Death Virgin

What begins as an ordinary Sunday in Maine turns into an unexpected journey through grief, spirituality, memory, and ritual. A spontaneous visit to a medium at the Temple Heights solstice fair leads to questions about the afterlife, writing, and whether the dead really have anything left to say. There are drum circles, neighborhood conversations, cemetery visits, a stolen bottle of birthday whiskey, Dad's ashes riding shotgun, and a meatball pizza waiting in Camden.

Along the way, Kristen reflects on father figures, memorials, where the dead live after they're gone, and what it means to spend your first Father's Day as a member of the Dead Dad Club.

A quiet, funny, wandering dispatch about love, loss, and carrying someone with you long after they've left.

In the days after her father's death, Kristen discovers that grief isn't always tears. Sometimes it's paperwork, locksmithing, funeral-home visits, Facebook etiquette, warm vodka in plastic cups, and a stubborn hearse that can't quite make it up the driveway.

As family and friends drift through the house overlooking the Atlantic, the ordinary and the extraordinary collide. A locked roll-top desk finally gives up its secrets. Hospice nurses become quiet heroes. Neighbors appear—or don't. The last blossom falls from the star magnolia tree at the exact moment a life comes to its close.

Part meditation on mourning, part documentary of what happens after someone dies, this episode explores the strange limbo between death and remembrance, and the unexpected humor, tenderness, and humanity that live there.

In this final living chapter of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen records in real time as her father dies at home overlooking the Atlantic. What unfolds is not a dramatic television death, but something quieter, stranger, and more human: hospice phone calls, olives for Coronas, oxygen tubes, morphine, family pacing in the kitchen, and the surreal administrative reality that arrives moments after someone leaves their body.

With dark humor, tenderness, and documentary immediacy, this episode captures the liminal hours between a person being here—and not being here anymore. It’s about witnessing death for the first time, realizing there is no adult in the room, and discovering that grief can coexist with practical decisions, nausea, laughter, cigarettes, and vodka shots in equal measure.

Not the final dispatch from Temple Heights—but the final one where Dad is still alive.

A few quiet days at Temple Heights.

Ryan arrives to spend time with his father and grandfather — a delayed 21st birthday and 50th birthday celebration no one imagined would happen under these circumstances. There are beers on the beach, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, morphine schedules, Family Feud at full volume, and the strange intimacy of caring for someone at the very end of life.

As the nights stretch into 3 a.m. vigils filled with ocean sounds, medication charts, and half-awake Googling, thoughts turn toward funerals, rituals, Viking ships, wooden boats, and what it means to build something with your hands for someone you love.

A dispatch about caregiving, exhaustion, humor, practical rituals, and the small strange thoughts that arrive while waiting beside a dying person.

Dispatches from Temple Heights continues with a wandering walk down to the beach on one impossibly beautiful Maine afternoon.

Kristen reflects on first love, old cottages, lobster shacks, disappearing landmarks, family mythology, Spiritualist history, teenage summers, and the strange ache of realizing the places that shaped us never stay the same. Along the way: Ozzy Osbourne t-shirts, mixed tapes, mayflies, sea glass, star magnolias, and a painted rock that vanished into a seawall decades ago.

As her father lies dying just steps away, memory itself becomes its own kind of shoreline — shifting, eroding, preserving fragments no one else knows are there.

Seth turns fifty in the middle of hospice care, and somehow the day becomes both heartbreaking and strangely joyful. In this installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen recounts a sleepless night, hospice workers who bring humor and humanity into the house, the surreal intimacy of caring for a dying parent, and a birthday celebration filled with Guinness, grocery store cake, party hats, inappropriate death jokes, and moments of real tenderness. It’s an episode about exhaustion, friendship, family, ritual, and the strange beauty of continuing to celebrate life while death sits in the next room.

