
People are saying that she didn't pass from cancer, that
she passed from some sort of a from sepsis. They're
saying she had a kidney infection, and this and that,
and and maybe she had some underlying things going on.
But when you have asitis, which is the fluids, there's
(18:37):
organs involved, that's a late stage cancer sign. The pain
was a late stage cancer sign, meaning that it was
spreading m hm. So they just because of what she
said and how she presented this cancer journey and the
things that she said about modern medicine and screening and
different things like that, these people cannot fathom that she
(19:01):
actually passed from cancer.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I am talking to my friend Megan Carmichael, who is
a death Dola who I've interviewed for the show before,
but she hasn't made it on. We've been internet friends
for ten years.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
Oh that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I interviewed her for the first season, but we didn't
use it, but it was about she got tricked into
going to a DOTA meeting. Oh my god, because the
person was like, end of life and essential oils can
be very helpful, and she was like that sounds great, yeah,
like anything to make your environment a little more comfy.
And then she gets there and it's like a Dota pitch.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
But she emailed me the minute she found out and said,
you know, I'm thinking about all of you and how
this must feel really weird, and I'm here to talk.
So I'm going to talk to her also for this episode.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
Well that's going to be I can't wait for that.
I would love to hear what she has to say,
just about all of it.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
She's a wonderful, wonderful person and I'm excited to talk
to her.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Hi.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
My name is Megan Carmichael. I live in Vermont, but
I'm originally from California and my mom died about six
and a half years ago when I was five weeks
out from my second child, and so I was really
thrown into the world of what it means to die,
especially in our society today, and so since then, I
(20:28):
quit my banking job and have really poured myself into
this full time. I've had some work in hospice and
with families that are preparing for a death. I've worked
with individuals that are training to become death doulas and
all sorts of things along the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
So that's kind of what I do. Do you get
this question a lot, like do you have like a
morbid fascination or what is the vibe? Like what draws
you to this work?
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yeah, so I would never have called myself morbid. I'm irish.
So I've always had sort of a healthy relationship with
death through my family. It's not something that we've shied
away from, and our wakes have always been the funnest
parties that we ever threw. So growing up I just
sort of had that take on death. But then seeing
(21:19):
it up close firsthand, and being in such a vulnerable place,
just you know, with a newborn and a toddler, Yeah,
it was gnarly and it really made me realize that
I'm not the only one that's about to face this.
I kind of looked around at all of my friends
and was like, oh my god, this is going to
happen to all of them. And so the fascination is
(21:44):
as much social and economic as it is about the
spiritual or the kind of woo woo.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, can you tell me a little bit about your
mom's passing. I just like, yeah, because I would imagine
a lot of people, especially if you are in that
vulnerable space of like having a newborn and a toddler
and you're super stressed out and then your mom is dying.
It's I don't imagine a lot of people would come
out of that experience saying I'll do that again for
(22:15):
a job, you know, So tell me about eight Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Let me take that on for fun, you know. So
my mom had been diagnosed right when I was about
three months pregnant, like right through the first trimester, and
we pretty much knew it was pretty bad right from
the get go. My daughter was one and a half
at the time, and you know, not everybody's a parent,
(22:40):
so I hesitate to use baby analogies, but if you
know what it's like when you have a newborn, you
just do what you have to do. And I just
had three times as much going on. But there was
sort of a sense of clarity around it all, Like
the short term decisions about what should happen were so
(23:02):
much clearer and easier than they were before. This truth
was sitting on the table in front of us. Do
you know, do we go to some other kid's second
birthday party? Or do we go down to my folks
house and hang out for the weekend?
Speaker 4 (23:15):
Done?
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Easy decision. I've always been a kind of person that
can lean into whatever is easy in the situation. Obviously
it was like gut wrenching and heartbreaking, but it was
easy to know that nothing I did or didn't do
was going to change things. That was easy. It was
easy to know what my priorities were on a minute
(23:38):
by minute level. That was easy.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
What's a What is a death doula? And are you
a death doula?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I'm not a death doula, and it's mostly because I
don't have the bedside manner needed for the job. Quite frankly,
so I would never take on that role with families.
