When We Die Talks

Content note: This episode includes discussion of suicide, physician-assisted death, psychosis, and serious illness.

The caller and their late partner met when they were nineteen. For the better part of a decade they were each other's person, the one you call with good news, bad news, or at 4am when you can't stop thinking about what it will feel like to stop existing. For most of that time, the caller was the one afraid of death. Their partner wasn't. Then their partner, searching for anything that might work against treatment-resistant depression, tried psilocybin. It went badly enough that they developed schizophrenia. The person who used to be at peace with the idea of nothing spent the rest of their life terrified of a very specific something, an afterlife they'd seen in that trip and believed was waiting for them.

What follows is not a straight line. There's electroconvulsive therapy and the brain damage that came with it. A period that looked, briefly, like hope: the partner coming out as trans, seeming more alive than they had in years. A breakup that was really an act of care. A vein at the temple that only shows when someone is dangerously underweight, and doctors who looked past it. And, in the end, something the caller is careful to call by its real name: a death with dignity, chosen with a death doula, not a crisis.

The caller talks about all of it, including where they are now: still afraid of death, but less afraid than before, because for the first time in their life they're the one hoping something comes next. Not despite what happened to their partner, but because of it.

Stay through to the very end of this one. Our caller shared a story after our conversation was over that's worth the listen.

In this conversation:

• What it means to lose someone who was, for years, more at peace with death than you were
• A mushroom trip that triggered psychosis, and the years-long shift that followed: electroconvulsive therapy, a gender transition, a slow physical decline
• Talking a partner through the idea of dying by choice, and the legal patchwork around death with dignity
• A friend's theory that memory is physical, and what that means for grief
• Growing a bat flower, and what it means to still want to see something bloom

Book recommendation: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — see the full list of Anonymous Book Recommendations here.

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

Our caller was sitting in a college class when a professor, mid-lecture, turned and looked directly at them and asked what it might have been like to be sheltered with your partner under a mantle in Pompeii, watching ash come down. The caller says every hair on their arm stood up. That was the professor's window into something he already suspected about them.

Years later, at an artist market, a stranger asked for a reading. The caller doesn't usually charge, and doesn't usually push, but something came through anyway: a message from the woman's late grandfather, gone three years, about a Salisbury steak dinner at a nursing home and a family joke he'd sworn her father to secrecy over. The woman called her father on the spot. He confirmed it, word for word.

The caller was raised in the Bible belt, got kicked out of a few churches as a kid for asking the wrong questions, and has spent years since building a belief system with room for all of it: heaven, reincarnation, nothing at all, and fifty other doors besides, none of them locking anyone out for good. These days, they're also working toward a graduate degree in forensic anthropology, with the goal of helping identify people found in mass graves so their families can finally bring them home.

In this conversation:

• Growing up a medium in the Bible belt, and what got them kicked out of church
• The professor, Pompeii, and the moment logic stopped being enough
• A grandfather's message about Salisbury steak that convinced a grieving family
• The horse spirit that's followed the caller their whole life
• Believing in "fifty doors" instead of one version of the afterlife
• Studying forensic anthropology to help identify people in mass graves

Book recommendations: The Giver by Lois Lowry and Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian (see the full list of Anonymous Book Recommendations here)

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

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

They used to believe in ghosts, built on a childhood theory that energy can't be created or destroyed, so it has to go somewhere. Standing alone in that house afterward, they gave it every chance to prove them right. Nothing came, and that absence is what moved them somewhere new.

In the days after, they became the one holding the certainty for everyone else. Friends kept saying it wasn't sinking in, that they couldn't believe it. And our caller, having seen it themselves, became the person other people leaned on to say it was real. A recurring dream followed: finding him alive again, undone each time by a conspiracy where everyone who loved them had lied to punish them. Even inside the dream, the relief of him being alive outweighed the betrayal. In the years since, part of that dream became true in its own way. Not him coming back, but the blame that landed on them anyway.

