Doug French: This is going to show people just how far apart we are in age in terms of like...
Magda Pecsenye Zarin: You and me?
Doug: Yeah, because you were a child bride.
Magda: Yes, that's true.
Doug: And the big story is that when New Coke came out, you were having Cokes with your grandfather and I was already 38 years old and…
Magda: Okay, but don't you think the fact that we use New Coke as a marker in our lives is hilariously elderly at this point?
Doug: Sure, I think so. It was a phenomenon. Yeah, it's 39 years ago now.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: But yes, I was in college mixing it with bourbon and you were sitting down staring adoringly at your grandfather as a teenager.
Magda: Oh, we were very upset when New Coke happened. When Classic Coke came back, we were first in line. I was not allowed to drink pop in my parents' house. We just didn't have it. And so we would go to my grandparents' house and my grandfather would always...
Doug: Wait a minute. I never knew that. They deprived you of Werner's?
Magda: Yeah, we never bought pop. Oh my God. That would, what a waste. What an absolute waste that would have been.
Doug: We didn't drink it often, but we had it sometimes.
Magda: It wasn't that they were like pop teetotalers. They didn't see it as immoral. Like if other people brought it over to our house or if, you know, like if we got takeout pizza and they gave us a free two liter, it was allowed in the house. It was just not something my parents would ever have spent money on.
Doug: It wasn't like garlic to a vampire.
Magda: Right. Right. Well, but you've got to remember, my mom was also a health food mom. She cooked out of Diet For A Small Planet my entire childhood. Belonged to a co-op, had to go to co-op breakdown, a lot of vegetables, a lot of brown rice, all of that kind of stuff. And so the idea of just keeping pop in the house to drink whenever we wanted to drink it was like... Well, my mother now buys pre-made chocolate milk, the kind that comes in a jug that's made with corn syrup pre-made for her and my dad to enjoy.
Doug: Time does things to people, I guess.
Magda: I don't know what I actually think, honestly. When you look at the food choices of women who are between the ages of 70 and like 100, I think some of it is because they made it through perimenopause and menopause. And now they're just like, fuck it. I'm going to drink chocolate milk if I want to.
Doug: I do not blame your mom for running out of fucks. So by all means. Yeah. So this is the banter portion of our conversation.
Magda: This is the banter portion of our conversation.
Doug: Well, we'll record this and then I'll put the music in and then we'll start talking about death. There's plenty of time to talk about death.
Magda: That's very true.
Doug: There's going to be plenty of time to talk more about death as the deaths of people we know and people we like and people we enjoy from afar also start crossing over.
Magda: Well, that's what we were planning on talking about today, right?
Doug: You didn't even want to record today because you were in a state.
Magda: I was fine with recording today. I just didn't want to think of a topic to record on today, right? Because It's been an interesting process of trying to process Shannen Doherty having died. I mean, I did watch Bev Niner in college with a group of friends, but I think we were a little bit older than the core demographic of viewers. I don't know. Like, I mean, I remember watching it, but I wasn't really attached to any of the people. And Brenda certainly wouldn't have been the character that I would have been interested in. I mean, I was much more of an Andrea fan.
Doug: Right. She was the nerd, so of course she was the brains of the outfit.
Magda: And yes. I mean she was playing the smart nerd. The actress was also like a solid five years older than everybody else on the show. It was just weird. It was a very strange setup from the beginning. And that was part of what we talked about when we watched it because I think we were just slightly too old to be the real core demographic to be fan fans of Bev Niner. But you know, when Melrose Place came on, we were much bigger fans of Melrose Place. And I never watched Charmed. Like I just didn't know a whole lot about Shannen Doherty, except that she was kind of the bad girl in that she fought with everyone. And it wasn't that her character fought with everyone. It was that Shannen Doherty fought with everyone.
And there were all these rumors that she was difficult to work with and she was late. And then when she was on Charmed, there was this famous feud between her and Alyssa Milano. And like, you know, she left the show because nobody wanted her and all this kind of stuff. And so that's just kind of what I knew about her right now. If all this was playing out now, as a mom, I would be like, oh, that kid has had problems. She's had some kind of trauma that is causing her to act out, is making it difficult for her to make friends with the people she works with, that kind of stuff. There's something going on, right? Anybody who has read the Britney Spears memoir would look at Shannen Doherty's behavior and be like, whoa, something is massively wrong with this kid here. There's a reason young people, especially young women, act out in those ways. And I think that may have been what caught my attention about Shannen Doherty. And then when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and started being very public about it, you know, she lived through all of these treatments. She was pursuing every kind of treatment there was because she really wanted to live and she was doing it in real life and in real time, showing us. She had a podcast. she was on Instagram all the time, she was very public about it. She did interviews, she went on shows, all kinds of stuff and she had so many treatments. And then last year she announced that it had gone to her brain. I was like oh, this is just awful. And she was trying to get divorced from this guy who's a total letch who would not settle with her because his game was: he knew she was dying., and if he could just not sign the papers to settle, time would run out for her. They wouldn't be legally divorced and he would inherit everything.
Doug: I didn't know that. Jeez, man.
Magda: All right.