But I have worked to train death doulas with a
very good friend of mine named Jill Shock, who's based
in Los Angeles. She's death doula la. What they really
(24:06):
do is very similar to what a birth doula does
in the sense that they are going to meet you
at a certain point in your journey, and you're going
to come together and make an agreement about what appropriate
support looks like and what appropriate payment looks like, and
they are going to walk with you and assist you
within those within that framework up through a certain point
(24:29):
in your journey, and then they go away. I've always
struggled with what to like call my job or whatever,
or what role I play and community death educator has
kind of been one that I've toied around with. But
after listening to this uh this season, I was like, fuck, dude,
I'm death coach.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I was thinking of you when I wrote that death coach. No,
when I wrote that line, I was thinking Megan in
my head. I was like, yeah, that's right, like you,
there's dead coaches who can help you have the best totally.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
And like you know, a couple months ago, somebody called
and said, hey, I am in a specific location helping
a friend and we need to find a speci type
of burial solution. Can you help? And I do the
leg work right. I call around, I make the calls,
and most importantly what I do in that case is
I say, hey, you did the right thing by asking
for help. I'm really proud of you, and hey, this
(25:25):
is a person who I have vetted and they're going
to take good care of you. You know, I heard
about jesse Lee's passing and I actually hadn't caught through
to the very last episode, so it was a complete
shock to me. I hadn't been aware of her cancer
journey at all, and I just saw this thing flip
through my fyp on TikTok, and I reached out to
(25:46):
you because I knew that you had profiled her. And
in grief theory, there's this concept of ambiguous loss, which
is sort of like when something leaves your life, not
as clear cut as like the loss of a friend
(26:06):
or the loss of a coworker, right, but like something
kind of confusing leaves your life. And I know that
that can just draw things up and it's a weird feeling.
And we as a society, we walked through so much
grief blindly. And I think I just sent like one
or two sentences that just said, Hey, I'm thinking about
you and your team. That's got to be weird.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, Well, I really appreciated the note, and I'm so
glad we're getting to talk now because it came at
a time where I was I was speaking to Aaron Bees,
who was on the first episode, who used to be
best friends with jesse Lee. We were kind of She
had told me a couple of days before jesse Lee
passed that it was coming, and we'd been discussing what
(26:48):
to do, like, you know, regarding the show, because it
was the show had just come out, like it was
three days old or something, and so there really wasn't
any turning back on the first episode. But I knew
what was coming in episode nine, and it really helped
to hear from you and to hear from her and
help me feel like, Okay, you know, I don't have
to make any quick decisions here, and I don't have
(27:12):
to throw I don't have to trash it. But I
was feeling very conflicted about the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
When I find when I find myself facing complicated grief, right,
like somebody that I didn't agree with or I wasn't
in alignment with, whether that means they lose their job,
right when your enemy at work gets fired, or when
somebody who you're critical of passes away. Right, there's this
idea of complicated grief, and it can be hard to
(27:41):
sort your feelings out, and so what I always go
to in those situations. It's called ring theory, and the
idea is like, right at the center of this circle
is the person who's immediately affected, so that would be
jesse Lee. And then in the next circle around her
are the people and I put pets there closest to her,
and then beyond that it might be her colleagues, and
(28:02):
then her doctors or her support staff. And then on
the really outside of this concentric circle, I'm going to
talk or think of the people that really admire her
and who she has become really important to. And whenever
I'm feeling complicated grief, I try to figure out who
on that concentric ring circle can I can I connect
(28:26):
with sort of with my heart, And I really am
thinking a lot about her fans and her followers and
the people that really upheld her in a really special way,
and what this experience must be like for them. And
then I'd almost put I'd almost put you and me
(28:47):
and the rest of the Dream listeners in the circle
outside of her fans and followers, right, because I think
that all of us get affected in some way by
the loss of an individual. And it's also really complicated
when somebody is so public about their illness for the
(29:10):
conversation to just drop off. It feels really gross. Right,
We're so trained, and we're trained not only to not
talk about people's medical privacy stuff, but also to not
talk about the dead. Like, there's this idea that people
get to choose how they die, and I will stand
(29:30):
by that forever. Whether that means you want to go
for the most aggressive treatments, if you want to get
preventative treatment that is wildly aggressive, or if you want
to forego everything or go holistic. You get to choose
how you die. And most people die how they live.
(29:52):
So if you live a life of not telling the truth,
if you lived a life of manifesting, if you lived
a life where you tried to speak things into truth,
you will die that way. And I think that if
we were to just stop our careful criticism of this
(30:16):
type of behavior that she had in life, if we
didn't continue that through, that would be inauthentic. And one
thing that woman was was authentic. She was the same
through her life and death.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah, I don't want to take that away from her.
I do think where she crossed a line is the
instructing of her you know, fans to absolutely not take
care of their own health in the same way that
she wasn't, you know, like the don't get mammograms and
(30:51):
chemo is always bad and you should know when you
have cancer, just intuitively if you know your body. Those
kinds of messages that were coming out over and over again,
I think we're really dangerous. And so I'm glad we're
talking about this because again, people aren't talking about her death,
or if they are talking about it, there's a whole
story that's been made up now about how she passed.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
I want to say it's dangerous to say that to people.
It is also dangerous to tell people to put a
seven hundred dollars starter kit on a credit card when
you don't have money for your light bill.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
It has been dangerous, right, right, So if we weren't critical,
and we should be critical of the things that she
said point by point and say not only was what
she said dangerous the way she said it was dangerous,
the the framing of the story, right, the framing of
(31:44):
it's just my kidneys, the number of videos I saw
where she was going through dramatic weight loss saying this
is what health looks like, that's dangerous. We should talk
about it, and we have to. And she never shied
away from the quote unquote haters when she was alive.
It would be inauthentic to not be having this conversation.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Another thing that it is really important when people are
grieving or when somebody's dying is this concept of anticipatory loss.
