When We Die Talks

Content note: One voicemail near the end describes being shot and a near-death experience, with some strong language. The episode also talks about pet loss and euthanasia. Three years ago, this project started with a phone number and one ask: leave a message and tell me what you think happens when we die. The first messages ran six minutes long, and the voicemail cut them off at three. For the ann...

I’m away on a meditation retreat and I know this isn't how one is supposed to use a podcast, but I didn’t want anyone to miss this. To celebrate three years of the When We Die Talks project, I’m doing a giveaway. Each winner will win a set of books which feature a book from some amazing people. These include books from Darnell Lamont Walker, Ben Reeves, Sara Rian, or Kacie Gikonyo, a few pick...

Content Note: This episode includes a brief mention of suicidal thoughts in childhood. This caller pictures death as floating in a dark bathroom lit only by a nightlight, so comfortable you forget where your skin starts and stops. You arrive with a cannonball, whether you jumped or got shoved. Then you settle into what they call a soup. The people and pets you loved aren’t floating next to you. Th...

Months into a stay at a rehab hospital, with both arms and both legs broken, the caller found out the crystal they always carried in their pocket had been sitting in their bedside drawer the whole time. They couldn’t reach for it. Their best friend, who ran physical therapy there, handed it to them. That night they had the most vivid dream of the morning of the wreck: pulling away from the house,...

The caller was five or six when they started lying awake at night, scared of death. What frightened them was the idea of not existing at all. That wasn't something a kid could bring up to adults, so they mostly thought about it alone. Around the same time, their mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was the 1980s, and nobody explained much to the kids. When the cancer came back years later...

Content note: This episode includes open, direct discussion of suicide, including details of the caller finding their son after his death and the caller's own suicidal thoughts in the months that followed. If you are not in a place to listen to this one, that's ok.  This week's caller is a psychic medium who spends their days holding space for other people's pain. Ten months be...

Content note: This conversation talks openly about drug addiction, recovery, overdoses, and near-death experiences. The subjects are heavy, but the call itself is warm, curious, and funny in places. If today isn't the right day for it, that's okay. The first time it happened, the power went out in the bathroom where the caller had collapsed, and their phone dropped into SOS mode. Nothing...

Content note: This conversation includes discussion around a terminal diagnosis and a period of chronic suicidality. If you aren't in the right space for this today, that's ok. This week's caller is the other half of last week's conversation, the one living inside the diagnosis instead of beside it. They have a former colleague who once opened a tense workplace meeting with thr...

Our caller's framework for what happens after we die starts with basic physics: energy can't be created or destroyed. From there, they work backward. If someone survives a traumatic brain injury and comes out unable to remember who they used to be, wanting different things than they did before, are they still the same person? Our caller thinks so. Just changed. It's the same logic t...

The caller was raised by two atheist parents who explained death the way you'd explain any other natural process: you die, you break down, you go back into the earth. They never fully believed it. Their grandmother offered something else, reincarnation, and the caller spent years circling that belief instead, even as they kept collecting moments that didn't fit cleanly into either story....

A note before we start: This episode includes discussion of a suicidal crisis and the loss of a pregnancy. If that's more than you can take in today, that's okay, come back to this one when you're ready. The caller keeps their twin daughters' ashes inside a teddy bear on a shelf beside their bed. Most mornings, they say good morning. The girls' names were Scarlet and Viole...

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 t...

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,...

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 applicati...

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 c...

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 ene...

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 bu...

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 the...

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 r...

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 o...

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 li...

This week's caller is 79 years old and has spent the last three years going down every rabbit hole death has to offer. All in service of a book that's about to come out. They have lost a husband and a mother. They have survived breast cancer. And somewhere in all of that, they stopped being afraid of dying and started being afraid of being dead. This is a conversation between two people...

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 full...

This week's caller is a pediatric nurse who has been around death long enough to stop fearing it and start getting curious about it. They lost their father to suicide as a teenager. A few months later, they were the one doing CPR on their childhood best friend after an accidental fentanyl overdose. They were sixteen. They didn't become a nurse because of those losses exactly, but those l...

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 d...