Doug: Well, you know, I work hard to get in a good mood before we start recording and you have effectively popped that balloon, so.
Magda: God, yeah. Well, I mean, this week's episode is The Yellow Wallpaper.
Doug: I don't know what that means, either, but I'm sure we'll get to it.
Magda: The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story, classic Charlotte Perkins Gilman, about a young woman who has everything going for her. She's, you know, middle class whatever, but she has been judged to be insane and the cure is a rest cure. And so she's forced to just lie in her bed all day and all night doing nothing. And so she stares at the yellow wallpaper. It's a feminist classic.
Doug: Noted. All right. I'll put that down. But we've had four very high profile deaths in the past week.
Magda: Yes.
Doug: We lost Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons, Dr. Ruth and Shannen Doherty, which seems like a bit of a carpet bomb given the nature of everything else that's going on, because these people meant a lot of things to a lot of people. It's actually fascinating to me how many people I know who've posted pictures posing with Richard Simmons.
Magda: I know a lot of people who had pictures posing with Richard Simmons too. My friend Alan lived in LA for a long time and he and a group of his friends used to go work out with Richard Simmons’ Saturday morning workout class for years. Like they would go in and just work out with Richard Simmons. I think this was in the aughts and it was $10 for a class to work out with the actual Richard Simmons. And it was just this whole group of them that would go. And so remember when Richard Simmons sort of went missing a couple of years ago? And I guess to Richard Simmons, he thought he was just taking a break, but everybody else was like, Ooh, he's been held captive by his assistant or something like that? And it was very weird.
Doug: Well, these are the times we live in now. Anything that seems slightly out of order launches 3000 conspiracy theories.
Magda: But I think Richard Simmons was one of those people that everybody felt like they wanted to know him, but he was kind of unknowable. Like he sort of protected himself so much that, he was on all the time.
Doug: And clearly being on meant not being him and taking abuse from talk show hosts about his oily legs and his short shorts and stuff. And that was the role he played.
Magda; What I think is particularly interesting about this quartet of people who has died. And this is, we're going to run this like a week after we tape it. So maybe more people will have died in the interim. Is that Gen X people all knew all four people. Because almost everybody has seen The Shining and Shelley Duvall was Wendy, the wife of Jack Nicholson in that. So even if you didn't know her from anything else, like that scene was–
Doug: And we can link to it in the show notes.
Magda: And the way Shelley Duvall plays it is just stunning. Everybody knew Dr. Ruth because Dr. Ruth was like everywhere in the ‘80s. I mean, I think probably more of us learned more about sex from Dr. Ruth than from anyone else. Richard Simmons was everywhere, too. We all knew Richard Simmons. And then Shannen Doherty was our age. She was 53 when she died. And so I think just like four people that everybody knew, even if you didn't think about them, but everybody knew who they were.
Doug: I'm trying to think who the third person was. I mean, 2016, that spring was brutal because we lost David Bowie and Prince.
Magda: Well, OK, so in 2016, we lost David Bowie. Then my uncle died. And then Prince. And then Tom Petty.
Doug: Right. That's the third celebrity. Yes.
Magda: And then George Michael, who I absolutely adored. George Michael died at Christmas in 2016. So that year was awful for a lot of people.
Doug: I know Robin Williams died sometime before that, but I think it was far enough behind. It might've been 2014. I remember it was a summer when I heard about Robin Williams.
Magda: Well, and then there was when Kate Spade and Tony Bourdain died within a couple of weeks of each other. I don't think Kate Spade meant a lot to men, but women knew her. Even if we weren't like into her as a person, women definitely knew Kate Spade. And we saw her as somebody who kind of had everything. So, yeah.
Doug: Anyway, the point of all this, you know, racking our aging brains about when people important to us died. I mean, this kind of dates back to me. I just recently saw the Idea Man documentary on Disney Plus about Jim Henson. And that was the first real death that just buffaloed me, that I just actually had to sit down where I was. And he was our age, too. He was 53.
Magda: Oh, wow.
Doug: And he died of something stupid. You know, he died of just undiagnosed double pneumonia.
Magda: Wow.
Doug: And then it came out that he was raised Christian scientist.
Magda: Oh, and so he wouldn't have gone to the hospital.
Doug: Well, he didn't espouse what his parents did. I think he was just in the wrong place. And he was more of a guy who just didn't think it was as serious as it was. And then he finally went to the hospital and the infections just didn't stop. He couldn't stop them.
Magda: People don't think you can die of pneumonia, but people die of pneumonia all the time. Even if they go to the hospital, even with modern medicine, because pneumonia is serious. You know, it's one of those things that's kind of like being a frog in a pot. It starts out like whatever it's going to start out like, and you think, oh, this is just some illness. I feel horrible now, but I'm going to get better. And then you kind of don't get better and you don't really realize how bad it is. I know people who've had walking pneumonia who are told, oh, you could have died. And they're like, what? I had no idea. I thought I just felt horrible. And so I think that's the real thing with pneumonia is that, especially before COVID, we didn't take stuff like that seriously. We were just like, oh yeah, I feel horrible. Let me just take some Robitussin and move on.
Doug: Okay. First of all, frog in a pot, a flag on the play there. because is that a Kermit reference? It's too soon.