It's when you get a chance to sort of gree
grieve and your brain starts to build the neural pathways
almost to accept what's about to happen. And what I
saw happening in this case, and I was always looking backwards, right.
(32:30):
It really didn't dive into this until after she had died.
But what I saw was the amount of false hope
that she was giving to herself and to her followers
really didn't allow any anticipatory grief at all. There was
one video that she did where she talked about making
(32:51):
a will, and that was pretty powerful, I thought, because
it seems like there was a little crack into the real.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
What could happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
But then at the same time, death is a cognitive dissonance, right.
We are wired as humans to survive. That's why suicide
and suicidal ideation are so fucking scary because our brain
is not working the way it's like supposed to work
to keep us alive.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Well, when I got hospitalized during the making of Season one,
was it season one or two? It was two? Actually, sorry,
it was right before the pandemic. I took a medication
that gave me this thing called Stevens Johnson syndrome, which
can kill you. It's like an autoimmune reaction to certain
medications and it makes your skin fall off essentially. But
(33:44):
when I got admitted to the hospital, I was in
the hospital for like three days, four days. They were
we were having a measles outbreak in LA and it
looks exactly the same, so they were I had to
go into like one of those isolation wards at the hospital,
and I remember thinking the first night I was in there,
because I still felt like horrible, like my body was
(34:05):
on fire and I had rated this crazy rash all
over and I was They were really worried, you know,
and I had IVS and everything, and I remember like
just sitting there watching TV and in my room all
by myself and thinking I had a good run. And
I couldn't believe that I had that thought, like me
the one he's so scared of death. I just I
(34:27):
just flashed into my head like, hey, my daughter's awesome.
I had a cool career, Okay, And then I was like,
what am I thinking? I didn't die? But I had
that graceful feeling about it.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
That's your future self coming to you to be like, hey,
just so you know, like you're really afraid of this.
This is the closest you've ever been to believing it
might happen. Just so you know, this is the feeling
you have.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Okay, all right, Well I'll look forward to that.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Yeah, dude, I wish you could have been there for
the last six weeks of my dad's life. It was
the fucking funnest party I have ever been to. It
was it was a ben. We went on a bender.
It was ordering every kind of food that he wanted,
even though he could only take a few bites. He
was like getting out in the sun every day. He
(35:19):
had this home health aid that helped him set up
his full speaker system, Like he pulled every speaker out
of the garage. He goes, what the fuck do I
care what the neighbors think? Yeah, I'm dying. Yeah, I
don't care about volumeting. I'm not trying to be polite anymore.
I mean it was an absolute joy. It was hard
after he died because it felt like the that fun
(35:42):
was actually over. I have seen a lot of people die.
I have been present while people were in the dying
process and while people actually took their last breaths, and
(36:02):
I have seen literally more dead bodies that are just
like fresh right, very recent.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
And it's not scary.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
There's nothing to be afraid of when you see it,
and you see it on the people's faces and you
see it in the room. The thing I'm afraid of
is how everybody else. The scary thing is the relationships
and how they're affected. Right. The scary thing is what
happens to everybody who's still alive. But I've seen their faces,
I've been there. They're not scared.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
You should not be scared, Okay.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me
Jane Marie. Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from
Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sandford. Our editor is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
The Dream is a
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Co production of Little Everywhere in Pushkin Industries.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey, Dream listeners, if you like this podcast, you're gonna
love the book.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I wrote a book. It's called Selling the Dream and
it's coming out March twelfth, twenty twenty four, on Atria.
It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and
some that you've never even heard of. I hope check
it out previously on the Dream. So can I ask
about your style of coaching? I've watched a lot of
(00:45):
your videos and I feel like your style is I
don't want to say agro, but you're very boisterous. You're
very You're kind of tough. Was that a choice or
is that just like how you naturally are?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Can I ask you a question?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah? Do you pay for my coaching?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Do I pay for your coaching?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah? Like, are you in accelerator program?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
No?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
My coaching's not boisterous?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Oh it isn't.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, No, not funny.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Do you tell people that when they sign up it's
like you're not going to get the same thing that
you see on online?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
No, that wouldn't be accurate either. I think that it's
important to realize that what you see on social media
tend to be a snippet of somebody's personality or like
a little glimpse into their life. But inside of my coaching,
it is very tactical. It is super super kind, loving, open,
empathetic listening. It is responsive into what people need, especially
(01:43):
in my platinum coaching. It's super conversational. But I think
I'm really different than people assume I am. From the internet. Anyhow, So.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Two months after the conversation you just heard, and days
after this season launched, jesse Lee died. There are very
few details I heard the same way. I heard that
she was broadcasting our chat through texts from former friends
like Aaron Bees, who we spoke to in episode one.
I guess it was only maybe six weeks after or
(02:20):
when when did she pass?
Speaker 5 (02:21):
September sixteenth?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Okay, yeah, it was about then. Six weeks after I
spoke to her. She was gone. Yeah, and I found
out from you first that she wasn't doing well. Why
don't you talk me through that?
