The Mortals

Last week's show was rough. I fumbled. A lot.

This week I figured out why. I overthought it. Weeks of treating my content like a math problem made it stiff and careful. My content got buns. Polished falls flat.

I learned the fix in the funeral home years ago. When a family plans a service, they bring two kinds of pictures. The church directory photo. And the shoebox. People always stand in front of the shoebox.

We also talked about The Comeback Room. I'm going to ask artists about the night they almost quit. First up is Julia Cole, night one of her Love You To Death Tour at Headliners in Louisville.

Your homework: send the ugly text. The one you've rewritten nine times.

Who's in your shoebox photo?

If today feels heavy, call or text 988. Someone's there.

The Mortals is live every Tuesday at 7pm ET on YouTube @nathanmorrismusic.

Join The Mortals, my supporter community: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/supporters
Stream "Names I'll Never Lose": https://vyd.co/namesillneverlose
Feel Anything, my weekly email: https://nathanmorrismusic.beehiiv.com
Free Funeral Song Guide: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/funeral-songs

Last week's show was rough. I fumbled. A lot.

This week I figured out why. I overthought it. Weeks of treating my content like a math problem made it stiff and careful. My content got buns. Polished falls flat.

I learned the fix in the funeral home years ago. When a family plans a service, they bring two kinds of pictures. The church directory photo. And the shoebox. People always stand in front of the shoebox.

We also talked about The Comeback Room. I'm going to ask artists about the night they almost quit. First up is Julia Cole, night one of her Love You To Death Tour at Headliners in Louisville.

Your homework: send the ugly text. The one you've rewritten nine times.

Who's in your shoebox photo?

If today feels heavy, call or text 988. Someone's there.

The Mortals is live every Tuesday at 7pm ET on YouTube @nathanmorrismusic.

Join The Mortals, my supporter community: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/supporters
Stream "Names I'll Never Lose": https://vyd.co/namesillneverlose
Feel Anything, my weekly email: https://nathanmorrismusic.beehiiv.com
Free Funeral Song Guide: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/funeral-songs

At 10:15 on the night of April 14th, 1865, a president was carried into a stranger's back bedroom and laid diagonally across a bed that was too short for him. The most powerful family in America spent the next nine hours exactly as lost as every family I've ever sat with in a small room, hours after the phone rang.Because here's the truth nobody teaches you: in the first hours after a death, power doesn't help you. Money doesn't help you. What's left is just people in a room, not knowing what they're allowed to do.Tonight I'm walking you through it — hour by hour. Who to call first. What you do NOT have to decide tonight, no matter what anyone tells you. What the funeral home is going to ask, and what you're allowed to say no to. What to say to your job. What to say to your kids. The stuff nobody put in a pamphlet, because there is no pamphlet.I've been in that room over a thousand times — the first hour after someone has died. Same hands that used to hold a microphone, now guiding families through the worst night of their lives.If you've ever gotten that call — the one that rearranges the furniture of your whole life in one sentence — type a 1 in the chat. I want to see how many of us are in this room together tonight.You are not supposed to know what to do. Nobody does. Tonight, I'll tell you the truth about it.The Mortals Live — memento mori made warm. Look at death, so you can live louder.———🖤 STAY CONNECTED🎵 Stream "Names I'll Never Lose": https://laylo.com/nathanmorris⭐ Members-only content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0rrl2tcQlqgkkQgMR9f_0w/join🌐 Website: https://nathanmorrismusic.com✉️ Feel Anything newsletter: https://nathanmorrismusic.beehiiv.com📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nathanmorrismusicTikTok: @nathanmorrismusicInstagram: @nathanmorrisX: @nathanmorris🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/4595061185642496

I have a confession. I watch strangers mow their lawns on YouTube. On purpose. For fun. When I was going through the hardest stretch of my life and rebuilding, I mowed. A lot. Just months before, I owned a major funeral home company. Then I started helping a friend with 67 yards. That turned into 87. Big yards. Small yards. Messy ones with weeds in the beds. This episode: what those straight lines did for me, and what I learned being the guy in the grass-stained khakis. What's your lawn? The thing you do when your head's too loud. Tell me in the comments. The Mortals is live every Tuesday at 7pm ET on YouTube. 

CHAPTERS

0:00 Pre-show

2:24 My confession: I watch strangers mow lawns

6:38 67 yards, then 87: mowing through the rebuild

12:29 The guy in the grass-stained khakis

16:24 What's your lawn? The thing you do when your head's too loud

28:41 The abrupt undoing: from funeral home owner to builder

34:07 "Why don't you just quit?"

45:01 Names I'll Never Lose

48:38 The War of Art & my grandfather's double Windsor

57:46 Victory in suffering & the voice that says you don't matter

1:07:06 What a million Spotify streams actually pays

1:14:22 Keep showing up 

What I'm wearing tonight: https://on.ltk.com/+pEWhnITXSoTULE3__NCYXg 

Join The Mortals, my supporter community: https://nathanmorrismusic.com/supporters 

━━━━━━━━━━

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He was 22, a new dad, drowning in debt, and standing on the wrong side of the rail on the Golden Gate Bridge. The only reason he's alive today is that a highway patrol sergeant named Kevin Briggs happened to be assigned to that bridge, and walked up, and stayed for 92 minutes.

Tonight we talk about that story, and what it means for you. Why the people we should worry about are never the ones crying. Why "strong" is just the word we use for people we've stopped checking on. And why showing up, even flat, even empty, even going through the motions, might be the most important thing you do all year.