Magda: No. No.
Doug: And it's interesting how, because I find myself making macabre humor in general to cope with that, because when we started talking about just this recent little flurry of deaths among celebrities that we all knew, it made me think more about just the arcs of our lives. It's one thing when somebody dies and you're in your 20s, or like Jim Henson did when I was in my early 30s. But now when somebody dies, how often do you think about mortality? Just how much time you have left, if at all.
Magda: At least as often as Stereotypical Barbie does.
Doug: I need help with that reference.
Magda: Have you still not seen the movie?
Doug: I have.
Magda: Remember when they're at the party and everybody's, “I can dance, I can dance, I can dance.” And then she's like, “Hey, do you guys ever think about death?” And the record scratch, right? So like, that's what I think is, you know, we're supposed to just be bopping along in our lives. Hey, everything's great. Let me go to the pickup line, sending my kids off to college. It's all fine. But I think a lot of us are really thinking about death a lot more often than we admit to other people.
Doug: Do you have conversations about that with people? I just did. That's why, because I'm asking.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: Does it involve friends, parents? What kind of people have passed on?
Magda: But a lot of it is framed around our parents' health, our parents' mortality, and what that makes us think about our health and our mortality. It's usually more about like my parents are putting this into place. My dad's doing like this. My mom's doing like this, that kind of stuff. And then it leads into some death stuff. Have you ever heard of a death cafe?
Doug: No.
Magda: A friend of mine who worked for a national hospice organization for a long time is the one who made me aware of them. A death cafe is a group that's open to people. It's usually held in a cafe or in somebody's house and people can come and just talk about death. And so it's for people who've been having thoughts about death. I don't mean like you're thinking about suicide and you need to talk to people. I mean, just people who are having thoughts about death and they want to talk to other people. Like, you know, what do you think happens when you die? Do you think it's possible to know what happens when you die? Like, I'm worried that no one will care when I go or, you know, like, do you think that we have a essence that goes somewhere? You know, questions like that.
Doug: Right.
Magda: Talking about different cultural traditions around death. And so the person who runs it is somebody that has some special training in talking about death to kind of guide the group, like any kind of support group. And people can show up if they want to. It's not like a series of anything. There's no program. There's not necessarily learning involved. It's just some place where people can go talk about death. And I think it's kind of a cool idea in our culture that doesn't really like to talk about death, that there is a place that people can talk about it.
Doug: Why hasn't this idea been franchised yet?
Magda: Oh, it probably has been. I don't know. I mean, I think for one, because I don't think people pay to go. I think you just go, and if it's held in like a coffee house, you buy a coffee.
Doug: Yeah, it's not a big profit center. I get it. Shareholders would revolt in five seconds.
Magda: I read a really delightful fiction book about a death doula. And she attends death cafe sessions occasionally, but doesn't tell anyone there that she's a death doula because she doesn't want to be seen as a professional. It was just a very charming book, but it was an interesting look into an actual death cafe because I think the author had gone to them to discover what they were like.
Doug: How do you find them? I mean, do they market themselves as death cafes?
Magda: Good question. I don't know. I don't know. Let's go to the internet and see.
Doug: Okay. So Googling, of course, makes excellent podcast content. Right.
Magda: Deathcafe.com has a page, “search for death cafes by location.”
Doug: It sounds like they're all like speakeasies.
Magda: Kind of. Okay, so it automatically searched Boston, Mass. And there are some sort of near me.
Doug: All right. Yeah, this is going to be secret society stuff. You got to knock twice and ask for Lazarus.
Magda: Right. I think we are at the prime age at which we should be thinking about death, but may be starting to get extra scared to be thinking about death.
Doug: I don't think. Well, are you scared to think about death?
Magda: No, I'm not.
Doug: Yeah, I'm not either. I mean, the only thing I think about is making sure everything that I need to have in order before I die is in place. Because I don't want anybody dealing with nonsense and probate and all that stuff. All the affairs must be in order in case that bus comes along with my name on it. And a lot of buses have my name on it.
Magda: So you want to know what's extra funny about that. There used to be, and maybe still is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a cleaning company called Magda's Cleaning.
Doug: Yup.
Magda: And, um, I used to see that all the time. They used to put those signs literally on the back of the public buses in Ann Arbor. And so I would, you know, pull up behind a bus at the stoplight and see this big thing that said “Magda's Cleaning.” Like, no, she's not. She is almost never cleaning.
Doug: And I see my name whenever a donut shop spells doughnut properly.
Magda: Oh, yeah, you're right. Okay, just so you know, there is an online death cafe in Ann Arbor. It used to be in person, but they went online during COVID and are still online.
Doug: That doesn't count. I'm not interested. Yeah, they meet once a month. But that's a good concept. I like that idea, just because, just like everything else, we're whistling past the graveyard. When you think about what death is, or I don't think much about what the next level is going to be about, because I can't know, so there's nothing to believe in, as far as I'm concerned.
Magda: Well, and I, you know, I have my religious beliefs, but I think my religious beliefs are...
Doug: Crap.
Magda: You just said “crap.”
Doug: Wait, was that out loud?