Speaker 5 (02:39):
Yeah? So, actually I didn't. I didn't realize how quickly
the decline would be. On my YouTube channel, I have
members that we have a discord, and we talk pretty
candidly in there.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I don't think my audit discord is just kind of
like a.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
Like a chat. There's different channels, different companies, topics that
we talk about within multi level marketing. There's an empathy chat,
and there's just different areas where we discuss specific things
within multi level marketing. I feel like a lot of
her followers are experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance. And
(03:21):
when I heard that she passed, I immediately obviously thought
of her family and the people closest to her and
how this has to be such a shock for them,
but also for jesse Lee's audience. You know, these people
that have followed her for many, many years, and now
all of a sudden, she's just gone. And the only
thing that they can see is the last live that
(03:44):
she did where she told them that the cancer was
regressing and that her lymphotes were going back to normal.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Well, hello, hello everybody, what's going on? It's jesse Lee.
You can call me Boss Lee if you'd like to.
How or the people's mentor I haven't done it live
like in a minute, so well, that's not really true.
I did a coffee and on the floor two days ago. Okay,
I did just get a phone call. I guess it's
been like four or five hours now. I've tried to
(04:12):
make the rounds of people that I'm super close with,
And if I look like I'm exhausted, if you're like,
she looks really tired, like I don't know that is
because first of all, I am okay, I have not
been sleeping well, which has been freaking me out, if
we're being very honest with each other, because I can't sleep.
I'm really bloated from just this extra liquid that's in
(04:35):
my abdomen. I feel like I am I'm scared all
the time because the lymph nodes in the net, like
it is the biggest mind f ever. And I have
the strongest mindset of anybody I've ever met, and I
still am over here on a daily basis, like it hurts,
it hurts, it hurts my my kid, theesus and my kid,
(04:57):
theseus about liver anyway, that the cough scary scary? Why
am I coughing up? Okay, so so excuse me. I
got a call today and mostly my stomach turnover even
thinking about it, And as soon as I saw my
oncologist's number flash on the screen, I had like a
(05:18):
little minor panic attack, like do I let it go
to voicemail or do I not? Uh? So I was nervous.
And then my doctor called today and and he said,
and he read my my pet scan from last Monday,
and it's very good news. So for those of you
(05:39):
who don't know, it's very good news. Not a drop
of chemo and not a blast of radiation, not anything
from a single traditional on college except for to read
my scans. And he said that the cancer is decreasing
in my body. Many of my limph notes have gone
back to normal. There's a few hot spots that were
always there, nothing has increased. And he said, he said, oh,
(06:02):
he's like, just get another scan in six months and
we'll see how it's going. And for those of you
who don't know, when I was diagnosed in and went
to and do you understand in March they told me
I wouldn't live to see November. And now they're asking
me to not get scanned for another six months because
(06:23):
the disease is regressing so dramatically. So thank you for
all your prayers. Thank you for you guys who have
sent really encouraging messages. I know I've had weird pains
and my kidney's hurt or my liver or something hurts.
I don't know what hurts, but wow, I love y'all
(06:43):
so much. I appreciate you so much. Keep the prayers coming.
We got a long road to go. Pray for this
back pain to go away, the stomach pains go away
because and keep praying for the cancer to go away,
because your prayers are definitely working. So God bless all y'all.
Thank you for being on this journey with me, and
let's keep this thing going. God bless y'all.
Speaker 5 (07:04):
And so how do you go from September fifth saying Hey,
I don't have to get another pet scan for six months.
You know, essentially the oncology from the sounds from her video,
essentially it sounded like the oncologist was giving her a
thumbs up, and it's kind of like then on the
sixteenth she's passed. And I feel like that was such
a shock to her followers. And that's why I say,
(07:26):
I feel like they're experiencing cognitive dissonance because they know
she's gone, but it doesn't make sense. They don't understand
because of that narrative that she created around her cancer journey.
The way that I found out was from a post
by Eric Worry, who's a multi level marketing quote unquote coach.
So he was one of jesse Lee's mentors and he
(07:48):
posted I think it was on Instagram and I believe
on Facebook somewhere around late February where she was going
in for surgery to have part of her colon removed,
and he at that point said that she had been
diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. So that was how
the world found out about this. It wasn't from jesse Lee,
it wasn't from anybody in her inner circle. It was
from Eric Worry, which is interesting to me because that's
(08:12):
how the world found out that jesse Lee her health
was declining, was because he also posted on Facebook and
Instagram and everywhere, which I find really odd. Yeah, I mean,
is that his place? I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah. So maybe she asked him.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I don't know, I don't I don't know. I just
it's uncomfortable that he did that, you know, because at
the end of the day, this is her story, and
I may not agree with the painting of the narrative
and the lack of truthfulness and the straight up misinformation,
but it was still her story to tell, right, you know. Right,
(08:53):
So that was February, and I saw her kind of
go back and forth based on what she was putting
out on social media and whether she was going to
do chemo or not, and there was speculation, not even speculation.