In this conversation:

• A childhood theory about ghosts built on thermodynamics and energy
• Losing a friend to suicide in middle school, and an aunt's suicide years later
• Becoming the one holding the certainty for a friend group that couldn't accept what happened
• A PTSD diagnosis and a recurring dream about a faked death
• Losing a shared friend group after the loss, and where the blame landed
• A missing stretch of memory that swallowed a birthday
• Avoidance, discomfort, and getting through a worst-case scenario that actually happened

Book recommendation: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling (see the full list of Anonymous Book Recommendations here)

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

From there the conversation moves through an ofrenda they keep in their home for a close friend they lost suddenly last year, and what it means for that friend to become part of the conversation every time someone new comes over. They talk about Day of the Dead, growing up between two countries, and a choice to focus on the decades someone lived rather than the last week of their life. They end on where they'd go first if they could see more of the world.

In this conversation:

• Being a radical death advocate, and choosing to accept dying rather than treat it as the enemy
• The idea of two deaths: the death of the body, and the last time anyone says your name
• Building and keeping an ofrenda, and what it means to talk about someone you've lost every time a friend visits
• Reframing grief around a lifetime lived, instead of the final days of it
• Wanting to see more of the world, starting with the Caucasus

Book recommendation: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

From there the conversation moves fast and wide. A reference to Coco and what it means to be remembered. The Big Bang and where the energy to start it came from. Consciousness, and why science still can't explain it. Being raised Catholic and no longer able to fully believe it, while also not able to fully let go of it either.

There's a period in high school the caller went through completely alone, lying to their parents and saying nothing to their friends. It's what diabetics call burnout, a point where the constant work of managing a condition every hour of every day just becomes too much to keep up. 

Out of it came a decision to spend their nights taking calls from classmates instead of asking for help themselves, some of those calls going until 2am. That decision turned into something more permanent: a sense that their own survival isn't really about them. It's about their parents, their brother, their friends, and the people they haven't met yet.

In this conversation:

• Coco, the Big Bang, and what it means to be remembered after you're gone
• Diagnosed at 22 months old, and growing up inside a condition rather than adjusting to one
• The freshman year burnout no one else knew about, and what came out the other side of it
• Sonder, The Egg by Andy Weir, and the idea that no one else's unkindness is really about you
• Living for other people as a stated philosophy, not a coping mechanism

Book recommendation: The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

From there, the conversation opens into a full cosmology the caller has been building for years: reflections in a bubble, a lava lamp as a model of consciousness, the Mandelbrot set and what fractals might have to do with the soul. Robert Monroe's astral projection experiments, the CIA's Gateway Project, a childhood spent doing dream interpretation. It moves fast and doesn't ask permission to be believed. It just asks you to follow.

Underneath it all is a caller who grew up Pentecostal in the Bible Belt and never stopped asking the questions the room didn't want asked. Including teaching themselves pieces of Greek and Hebrew just to check if the Bible had been translated right. That same refusal to accept an easy answer is what eventually led them somewhere stranger, and more spacious.

This is a good one if you're drawn to big, unresolved ideas that don't tie up neatly. It asks you to sit with concepts you may not have language for yet. But it lands, at the end, on something disarmingly simple.

In this conversation:

• A doctor, a dying aunt, and the coincidence that let the caller's mother survive infancy
• Astral projection, Robert Monroe, and the CIA's Gateway Project
• The Mandelbrot set, the Buddhabrot, and fractals as a model for the soul
• Growing up Pentecostal, teaching themselves biblical languages, and learning not to accept easy answers
• A string of losses across adolescence and what they taught the caller about impermanence

Book recommendation: Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

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

From there, the conversation moves into the one electron theory: the idea that a single electron might be tracing a path so vast and complex that, from our perspective, it looks like billions. And the caller's question: what if souls work the same way?

We also talk about non-duality, about the grief they're able to feel versus the grief they're expected to perform, about the Catholic upbringing that they've mostly moved away from, and the one part of it that still quietly unsettles them. And at the very end, after an hour of theory and philosophy, the conversation lands somewhere unexpected.

This is a good episode if you enjoy ideas. If you're comfortable sitting with a framework that's genuinely unusual and doesn't resolve neatly. The caller isn't here to convince. They're here to share what helps them.