In the third installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, the vigil continues. Kristen and her brother Seth make it through another night beside their father’s bed, surviving on raisin toast, gallows humor, ice cream, and adrenaline while waiting for the inevitable. As neighbors stop by, hospice nurses arrive, morphine enters the picture, and Seth’s fiftieth birthday approaches, the episode drifts between absurdity and heartbreak with startling intimacy.

There are conversations about gatekeeping death, family roles, sea glass, Costco sweatshirts, NPR, birthday piñatas, and what it means to love someone while slowly letting them go. Through exhaustion and tenderness, Kristen reflects on the strange in-between space of vigil keeping — where ordinary life continues even as death waits quietly in the next room.

In the second installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen’s father finally comes home from the hospital to die overlooking the ocean in Belfast, Maine. What follows is a surreal and deeply human twelve hours of oxygen tubes, ice cream runs, commode disasters, family tension, dark humor, and quiet tenderness as everyone adjusts to the strange rhythm of waiting for someone to die.

Blending real-time recordings with reflections on caregiving, control, inherited trauma, and the absurdity of end-of-life logistics, this episode captures the suspended feeling of a family gathered at the threshold—where exhaustion, love, resentment, laughter, and fear all exist in the same room.

Dispatches from Temple Heights: Notes From My Father's Dying

The first episode of a new mini-series within Death Virgin.

Kristen records from her childhood home on the coast of Maine as her father lies dying on hospice care in the next room. Over the course of one sleepless night, she reflects on what it means to accompany someone through death for the very first time — while also navigating hospital logistics, oxygen tanks, weed gummies, family dynamics, spiders, ocean sounds, assisted living rituals, and the strange absurdity that continues alongside dying.

Part vigil diary, part field recording, part dark comedy, this first dispatch captures the liminal hours before bringing her father home from the hospital to die overlooking Penobscot Bay.

A series about grief in real time.

About becoming “no longer a death virgin.”

About how death is both sacred and deeply, relentlessly human.

In this episode of Death Virgin, Kristen gets a new hip — and loses a bone.

What begins as a routine surgery (everyone says it’s routine) becomes something stranger: a meditation on ownership, body parts, family legacy, and what it means when a piece of you that grew with you is suddenly removed.

Before going under anesthesia, Kristen asks the question most surgeons are not prepared for:

Can I keep the bone?

From there, she wanders — lovingly and irreverently — through medical authority, arrogant surgeons, grandmother pranks, Harvard Medical School cadavers, the mysterious Jewish “Luz bone” of resurrection, and the strange grief of losing a tooth in your twenties.

This episode explores:

1. Why “common” surgery doesn’t mean minor
2. What belongs to us once it’s cut out of us
3. The power dynamics between doctors and patients
4. Why second opinions should be normalized
5. The family story of Grandma Mary, told she would never walk again — and walking anyway
6. Donating bodies to science (and what happens after)
7. The religious argument against cremation and the almond-shaped “Luz bone”
8. Why birth and death are both messier than we like to admit
9. Mourning body parts — teeth, breasts, bones — as small rehearsals for larger loss
10. Whether cremation tidies death… or just disguises it

Kristen also confronts the hypocrisy of creating end-of-life workbooks for others while having no will herself — realizing, the night before surgery, that she has not practiced what she preaches.

Because maybe death practice doesn’t only happen at funerals.

Maybe it happens in operating rooms.

Maybe it happens when your body changes.

Maybe it happens when you realize you are not, in fact, twenty anymore.

There is pumpkin pie.

There is Beyoncé.

There is The Big Lebowski.

There are bones — some kept, some donated, some pulverized.

And there is humor. Always humor.

Because sometimes the only way to talk about taboo things

is to talk about them sideways.

Harvard Medical School Body Donation Program

Rabbinic literature on the “Luz” bone

Ecclesiastes (interpretations of resurrection texts)

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

The Big Lebowski (the Folgers canister scene)

Pretty Woman (big mistake. Big. Huge.)

The Little Engine That Could

Beyoncé — “Sorry” (Becky with the good hair)