Magda: So I was raised Lutheran. And what I was taught was that when you died, you went on to eternal life, which was, I guess, heaven. But like they never said it was specifically heaven. You were just supposed to sort of get that it was heaven. But what I was taught about heaven was that it was just being in the presence of God. It wasn't a place. It was just that whatever made you you, whether you call that a spirit or a soul or a personality or whatever, whatever made you you, apart from your physical body, which had died on earth, you would just be in the presence of God.
I kind of like that it's not specific. I like that it's not particularly rules bound, right? It's not like, oh, you go to heaven if blah, blah, blah, and you get your wings and you got to play a harp and blah, blah, blah. You know, like, what am I doing? Eating marshmallows? Because they're white like the clouds?
That idea is weird to me. But the idea of the part of me that is the essence of me is someplace else in the presence of this universal divine that loves me, I can totally get behind that. I don't really need to know the other details. I figure out I'll be told on an as needed basis.
Doug: Well, you know, sometimes I think it's possible that I'm dead now. You know, I mean, since the heart attack, and I'm not saying this is happening or that I feel this way, but the bottom line is, I think if there is such a thing as a hell, as a place that punishes you, and I don't believe that either, but it's entirely possible. My idea of hell is watching everything I care for crumble around me and be powerless to do anything about it, you know? And the opposite is true, too. There was an interview with John Mulaney recently who was thinking, “You know, sometimes I think I actually died from my drug overdose” because ever since, he's blown up as a celebrity. He's got a new partner and a new son. He's a father now. And it's like he's having the same revelations that Seinfeld did when he waited a little longer to have kids. And it's like, this is a whole new part of my life I never knew could possibly exist. This new level of love that I have. So he's like, I might have died two years ago because this might be some kind of afterlife that's really being very pleasant to me.
Magda: Are you saying that this is kind of like the Truman Show?
Doug: I'm not saying that at all. Where does that come from?
Magda: Here's the question. If you had died when you had your heart attack, but I'm here interacting with you, do I exist?
Doug: In my mind, yeah.
Magda: Okay, but for me, because I perceive that I am here, like I can look at myself both in the window on the computer and by sticking my hand out in front of my face, right?
Doug: Right. Okay.
Magda: And I'm having a conversation with you, but what if I don't actually even exist? What if my consciousness is a figment of your imagination?
Doug: Of course. I may have died when I was 17.
Magda: You can tell I've been reading Haruki Murakami novels this week.
Doug: Yes, you have. Absolutely. And I've watched The Matrix again, you know. I mean, your reality is what you perceive and what your brain is processing and what the chemicals are telling you is happening. So sure. I like to think a lot about the whole idea of recognizing like some people think, you want to think of the end as the end of The Sopranos and just the screen goes black.
Magda: Right.
21:57
Doug: But if we're on a continuum, who knows when one reality stopped and another one started.
22:02
Magda: Well, my question is, why does it have to be the same for everybody?
Doug: It doesn't. I'm saying you might have an entirely different experience. It is different. I think reality is different for everybody, as we've seen.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: It's based on your perception. It's all subjective. So how you perceive the afterlife is the same thing, I think.
Magda: I would go along with that.
Doug: Yeah, who's to say there's a universal experience for all of humanity once they pass into the next realm, if there is a next realm.
Magda: I kind of don't see how there could be a universal experience for everybody. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Doug: Yeah, because your hell isn't my hell and your heaven isn't my heaven. And I love the part of The Good Place when people realize that if you even spend enough time in heaven, that's not great either. That's boring. Heaven doesn't exist without hell. Light doesn't exist without shade, etc.,
Magda: I think that the idea that heaven could possibly be boring is part of the need that the Evangelical church has to create such a punishing system for the people they are human trafficking through their system. Because I was just told it was being in the presence of God and nobody said that you're gonna be super-engaged all the time, right? Like, I don't know. When you're with somebody you really like, are you super-engaged all the time? No, but it's fine, right? Because you're with this person you really, really like. So I guess there wasn't any big expectations set up for me, but there also wasn't a big expectation set up in the rest of my life, right? Like I wasn't being trained to think I had to be having a peak experience all the time. And I think the Evangelical church, it kind of sets people up to think that they're supposed to be having these subpar experiences in the current life, and then they're going to get into the afterlife and be rewarded by having peak experiences all the time. You'll never be bored in heaven. It'll always be wonderful. Constantly. You're going to be rewarded constantly for having essentially been traumatized your entire life on earth and that reconciles the suffering. it's like the suffering is worth it because you'll go on and be raptured and–
Doug: Exactly. Nobility in suffering, and I don't believe that at all. I think people spend too much time looking up.
Magda: Yeah, it's so hard for me when I read these stories by people who are Evangelical, were Evangelical, were growing up in these Evangelical cults, all that kind of stuff. And they're just like, you ask them, “Why would you put up with that??” And they're like, “Well, because I was told that was the only way to get into heaven or the only way to get into the afterlife.” And I guess I don't have that ability to delay gratification for that long. You know, if it was the marshmallow test between like me and an Evangelical, like the Evangelical would absolutely win because I would just eat the marshmallows. Like why? Why is today supposed to be horrible? Like God's kingdom is here for me right now today. And turns out it's hotter than balls.