She said that she was considering doing chemo in May,
and she went to an acupuncturist, and that acupuncturist said,
(09:16):
I don't think you need chemo. You need to go
plant based, and so that was when she switched to
vegetables and all of that stuff. And I watched her
go back and forth between going to I think she
was in Germany and she was seeing a biohacking doctor overseas,
and then she was going to different treatments, which from
(09:37):
what she has said, some of those treatments included ozone
both intravenously and also rectly, and coffee enemas and high
vitamin seed drips and all kinds of other holistic type treatments.
I don't even know if I want to call them treatments,
(09:58):
to be honest. And I feel like we all just
watched her decline on social media while she was smiling
and telling everybody you know, no, I'm beating cancer, and
it created cognitive dissonance within her community and her followers
because they're like, oh, yeah, she's saying she's great, but
you look at her and you're like, but your eye
(10:18):
sockets look like they're you know, drawn in or whatnot.
And you could see a weight loss, a lot of
weight loss. That temporal wasting look was really alarming to me,
and I'm like, how can you say that you're getting
better when when you are, you're physically you are starting
to change because of the weight loss. And it didn't
(10:40):
make sense to me. So I can't imagine how her
followers must have been.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Well, she was selling a weight loss product.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Right, yeah, yeah, even though they say it's not weight loss,
but all of them do before and after pictures, right.
So then I found out she was in the hospital
the September eleventh, I want to say, or twelfth, somewhere
in there. And you know, the next thing we know,
I'm hearing all this chatter about jesse Lea's has passed.
(11:09):
And then people started to post and to speculate, because again,
I feel like people didn't understand what was really going
on because they believed what she was telling them.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
After I, you know, I had interviewed her, I was
following along a little bit more closely. The symptoms she
was experiencing during that time are end stage cancer symptoms, right, Like, Yeah,
the fluid in her abdomen from liver failure, the difficulty breathing,
(11:43):
the back pain even in that yeah, the cough in
that final video she can't fully catch her breath, and
again the continued weight loss. Yeah, all of those things
are very in line with like multi organ failailure. Absolutely
(12:04):
a metastasized cancer, which she did acknowledge that it had metastasized,
right she did.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
In one of her videos that she did sometime this
past summer, early summer, she was talking about how she
mentioned that it was in her esophagus. She mentioned it
was in I believe twenty six lymph nodes or something
like that, of the thirty that they removed during her surgery.
(12:30):
She mentioned areas being lit up on a scan, you know,
And this was all after she had had the surgery,
so she was very aware that it had metastasized.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
I don't know when she started saying this, but she
would introduce herself on almost every video as welcome to
jesse Lee beats Cancer. Holistically. Is that yep. Okay, yep.
So it was kind of a branded experience sort of.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
Yeah, And I do think that there's a place for
holistic type treatments, but I think that we also have
to depend on, you know, what we know works best
against the scenario that people are facing, and you know
that would be for cancer, it's it's chemotherapy. And I
also but.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
You do all of that and then you go, Okay,
maybe I'll just like pound the turmeric juice or whatever.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Yeah, but or things that can help with the symptoms
from you know, traditional treatments, things that can help with
nausea and you know, different things like that. So I
do think that there's a place for that.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
So she had had she been anti chemo those kinds
of things prior to this, I think, do you know,
I know, I saw one video where she was telling
people not to get mammograms.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
Yeah, she was definitely telling people not to get mammograms.
She was telling people they didn't need ultrasounds. She was
telling people, you know, just trust your body and know
your body, and you can know your body and know
how you typically feel and miss a life altering thing
diagnosis or whatnot. I don't know how I want to
(14:16):
word that, and that's why they do a lot of
screening things. So if anything out of all of this,
I really hope that people get screened when they have
risk factors for anything like this. Just go to the
doctor and get those things checked out, get the screening done,
(14:37):
and just you know, I guess, be vigilant about that.
I hope that that's the message out of all of this.
At the end of the day, jesse LEAs she was
still a human being, and to think about her being
in as much pain as she was, knowing that there
could have been you know, palliative care to prevent some
of this, to slow down her body's response to the
(14:59):
pain and the spreading of the cancer. I didn't know
that that was a thing. I didn't know that. I mean, obviously,
nobody should be in that kind of pain, you know,
and we don't want other humans to experience that. But
to understand, like the physiological aspect of what happens when
somebody is in late stage cancer and then they're in
pain and they have a fever and their blood pressure
(15:22):
is up and how that just basically accelerates them passing
is heartbreaking to me.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, yeah, that you can't catch your breath essentially, and yeah,
it must have been brutal.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
I think that the spreading of misinformation in these last
six and a half seven months that she has has
given on her platform is extremely alarming. I know how
commercial cults operate, and how they look at their leader
and believe everything that their leader is saying. And unfortunately,
(16:00):
you know, there's probably people out there that are going
to listen to her advice, you know, because we could
get into a whole conversation about well, if I am
only going to be given nine months, or if I
do chemotherapy, I'm going to be given ten months. There
is a very distinct difference in someone saying I'm choosing
to live my life the way that I want to
live for these next nine months or however many months
(16:22):
i'm given. That's not what she was doing. Her whole
brand was, in my opinion, villainizing the medical community, villainizing
the oncologists. At one point she was calling them chemo pimps.
