Episode 53: As we live more with our finality, celebrity deaths hit different

It’s hard to keep up with the swift pace of death, which claims 11 people every second. When we recorded this, we were still processing the departures of Shannen Doherty, Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Since then we’ve lost Bob Newhart, Lou Dobbs, John Mayall, Sheila Jackson Lee, Doug’s cousin Tim, and about 6.6 million others.

Oop. There go 11 more.

With that as a launching point, we got to chatting about what we’d like to do with the rest of our lives, and what might happen when they end. How do we want our funerals to go? How do we pay for them, and who’d bother to show up? Will we be remembered the way we hope to be? And should we hire a death doula?

Or maybe our mortal lives are already over, and each of us is living our own subjective afterlife. Are we even here? Is everyone we see just a stray synapse firing in our posthumous brains? And if they attend our funeral, will they ad-lib the eulogy?

These are probably the exact gushes of questions that people discuss at a Death Cafe. We also talk about being deprived of Vernor’s ginger ale as a child, whether evangelicals excel at the marshmallow test, and what if heaven is really boring?

Other links:

• The cultural phenomenon of “Bev Niner”

• Shannen Doherty “put it all out there” on her podcast

• The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• The Shining: Shelley Duvall finds Jack Nicholson’s demented script

• Jim Henson: Idea Man is a must-see for Muppet fans

• John Cleese eulogizes Graham Chapman

• Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, by Neal Peart

• Mail boat cruises in Norway

• The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer

• The life and weird legacy of Mitch Hedberg