When We Die Talks

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 complicated. This is a conversation about what it looks like to choose...

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 own choice, and talked about living with ALS, his Baha'i faith, a...

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 no clean answers. They came to this conversation not from a place of...

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 refreshingly honest about the contradiction of doing death work...

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 families scramble to figure out, and how easily someone’s wishes can get l...

What does death look like when it’s part of your job? This week’s anonymous caller is an EMT who’s around emergencies and dying on a regular basis. And because of that, this conversation doesn’t stay in the abstract for long. We talk about what CPR actually does to the body, the gap between what people think happens in a medical crisis versus what it really looks like, and why end-of-life wishes can get complicated the moment fear enters the room. A big thread in this call is about clarity. N...

What happens when your mind stops feeling like a safe place to live? This week’s anonymous caller shares about experiencing a psychotic break in 2020, and what it changed about how they relate to death, reality, and their own sense of self. They do an unusually good job describing what psychosis can feel like from the inside, including a “movie logic” kind of certainty that’s hard to understand until you hear someone try to explain it. A big part of this conversation is what came after. The c...

What do you say to a child who asks, “Am I going to die?” This week's caller is a physician who works with children who have cancer and has training in pediatric palliative and hospice care. In this conversation, she shares what it’s like to talk honestly with families about death. Including a story about having to tell a seven-year-old patient that she is going to die. This is a heavier episode. The subject matter is difficult, and the conversation doesn’t shy away from that. But it’s also t...

Many people are curious about conversations around death but hesitate to listen because they worry it will feel emotionally overwhelming. This episode challenges that assumption. In this anonymous call, the conversation begins with an expectation of tears. What unfolds instead is something more layered. Grief is present. Loss is real. And still, laughter, warmth, and unexpected lightness find their way into the room. If you’ve been curious about this podcast but unsure where to begin, this is...

What if your afterlife looks exactly like what you expect to find? That question sits at the center of this conversation with our caller who has died more than once and come back with stories that challenge the script many of us inherit about death. She begins with a fire-breathing accident that leads to severe burns, an awake surgery, and a coma where there is no tunnel of light—only darkness without walls, filled with taunting voices. She runs for days inside that void before turning to fig...

Death wasn’t an idea for her growing up—it was something that walked beside her. In this call, we trace a life shaped by early violence in South Africa, a strict Catholic upbringing that equated identity with sin, and a long stretch of years where death felt more like an exit than a fear. She talks about grooming, a marriage built on uneven power, the mental health system that kept missing the mark, and the small, steady voices that helped her stay alive long enough to want to keep living. Fr...

Mortality feels different when you’re sitting beside a parent and waiting for the breath that doesn’t return. In this call, we stay close to that moment—not with big theories or tidy comfort, but with the real stuff: complicated love, sudden anger, the guilt that shows up long after it’s “too late,” and the small rituals we use to get ourselves through the night. He talks about a fractured relationship, the final hours in the hospital, and the split-second when a kind nurse became the target ...

This week’s caller has lived with death in the background for most of her life—first through migraines that began when she was six, and later through a brain tumor that went undiagnosed for more than twenty years. By the time doctors caught it, she had spent a full year in a migraine that never let up. Surgery changed everything: her mood lifted, her pain eased, and even her tastebuds shifted. But the possibility of recurrence remains, shaping how she moves through the world. What unfolds fro...