And you know, I understand that that is probably a
(16:42):
very personal journey for people, a very personal decision on
whether they want to fight this with chemotherapy and all
of the symptoms that may come with that or whether
they want to live their life on their terms for
however many months they have. But what she was doing
was in my opinion, medical fear mongering. And she was
telling people prior to this, you don't need to have ultrasounds,
(17:05):
you don't need to you know, get MRIs and these
are all very much what she was doing to monitor
her cancer journey. We have medicine for a reason. And
if she had the way that she had presented herself,
would have been like, I'm choosing to do what I
want with the rest of the time that I have here.
I don't think any of the creators in the anti
(17:27):
EMLM movement would have said a word. I think they
would have sent her well wishes and we would have
continued to cover MLM leaders and companies. But because she
was doing it in a way where she was spreading
misinformation and doing what I feel like I call it
shock marketing, where she says or said things that were
really offensive and then right after she would pitch her coaching,
(17:49):
or she would pitch Keytones, or she would be packing
up keytnes at the same time, which is representing the
MLM company at the same time that she's saying these
really atrocious things, and the fact that some of her
followers might listen to her advice even though she passed
from it, and then seeing some of them saying, oh,
she cured cancer. She didn't cure cancer.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
She had saying she cured it.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
People are saying that she didn't pass from cancer, that
she passed from some sort of a from sepsis. They're
saying she had a kidney infection, and this and that,
and and maybe she had some underlying things going on.
But when you have asitis, which is the fluids, there's
(18:37):
organs involved, that's a late stage cancer sign. The pain
was a late stage cancer sign, meaning that it was
spreading m hm. So they just because of what she
said and how she presented this cancer journey and the
things that she said about modern medicine and screening and
different things like that, these people cannot fathom that she
(19:01):
actually passed from cancer.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I am talking to my friend Megan Carmichael, who is
a death Dola who I've interviewed for the show before,
but she hasn't made it on. We've been internet friends
for ten years.
Speaker 5 (19:15):
Oh that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I interviewed her for the first season, but we didn't
use it, but it was about she got tricked into
going to a DOTA meeting. Oh my god, because the
person was like, end of life and essential oils can
be very helpful, and she was like that sounds great, yeah,
like anything to make your environment a little more comfy.
And then she gets there and it's like a Dota pitch.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
But she emailed me the minute she found out and said,
you know, I'm thinking about all of you and how
this must feel really weird, and I'm here to talk.
So I'm going to talk to her also for this episode.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
Well that's going to be I can't wait for that.
I would love to hear what she has to say,
just about all of it.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
She's a wonderful, wonderful person and I'm excited to talk
to her.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Hi.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
My name is Megan Carmichael. I live in Vermont, but
I'm originally from California and my mom died about six
and a half years ago when I was five weeks
out from my second child, and so I was really
thrown into the world of what it means to die,
especially in our society today, and so since then, I
(20:28):
quit my banking job and have really poured myself into
this full time. I've had some work in hospice and
with families that are preparing for a death. I've worked
with individuals that are training to become death doulas and
all sorts of things along the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
So that's kind of what I do. Do you get
this question a lot, like do you have like a
morbid fascination or what is the vibe? Like what draws
you to this work?
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yeah, so I would never have called myself morbid. I'm irish.
So I've always had sort of a healthy relationship with
death through my family. It's not something that we've shied
away from, and our wakes have always been the funnest
parties that we ever threw. So growing up I just
sort of had that take on death. But then seeing
(21:19):
it up close firsthand, and being in such a vulnerable place,
just you know, with a newborn and a toddler, Yeah,
it was gnarly and it really made me realize that
I'm not the only one that's about to face this.
I kind of looked around at all of my friends
and was like, oh my god, this is going to
happen to all of them. And so the fascination is
(21:44):
as much social and economic as it is about the
spiritual or the kind of woo woo.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, can you tell me a little bit about your
mom's passing. I just like, yeah, because I would imagine
a lot of people, especially if you are in that
vulnerable space of like having a newborn and a toddler
and you're super stressed out and then your mom is dying.
It's I don't imagine a lot of people would come
out of that experience saying I'll do that again for
(22:15):
a job, you know, So tell me about eight Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Let me take that on for fun, you know. So
my mom had been diagnosed right when I was about
three months pregnant, like right through the first trimester, and
we pretty much knew it was pretty bad right from
the get go. My daughter was one and a half
at the time, and you know, not everybody's a parent,
(22:40):
so I hesitate to use baby analogies, but if you
know what it's like when you have a newborn, you
just do what you have to do. And I just
had three times as much going on. But there was
sort of a sense of clarity around it all, Like
the short term decisions about what should happen were so
(23:02):
much clearer and easier than they were before. This truth
was sitting on the table in front of us. Do
you know, do we go to some other kid's second
birthday party? Or do we go down to my folks
house and hang out for the weekend?