Doug: Yeah. You could say you're doing a little bit of heaven on earth right now. I mean, you got a new marriage and a, granted, it's got some hard edges to it, but everything does.
Magda: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I think it never made sense to me that to get people to believe in your specific brand of religion you would need to tell them that everything here was horrible and was supposed to be horrible, but just hang in there, keep giving us money, keep giving us all of your energy and all of your spirit. And then later on after you die, when you can't come back to us, there's something good behind door number whatever, right? That never made sense to me. If you want people to join your religion, why don't you teach them how to just enjoy what you have here right now. I mean, when I read the gospels, I see a dude who was trying to teach people around him, like just everybody be really kind to everybody else. And then you can all enjoy what's here right now together.
Doug: I'm also in this mood because I spent an hour and a half on the phone with my parents and we talked a lot about that. I just, I finished their obituaries.
Magda: Oh, wow. Good. Yeah.
Doug: Which was harder than I thought. And I'm, you know what I mean?
Magda: You didn't think it was going to be hard. And I knew it was going to be grueling for you because it involves things that are very important to you. It's, writing well is very important to you. Doing justice to a topic, a person, a life is very important to you. And you are trying to blend the way you see your parents with the way they see themselves. And that's a big challenge.
Doug: Well, that was a keystone in the whole process because I did realize that this is not about me. It's about them, and I should create the legacy that they want, not what I'd like to read. And I'm glad I was able to make that happen. I mean, granted, I'll have that opportunity in the eulogy.
Magda: Right.
Doug: That's going to be like a tight five.
Magda: Tight ten. You're allowed ten when it's your parents' death.
Doug: But I can understand, too. I think they want some gravitas at their funerals.
Magda: Right.
Doug: And I don't.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And I keep thinking of, I think it's from The Big Chill, that line where they're at the funeral and Jeff Goldblum says, man, you’ll never get a crowd like this at my funeral. It's amazing how they throw the biggest party for you ever and they know you can't come.
Magda: People are still reciting at least one line from the eulogy I gave from my uncle at his funeral eight years ago back to me.
Doug: Why are they doing that? How does that come up?
Magda: Because it was great. Whenever he comes up, they say my line.
Doug: What? Do you want to share the line?
Magda: “He was an asshole, but he was OUR asshole.”
Doug: Oh my goodness.
Magda: It was true. He was a complete asshole, but he was our asshole. We loved him and he loved us.
Doug: So he'd be comfortable knowing that you said that.
Magda: Oh, absolutely. I had written this very lovely eulogy and—
Doug: And said, this is all crap. Delete.
28:33
Magda: –and then I got the feeling that it was wrong, but I was just going to forge ahead with it anyway. And then right on the way to the funeral, I got a flat tire. And so I called Christa, his friend, my friend, and said, “Oh, my God, I got a flat tire.” And she's like, “He doesn't want you to come to the funeral. What's wrong?” And I said, “Oh, he doesn't like the eulogy I wrote.” She said, “So don't give that eulogy.” Got the tire fixed, got there like 10 minutes before the funeral, got up, ad-libbed this eulogy. Afterwards, a dozen people asked me if I would give their eulogies because they said it was the best eulogy they've ever heard. And “He was an asshole, but he was OUR asshole.” Everybody loved it. They were like, that was the absolute summation of him and of my relationship with him and of everybody's relationship with him.
Doug: Did you ever see the eulogy that John Cleese gave for Graham Chapman?
Magda: No.
Doug: He basically went in with, Graham Chapman is dead. He's deceased. He is no more. He has expired and gone to meet his maker. And they definitely, he just went through like the first several bars of the dead parrot sketch.
Magda: Okay.
Doug: And everybody was laughing because they needed to, because they were so sad having seen him be near death through alcoholism and then survive that.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: I think about that a lot. Like if I outlive you, what would you want me to say at your funeral?
Magda: That I tried really hard. That loving our two kids was the most important thing in my entire life. And that I wish that I had figured out that there was nothing wrong with being earnest about 10 years earlier than I did.
Doug: Wow, this got serious awful quick.
Magda: It did. I'm crying.
Doug: I mean, I did not want to solicit that response. And it's beautiful. I mean, if I had to guess, you would have said, “Nothing, dumbass. I've got a husband now.”
Magda: Well, here's the thing. You're a speaker. Mike is not a speaker. I don't imagine that Mike would feel comfortable getting up and speaking. Although he did–
Doug: He did fine at your wedding.
Magda: Yeah. He did speak. Oh, he was great at our wedding. Oh, he was so sweet and wonderful. His speech was wonderful at our wedding. And he did get up and give a really good eulogy at our friend Janet's funeral. I don't know for me. I don't know if he would or not for my funeral, which I have written instructions for and sent to each of our children and to my brother and my sister-in-law. They know the order of the service. They know what music I want. They know that afterwards I want everybody to go out for tacos and karaoke. They know the whole thing.
Doug: But there's also the idea that I would not be involved because I haven't seen any of that.
Magda: Hey, I mean, I wrote up the funeral that I wanted in 2016 when my uncle died. After I planned his funeral, I planned my own. And so, you know, like you and I weren't buds back in 2016. You know, we were like co-parents. We were efficient co-parents.