In this conversation:

• A theory of reincarnation that isn't tied to linear time
• The one electron theory, and what it might mean for the soul
• Non-duality, and why the caller thinks separation is something we invented
• Consciousness as a gradient scale, with humans nowhere near the top
• The grief they feel versus the grief they know how to show
• A Catholic upbringing, a mostly-abandoned belief system, and the one fear that stayed

Book recommendations: The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh and Morning, Noon, and Night by Spalding Gray

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

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

A first-generation Filipino American who grew up without a fixed sense of home, they found their way into community death care not through a course or a calling they could name, but through the accumulation of things they survived and the people they stayed for. What brought them to this work was loss. What keeps them in it is something harder to explain: a sense that being present for someone at the end of their life is less about training and more about showing up with your whole self.

This is a conversation about learning to live inside uncertainty, and finding that the mystery of death doesn't have to be something you solve.

In this conversation:

• What it means to grow up without a fixed home, and how that shaped an early, complicated relationship with death
• Witnessing a parent's suicide attempt as a child, and carrying that in relative silence for most of a lifetime
• How a family crisis became the unexpected doorway into community death care
• Volunteering to sit with people who are actively dying, and what that actually looks like
• The idea that suicidal ideation is more common than most people admit, and what changes when we stop treating it as unspeakable
• Settling into "I don't know" as an answer to what happens when we die, and why protecting the mystery might matter more than solving it

Book recommendation: The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

From early childhood spent in chemo waiting rooms to becoming, at 16, the family member who could see what others couldn't (or wouldn't) admit was happening to aging parents and grandparents, this caller has spent years as the person carrying the weight of decline that the rest of the family wasn't ready to face.

This is a conversation about what it means to be the one who's honest when honesty isn't welcome, what caregiving costs a person in the years they don't get back, and how someone holds onto curiosity and faith even while putting their own life on hold again and again.

In this conversation:

• Growing up with memento mori as a normal part of family life, and what it's like to be raised Catholic in a way that felt welcoming rather than fear-based
• What it's like to be the one who notices a parent or grandparent is declining — and the toll of being disbelieved by family members who aren't ready to see it
• Being present for a peaceful death in early hospice care, and what it meant when pain relief wasn't yet standard practice
• What it costs to keep putting your own health and education on hold for the people who need you
• Finding small ways to hold onto a life of your own while still being on call for everyone else
• A different way of imagining what "nothing" might feel like after we die

Book Recommendation: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.

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

This is a conversation about what it looks like to build an entire life around proximity to death and come out the other side more certain, not less.

We talk about the difference between the brain that perceives and the brain that just keeps the lights on, what it felt like to be airlifted off an island during a military coup at 22 years old, and why the anatomy lab might be one of the most quietly spiritual places a person can sit. We also get into what families get wrong about what their loved ones are experiencing near the end, why the body is so complicated it's hard not to believe something made it, and what it costs a person emotionally to keep showing up for other people's worst moments without breaking down.

In this conversation:

• What the brainstem keeps doing after the upper brain goes quiet, and why families often mistake that for suffering
• This is the anatomy book mentioned during the call: Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab by Christine Montross
• Why promising to be there at the deathbed changed how this caller practiced medicine
• Being airlifted out of Grenada in 1983 and what that moment did to how this caller decided to live
• What burying your emotions to help other people actually does to you over time
• Why the caller can't understand choosing to believe there's nothing after death

Book Recommendations: The Bible

All Anonymous Book Recommendations: View the full list

Video Episode: If you'd like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube

About When We Die Talks: When We Die Talks is a podcast built around anonymous conversations about death, loss, and how contemplating mortality shapes the way we live. If you’re new here, start with the Episode Guide. It’s designed to help you find conversations that match where you’re at—curiosity, grief, hesitation, or openness.

Stay Connected
🌐 Website: whenwedietalks.com
📰 Substack: When We Die Talks
📸 Instagram: @whenwedietalks
▶️ YouTube: When We Die Talks
✉️ Email: [email protected]

Want to share your thoughts? Leave a voicemail at 971-328-0864 and share what you believe happens when we die. Messages may be featured in a future episode. If you’d like to have a full conversation, you can apply to be an anonymous caller at whenwedietalks.com.