Speaker 4 (23:15):
Done?
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Easy decision. I've always been a kind of person that
can lean into whatever is easy in the situation. Obviously
it was like gut wrenching and heartbreaking, but it was
easy to know that nothing I did or didn't do
was going to change things. That was easy. It was
easy to know what my priorities were on a minute
(23:38):
by minute level. That was easy.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
What's a What is a death doula? And are you
a death doula?
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I'm not a death doula, and it's mostly because I
don't have the bedside manner needed for the job. Quite frankly,
so I would never take on that role with families.
But I have worked to train death doulas with a
very good friend of mine named Jill Shock, who's based
in Los Angeles. She's death doula la. What they really
(24:06):
do is very similar to what a birth doula does
in the sense that they are going to meet you
at a certain point in your journey, and you're going
to come together and make an agreement about what appropriate
support looks like and what appropriate payment looks like, and
they are going to walk with you and assist you
within those within that framework up through a certain point
(24:29):
in your journey, and then they go away. I've always
struggled with what to like call my job or whatever,
or what role I play and community death educator has
kind of been one that I've toied around with. But
after listening to this uh this season, I was like, fuck, dude,
I'm death coach.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I was thinking of you when I wrote that death coach. No,
when I wrote that line, I was thinking Megan in
my head. I was like, yeah, that's right, like you,
there's dead coaches who can help you have the best totally.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
And like you know, a couple months ago, somebody called
and said, hey, I am in a specific location helping
a friend and we need to find a speci type
of burial solution. Can you help? And I do the
leg work right. I call around, I make the calls,
and most importantly what I do in that case is
I say, hey, you did the right thing by asking
for help. I'm really proud of you, and hey, this
(25:25):
is a person who I have vetted and they're going
to take good care of you. You know, I heard
about jesse Lee's passing and I actually hadn't caught through
to the very last episode, so it was a complete
shock to me. I hadn't been aware of her cancer
journey at all, and I just saw this thing flip
through my fyp on TikTok, and I reached out to
(25:46):
you because I knew that you had profiled her. And
in grief theory, there's this concept of ambiguous loss, which
is sort of like when something leaves your life, not
as clear cut as like the loss of a friend
(26:06):
or the loss of a coworker, right, but like something
kind of confusing leaves your life. And I know that
that can just draw things up and it's a weird feeling.
And we as a society, we walked through so much
grief blindly. And I think I just sent like one
or two sentences that just said, Hey, I'm thinking about
you and your team. That's got to be weird.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, Well, I really appreciated the note, and I'm so
glad we're getting to talk now because it came at
a time where I was I was speaking to Aaron Bees,
who was on the first episode, who used to be
best friends with jesse Lee. We were kind of She
had told me a couple of days before jesse Lee
passed that it was coming, and we'd been discussing what
(26:48):
to do, like, you know, regarding the show, because it
was the show had just come out, like it was
three days old or something, and so there really wasn't
any turning back on the first episode. But I knew
what was coming in episode nine, and it really helped
to hear from you and to hear from her and
help me feel like, Okay, you know, I don't have
to make any quick decisions here, and I don't have
(27:12):
to throw I don't have to trash it. But I
was feeling very conflicted about the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
When I find when I find myself facing complicated grief, right,
like somebody that I didn't agree with or I wasn't
in alignment with, whether that means they lose their job,
right when your enemy at work gets fired, or when
somebody who you're critical of passes away. Right, there's this
idea of complicated grief, and it can be hard to
(27:41):
sort your feelings out, and so what I always go
to in those situations. It's called ring theory, and the
idea is like, right at the center of this circle
is the person who's immediately affected, so that would be
jesse Lee. And then in the next circle around her
are the people and I put pets there closest to her,
and then beyond that it might be her colleagues, and
(28:02):
then her doctors or her support staff. And then on
the really outside of this concentric circle, I'm going to
talk or think of the people that really admire her
and who she has become really important to. And whenever
I'm feeling complicated grief, I try to figure out who
on that concentric ring circle can I can I connect
(28:26):
with sort of with my heart, And I really am
thinking a lot about her fans and her followers and
the people that really upheld her in a really special way,
and what this experience must be like for them. And
then I'd almost put I'd almost put you and me
(28:47):
and the rest of the Dream listeners in the circle
outside of her fans and followers, right, because I think
that all of us get affected in some way by
the loss of an individual. And it's also really complicated
when somebody is so public about their illness for the
(29:10):
conversation to just drop off. It feels really gross. Right,
We're so trained, and we're trained not only to not
talk about people's medical privacy stuff, but also to not
talk about the dead. Like, there's this idea that people
get to choose how they die, and I will stand
(29:30):
by that forever. Whether that means you want to go
for the most aggressive treatments, if you want to get
preventative treatment that is wildly aggressive, or if you want
to forego everything or go holistic. You get to choose
how you die. And most people die how they live.