Doug: No, no, no. After you moved in and took care of me after my heart attack, I think once we even moved here, frankly, you know, the idea that we were able to agree to move here, that regenerated the bulb of budness.
Magda: A little bit, but not enough that I figured you would be having anything to do with my funeral. I don't know, but like there's room in it for anybody to get up and speak who wanted to. So, and that's the thing I find very fascinating about funerals in general is who ends up speaking and who doesn't, because it's not ever expected that the person's spouse is speaking because sometimes they're too close to it and they're unable to speak to a group. My friend Maya's parents both died within four months of each other and they had not had a service for her dad when he died because her mom was too sick to have a service for him. So she had a service for the two of them together. And there were many people who got up and spoke and it was really wonderful. And I think the best funerals I've been to have been funerals where multiple people have gotten up and spoken during the actual service, because then you really get a good perspective on who the person actually was and what they meant to people and what their community was, what their overlapping communities were, all of that kind of stuff.
Doug: And how they're going to live on in each of our hearts in our own individual ways.
Magda: Yeah. Yeah.
Doug: It kind of builds a 3D model of the person.
Magda: Basically what I'm saying is if I die before you do, Doug, if you want to be one of the people who gets up to speak at the funeral, you are certainly allowed to.
Doug: Okay. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, we have that on recording now. If you could update your funeral instructions so that the powers that be are aware of that. So I'm not, you know, tackled by Secret Service agents if I attempted. Right.
Magda: It's funny. I wonder if there's like a form that's like, you know, the medical power of attorney form.
Doug: No, it's the authorized pickup form from school. What is the relationship of the pickup? Right.
Magda: Who's only allowed to show up if they're wearing a red dress?
Doug: But when we consider the much more likely idea that you will outlive me, then what happens?
Magda: I don't know. Do you want me to speak at your funeral?
Doug: I think I could trust you to say something.
Magda: Who's going to be in charge of your funeral? That's the weird thing.
Doug: I have no idea. I don't know who'll be still around to even do it or want to do it.
Magda: The kids, I guess. You know, we have talked about that.
Doug: Probably, yeah. I would put the kids in charge, I think.
Magda: We have talked about this in the past, that kids really have to be apprenticed into that kind of stuff. And I think the kids weren't really old enough to know what was going on when my grandmother died and Uncle Tim and I did it. But then when he died, like a year and a half later, the kids were old enough and I sort of let them know what was happening, you know. “I went and I bought a cemetery plot” and all of the stuff that you have to do so they know that it's just a process.
And if there's anybody listening who's like, I wouldn't have any idea how to do any of this. The thing to do when someone dies is you choose a funeral home that's in your tradition, you call them and you tell them the person has died and then they have the process and they just ask you questions about what you want and they run through the process. They will go pick up the body and do whatever you want with the body, whether it's embalming, cremation, whatever. If you want to have a service, if you want to have it buried, if you want to have it interred, whatever, they're the ones who know the whole process and they walk you through and ask you all the questions. So that's where you start.
Doug: And then after it's done, yes, they give you the bill.
Magda: Yeah, it's true.
Doug: Do they give estimates?
Magda: They do. So here's the thing. They will tell you ahead of time how much it will all cost. You do have to pay them right away. This is a tricky thing for some people because a lot of people take out life insurance policies for the specific purpose of paying for a funeral. So a funeral, when I did it, in 2016 in Toledo, Ohio, I think the cheapest thing you could do probably was around $4,000, but a normal one was $6,000 to $7,000, and you could very easily spend $12,000 on it, right?
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: My uncle had left money for it in a life insurance policy that was paying out. But here's the thing about the life insurance policy. You can't get the life insurance money until you get the death certificate. And you do not get the death certificate until anywhere between a few days to a few weeks after the person has died, depending on what state you're in. And so in Ohio, where my uncle was when he died, my brother went to the, I think it's the county clerk's office, probably within, I think it was like a week after my uncle died, and was able to buy as many copies of the death certificate as he wanted. And I think we got half a dozen because you have to end up showing them to everyone. Even just to turn off his newspaper delivery, I had to show his death certificate.
Doug: Right.
Magda: But you need the death certificate to be able to collect the life insurance. So you're going to have to have some cash to be able to pay the funeral home before you have access to the life insurance money, because you will probably have the funeral and bury the person within a few days of the death and you won't get the death certificate for a week or maybe two.
Doug: That's the nature of our lives now. Nothing is ever prepaid for. It's all you front it and we'll pay you back. Promise.
Magda: Yeah, the other thing is that some people sometimes prepay for a whole funeral. If you prepay for a funeral, you need to leave the signed papers and receipts someplace where your children can find them or whoever's in charge of your estate and doing the funeral, because there's no central registry of any of this. So like if you paid for the whole thing with funeral home A and the people who are alive when you die have no idea and they walk into funeral home B, they have to pay for the whole thing at funeral home B because nobody knows that you paid for it at funeral home A and funeral home A doesn't even know that you've died until they like happen to read your obit in the paper.
Doug: So do you know what your parents want after they die?
Magda: More or less. And we know that they bought cemetery plots in the town in Minnesota that they live in now.