I'm a funeral director. I've stood in the room after. So when I say I'm glad you stayed, I mean it.

If tonight moves you, get us to 20 members and I'm doing a members-only live. The membership button is right under this video.

If you're struggling, you don't have to do it alone. Call or text 988. Someone will pick up.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — glad you stayed

2:00 Two men named Kevin

4:00 Kevin Berthia and the coat he wore

8:30 A NICU daughter and a $250,000 bill

12:30 March 11, 2005 — over the rail

17:00 Sergeant Kevin Briggs, the Guardian

22:00 92 minutes — "the compassion in your voice"

27:00 The photograph, and staying alive vs. healing

34:00 Why the mundane is the whole point

41:00 Names I'll Never Lose — my own 3 a.m.

52:00 Your names, my music, and showing up anyway

———

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A funeral director's answer to the machines.

AI tribute generators are everywhere now. Upload a photo, answer three questions, and out comes a eulogy. Clean. Fast. Forgettable.

But here's what the machines will never know: the way someone's voice changed when they talked about their mother. The laugh that came out of nowhere at the arrangement table when a family remembered something small and beautiful. The silence that tells you more than any paragraph ever could.

A real tribute isn't assembled. It's built by someone who sat across from the grief and paid attention.

In this episode, Nathan talks about what gets lost when we hand the most human moment of a funeral to a prompt — and why the directors who still write by hand, who still listen first, will always matter more than any tool that autocompletes a life.

This one's for every funeral director who's ever stayed up late getting the words right.

———

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You never met them. You never shook their hand. So why does it feel like you lost a friend when the news says they're gone?nnThis week on The Mortals, funeral director and singer-songwriter Nathan Morris sits with the grief nobody gives you permission to feel — the artist whose songs raised you, the voice that was in your kitchen for fifteen years, the stranger whose passing put you flat on the floor. It's called parasocial grief, and it is not a malfunction. It's love that only had to travel one way.

From a child's headstone found buried under a backyard deck, to an English village that tended an enemy airman's grave for nearly 86 years, to the signs we swear come from the people we've lost — this is a night about the names we refuse to put down, and why looking straight at death is how we learn to live louder. Bring someone with you. Drop a name you still carry in the chat — we're going to say them out loud.

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This week on The Mortals Live, we walk through what a visitation at a funeral home is really for. Not the version you see in movies. The real thing. Why we gather, what it does for the living, and how showing up for someone in grief is one of the most important things you will ever do.

Then it gets personal. I share the night I almost became the one on the other side of that room. The night everything almost ended, and what kept me here.

This is a conversation about presence, purpose, and the people who hold us together when we are falling apart.

If this episode sits with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6x_THxJRVA

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Before my new single "Names I'll Never Lose" drops Friday, I wanted to give you the other half of it.

Fifteen years as a funeral director taught me something almost nobody gets to see: exactly how much one ordinary life adds up to — because I'm standing there on the day the world does the subtraction. In this episode I tell you about a man I'll call Ray, who spent his whole life certain he didn't matter... and the room that proved him wrong. The catch? He never got to see it.

So tonight I'm doing something we're not supposed to be able to do: I'm going to show you your room, while you're still here to stand in it.

This is the episode where I read the Wall of Names — the names you told me you'll never lose — and where I make the case that you are load-bearing in more lives than you have any idea. If you've ever felt invisible, overlooked, or like the reliable one nobody checks on, this one's for you.

You're a name somebody will never lose. Let's prove it.

———

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There was a stretch of time where I did not want to be here anymore. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, tired, hopeless way.I want to tell you how I got there, because I think a lot of you know how it happens. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens in pieces. It happens the way erosion happens — you don't notice the ground leaving until you're standing on nothing.My friend and business partner died. A mentor I trusted turned around and worked to undo me. The company we built was slipping out of my hands. My marriage was coming apart. And the identity I had spent fifteen years building — the steady funeral director who walks into the worst room in someone's life and holds the floor so it doesn't collapse — that identity burned down to the ground.For a season, my own mind lied to me in my own voice. It told me that leaving would be the kind thing. That the people I loved would be better off without me. And I nearly believed it.Here's what kept me here. Four boys who did not ask for any of this. And a woman named Marilyn who refused to leave the room, even on the days I could not show up for myself.I wrote a song about it. It's called "Names I'll Never Lose." It's out August 14. The artwork is a grave with dirt coming down — but the dirt never covers my face, and it never covers the roses. Because that is exactly what this was. I was buried, and something in me would not let the dirt cover my face.Tonight I tell the whole story, why I'm still here, and I play the song for the first time.If any of this is landing where you are right now — please hear me. You are worthy. You are valued. You are important. Reach out. 988 is a lifeline, 24 hours a day. And find your quiet reasons — the faces, the names, the people you would carry no matter what. Choose the quiet reasons over the loud ones. Every single day.— NathanWatch live every Tuesday at 7 PM ET.

https://youtube.com/@nathanmorrismusic🕯 Add a name to the Wall of Names → https://namesillneverlose.netlify.app🎵 Pre-save "Names I'll Never Lose" (out Aug 14) → https://laylo.com/nathanmorris/qI8WVI🎙 The Mortals podcast (Spotify, Apple, video) → 📩 Feel Anything newsletter → https://nathanmorrismusic.beehiiv.comIf you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988. You are not alone.Walls of Names: Share a name you will never lose: https://namesillneverlose.netlify.app