(29:52):
So if you live a life of not telling the truth,
if you lived a life of manifesting, if you lived
a life where you tried to speak things into truth,
you will die that way. And I think that if
we were to just stop our careful criticism of this
(30:16):
type of behavior that she had in life, if we
didn't continue that through, that would be inauthentic. And one
thing that woman was was authentic. She was the same
through her life and death.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah, I don't want to take that away from her.
I do think where she crossed a line is the
instructing of her you know, fans to absolutely not take
care of their own health in the same way that
she wasn't, you know, like the don't get mammograms and
(30:51):
chemo is always bad and you should know when you
have cancer, just intuitively if you know your body. Those
kinds of messages that were coming out over and over again,
I think we're really dangerous. And so I'm glad we're
talking about this because again, people aren't talking about her death,
or if they are talking about it, there's a whole
story that's been made up now about how she passed.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
I want to say it's dangerous to say that to people.
It is also dangerous to tell people to put a
seven hundred dollars starter kit on a credit card when
you don't have money for your light bill.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
It has been dangerous, right, right, So if we weren't critical,
and we should be critical of the things that she
said point by point and say not only was what
she said dangerous the way she said it was dangerous,
the the framing of the story, right, the framing of
(31:44):
it's just my kidneys, the number of videos I saw
where she was going through dramatic weight loss saying this
is what health looks like, that's dangerous. We should talk
about it, and we have to. And she never shied
away from the quote unquote haters when she was alive.
It would be inauthentic to not be having this conversation.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Another thing that it is really important when people are
grieving or when somebody's dying is this concept of anticipatory loss.
It's when you get a chance to sort of gree
grieve and your brain starts to build the neural pathways
almost to accept what's about to happen. And what I
saw happening in this case, and I was always looking backwards, right.
(32:30):
It really didn't dive into this until after she had died.
But what I saw was the amount of false hope
that she was giving to herself and to her followers
really didn't allow any anticipatory grief at all. There was
one video that she did where she talked about making
(32:51):
a will, and that was pretty powerful, I thought, because
it seems like there was a little crack into the real.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
What could happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
But then at the same time, death is a cognitive dissonance, right.
We are wired as humans to survive. That's why suicide
and suicidal ideation are so fucking scary because our brain
is not working the way it's like supposed to work
to keep us alive.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Well, when I got hospitalized during the making of Season one,
was it season one or two? It was two? Actually, sorry,
it was right before the pandemic. I took a medication
that gave me this thing called Stevens Johnson syndrome, which
can kill you. It's like an autoimmune reaction to certain
medications and it makes your skin fall off essentially. But
(33:44):
when I got admitted to the hospital, I was in
the hospital for like three days, four days. They were
we were having a measles outbreak in LA and it
looks exactly the same, so they were I had to
go into like one of those isolation wards at the hospital,
and I remember thinking the first night I was in there,
because I still felt like horrible, like my body was
(34:05):
on fire and I had rated this crazy rash all
over and I was They were really worried, you know,
and I had IVS and everything, and I remember like
just sitting there watching TV and in my room all
by myself and thinking I had a good run. And
I couldn't believe that I had that thought, like me
the one he's so scared of death. I just I
(34:27):
just flashed into my head like, hey, my daughter's awesome.
I had a cool career, Okay, And then I was like,
what am I thinking? I didn't die? But I had
that graceful feeling about it.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
That's your future self coming to you to be like, hey,
just so you know, like you're really afraid of this.
This is the closest you've ever been to believing it
might happen. Just so you know, this is the feeling
you have.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Okay, all right, Well I'll look forward to that.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Yeah, dude, I wish you could have been there for
the last six weeks of my dad's life. It was
the fucking funnest party I have ever been to. It
was it was a ben. We went on a bender.
It was ordering every kind of food that he wanted,
even though he could only take a few bites. He
was like getting out in the sun every day. He
(35:19):
had this home health aid that helped him set up
his full speaker system, Like he pulled every speaker out
of the garage. He goes, what the fuck do I
care what the neighbors think? Yeah, I'm dying. Yeah, I
don't care about volumeting. I'm not trying to be polite anymore.
I mean it was an absolute joy. It was hard
after he died because it felt like the that fun
(35:42):
was actually over. I have seen a lot of people die.
I have been present while people were in the dying
process and while people actually took their last breaths, and
(36:02):
I have seen literally more dead bodies that are just
like fresh right, very recent.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
And it's not scary.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
There's nothing to be afraid of when you see it,
and you see it on the people's faces and you
see it in the room. The thing I'm afraid of
is how everybody else. The scary thing is the relationships
and how they're affected. Right. The scary thing is what
happens to everybody who's still alive. But I've seen their faces,
I've been there. They're not scared.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
You should not be scared, Okay.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me
Jane Marie. Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from
Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sandford. Our editor is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
The Dream is a
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Co production of Little Everywhere in Pushkin Industries.
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