Doug: Oh, they want to be buried. Okay.
Magda: Yeah, they do.
Doug: My mom wants to be buried. She has a family plot.
Magda: Okay.
Doug: But my dad wants a place. He just wants to be remembered in a place. And I think that's what I want, too.
Magda: So he wants to be cremated and then have his ashes spread somewhere?
Doug: And scattered.
Magda: Scattered.
Doug: And that's where I'll be, I think, too.
Magda: So during my many trips to the funeral home when my grandmother died and then my uncle died and it was the same funeral home, I got to see a lot of the sort of latest technology and funeral stuff. And at the time, some company had started making a paperweight. And it looked like you were looking at this swirl of like the universe or a nebula or something like that. But it was actually the ashes of your deceased loved one in there.
Doug: Yeah, that's just too much work.
Magda: I mean, I get it, but yeah. I used to joke that I was going to have two of those paperweights made with the ashes and each of our kids were going to have to display it prominently in his house forever. Do you want to have a funeral service? What do you want?
Doug: I think I like one, yeah. Funerals are not for me. Funerals are for anybody who feels they need to pay respects and grieve. If you spoke at that funeral, what would you say?
Magda: Okay, so you asked me what I would want you to say about me, and now you're asking me what I want to say about you? What do you want me to say?
Doug: Well, because that's what I was waiting for you to ask me.
Magda: All right, what do you want me to say about you?
Doug: Well, I don't know. I mean, obviously your reality is your reality. You'll say what you want, but I know what I'd like to be remembered as.
Magda: Okay.
Doug: You know, I thought about this for a bit, but I think at my core, I'm a curious person and I'm a really affectionate person once you get through a layer of things. And so anybody who ever felt my affection or else felt my curiosity about how they were, if I asked about you, I would hope people will remember and know that that was all genuine.
Magda: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Doug: I'm not really big on legacy. I mean, there was a time when I thought I wanted to build something that would outlast me and I think that's passed. You know, and what you said was poignant too. I really tried my hardest. I was all in. You know, just the whole idea of like whenever something bad happens or when something goes terribly wrong, if you know you in your heart of hearts did your best to save it, then you can live with yourself. You remember that show Six Feet Under?
Magda: Yes.
Doug: I've actually been re-watching a couple of them because it was so well done. It began well, it was formatted well, and it ended extraordinarily well. Because if you remember the premise, every episode began with a death.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And I remember when Peter Krause, the lead, was on a talk show saying, “It's unbelievable how many people who work on this show have accelerated their life choices because they're so much more aware of how suddenly it could end.” Because a lot of these deaths were pretty sudden that they dramatized on the show.
Magda: I mean, I was talking to somebody who was getting divorced a couple days ago, and everybody thinks there's something about their situation that makes it so impossible to get divorced. And then once you get over that and you realize like, oh, there's a logistical path to it, that's when it all kind of opens up for you. And so I think for me, the question is, how do I get to that place with other aspects of my life and see, oh, there's a logistical path to this. I can totally do this if I want to, because, you know, the goal is accelerating your life choices.
Doug: When you think about now, I mean, irrespective of how many years you might have left, is there anything in your short-term bucket list, something specific that you'd like to accomplish before you go?
Magda: That's such a weird question. I mean, there are so many ways that could go and so many different paths that could take, right?
Doug: Exactly. That's why I asked it.
Magda: Can I eradicate the bindweed in my yard? Signs say no, but I still might try, right?
Doug: I hope that's not the peak achievement that 51-year-old Magda Pecsenye is looking to do.
Magda: Right, but I mean, there are all kinds of things I could do, you know? Like, I could start a non-profit. I could start another company. I could win an Academy Award.
Doug: But you can do anything. That's not the question. What do you want to do? Do you want to travel anywhere? Any place you want to see? Um...
Magda: No, I've been a lot of places. I think there are a lot of cool things. There's no way for me to see every cool thing in the world. So I'm not super concerned about the ones that I haven't seen yet. I mean, I would like to go see the islands in the north of Norway. I would like to take the mail boat cruise. There are rooms available on the boats that deliver mail to these isolated islands up in Norway. And so you can book one of those rooms and then get off at the islands while they're delivering the mail and see that. I'd like to see that. I've never been to South America. I would love to be in South America. I've never been to Africa. I would like to go someplace in Africa.
Doug: That would be cool. Get out of my head, lady.
Magda: What?
Doug: I've been talking to Thomas about Africa because he really wants to go travel there. But I have been rewatching some of the episodes of Ewan McGregor driving all around the world on his motorcycle. And Long Way Down ran through Africa. And Long Way Up came through on the west coast of South America. And he went and saw Machu Picchu and he got to La Paz, which is amazingly huge all through Costa Rica and getting around the Darien Gap, which is purposefully untraversable.
Magda: Okay.
Doug: Where South America meets Central America is dense forest that's meant to slow the traffic north. And I also need to get to Australia and/or New Zealand before I go. And another big goal of my life is to end this podcast. And I think we're going to achieve the dream shortly on this extended discussion about death.
Magda: Yes. Okay. We started out with the celebrity death thing and how it hits you. And I think that's another thing that's been very interesting to me about aging, you know, is that I remember before when a celebrity would die, sometimes it was somebody who really meant a lot to me. Sometimes it was just somebody who had been around for a while, or sometimes it hit me kind of hard. But it feels like for the last few years, there's been a higher proportion of the deaths that I knew the person, knew their work, had good feelings about them, maybe had bad feelings about them. But it was more personally meaningful to me. And I hadn't really understood what it was like for older people in my life when they said, “yeah, everyone I know is dying.”
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: And now it kind of feels like, yeah, a lot of people I know are dying.
Doug: It extrapolates, doesn't it? When people that you kind of identify with artistically or whatever, when they go, it radiates out. Like, there's a Facebook group about my high school that lists the people in each class who have passed away.
Magda: Oh, wow.
Doug: And my high school class is an anomaly because... About 10% of our class is gone already.
Magda: Oh, wow.
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: That's such a high number.
Doug: The class was pretty small anyway. It was like 120 people.
Magda: Right.
Doug: And like 14 people have passed away from our high school class. Wow. And not just recently, you know? Yeah.
Magda: Like you lost somebody at 9/11, didn't you? From your class?
Doug: Yes. And another classmate's brother. So that gets us thinking a lot, especially when we get back and have these reunions, which are a total blast now. My God, to be almost 60 and having a high school reunion, what a ball. Almost makes me wish I still lived in New Jersey. And who knows? I may end up there for all I know. I mean, I have a lot of people there. Who's to say? I do like the beach. I would love to live in a one-bedroom lean-to near the shore with Wi-Fi and air conditioning.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And I wanted to ask you too, because I've been thinking about one particular person who wasn't the most famous deaf, but it struck me like, remember Mitch Hedberg?
Magda: Yes.
Doug: I loved him. And I just, when you look at his story, because I did a bit of reading on him after he passed, and he was this really bright kid from St. Paul, Minnesota. And sometime halfway through high school, he just kind of flipped and was like, I'm disinterested in all of this now. He limped out of high school, didn't go to college and started touring and started offering up his just really interesting outlying thoughts. And the machine just kind of ground him up. You know, he just became a heroin addict and he tried to do the mainstream thing. He blew up doing standup and tried to be on TV a couple of times and bombed terribly and And he was very judgmental. He was saying like, he would talk about his jokes. And if a joke bombed, he'd be like, “oh man, that joke bombed.” And you wonder what kind of judgment was kind of implanted in him as a kid to make him that judgmental of his own work.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And then finally, just the drugs took over. He'd been in rehab a couple of times and it didn't take. And he was so young too. He was like 37 and he was married. Is there someone like that for you that has like a similar, you know, maybe not everybody felt the same way about him as you did that kind of sticks with you?
Magda: I mean, I felt very much like that about Mitch Hedberg. I loved Mitch Hedberg. George Michael dying hit me very, very, very, very hard.
Doug: That's who I was thinking you might come up with.
Magda: There's like some residual in my body that when I'm feeling really sick or horrible, I get weepy about George Michael. Do you remember when I had COVID back in June of 2022 and I was just miserable for two weeks and I had just seen that documentary about George Michael and I was in this fever haze for 10 days, just like thinking about how horrible it was that George Michael had been in love with the love of his life, who then had died of HIV and all this kind of stuff. And I was having dreams about it. It was very weird. It's just like every time I get very sick, the tragedy of George Michael's life like resurrects itself in the body. And I start having nightmares. Yeah. Yeah.
Doug: People who had lived their entire lives hidden and who were just finally finding themselves and inhabiting their whole bodies. He'd been... He lost his boyfriend and never really recovered.
Magda: He really never recovered from it. And his mom died not too long after and just never really recovered from it.
Doug: I think of him also with Neil Peart, the Rush drummer, because he wrote all the lyrics to Rush's songs. And he wrote this memoir called Ghost Rider after his wife and daughter died. You know that story, right?
Magda: Yeah. You've told it to me a whole bunch of times.
Doug: Right, yeah. And speaking of something that has hit me hard. So he went on this bike ride 55,000 miles around North America to just get away from everything and reconcile this tremendous tragedy. And he wrote this memoir about it. And he had since then worked so hard. He met a new woman. They had a daughter together. And he had just retired from the band. He's like, I can't do this anymore. I have a young child. I want to be with her and have the life I always dreamed with with my previous family. And like within a year, the brain tumor took him away.
Magda: That's awful.
Doug: You think of that, too. It's just the vagaries of life and how, you know, you got to keep building and building and building, recognizing that however big your sandcastle gets, the waves are coming. But just keep building. Anyway, as I mentioned, a life goal of mine was to end this discussion about death, and we're getting close. Yeah. I think the tone of this podcast was pretty indicative of how we're feeling right now. I think there's a lot of whistling past the graveyard. You got to find humor and everything the best you can. Gallows humor is a big deal. And I think the gallows get taller the older you get.
Magda: Yeah, I think so, too.
Doug: Well, thanks everyone for listening to episode 53 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been the final exit. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles, LLC, and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our bi-weekly newsletter on Fridays. And we'll see you next time for episode 54, assuming we're all still alive. Until then, bye-bye.