The Loose Connections Recommender #16

On Death Is Not The End

There’s so very many things on this earth I have no idea about. Most of the time I’m good with that, but every now and then, I fall down rabbit holes of things I want to learn about and then I keep digging. It’s like pulling a thread, once you start there’s no way to stop …. a few years ago, I started wondering about death. Simple things at first, like how do you write a will, and whether my friends all had them and I was the only one who didn't, and what happens to your body and who decides and what does it cost, and about how I read somewhere years ago that you can be turned into a record after you’re dead and how do I plan for that and the questions kept coming and I kept discovering intriguing articles and stories and wondering why we didn’t talk about it more when its one of the only things that we all have in common for sure and we’re all so awkward and weird and clueless about it and I started contacting strangers and asking if I could talk with them about death and death care and how music and art connects us and comforts us and helps us through and how there are all kinds of rituals and celebrations and processes in non-Western countries that seem to help people make more sense of it all and anyway it appears that I have made a podcast called Death Is Not The End and there’s a trailer you can listen to now and the first episode will appear on this Tuesday! Phew!

I’ve spoken to an amazing array of people, scientists and death doulas and death whisperers and death care providers along with songwriters, CEOs, photographers, tech inventors, writers, musicians, performance artists and friends and now I feel like my perspective is getting clearer and broader and I’m picking up beautiful little pearls of wisdom and insights from everyone I talk to and I’m pretty excited to share it with you.

Here’s the trailer:

My dad Peter Head composed the original theme music and it makes me feel like I’m in some kind of cool philosophical cocktail bar in the clouds …

Sydney artist Craig Waddell kindly let me use his beautiful oil painting ‘ Surrounded By Your Beauty” for the artwork. He did an amazing series of skulls and flowers after spending time in Mexico some years ago.

There’s now a seperate section here on my Substack called Death Is Not the End, where I’ll share deeper info and resources from each episode and I hope it can become a community where we can feel free to question, share and converse about whatever comes up and see where it goes.

Missives from Death Is Not The End will be free to your inbox to all subscribers, free or paid (before sliding behind a paywall for non-subscribers a couple of weeks later) - I’m very grateful to each and everyone of you who has signed up here and thrilled to be getting very close to 1000 subscribers.

For those that have recently signed up for this newsletter, I’ve been sharing essays on Loose Connections since writing about an imaginary conversation between me and Bob Dylan in April 2021 and all kinds of things since, including this reflection below on funeral songs and the thin veil between life and death which will definitely give you a clue of what my podcast will be like… I’m trying to sound like the BBC but it will no doubt sound like me, and be messy and weird and all over the place - but hopefully entertaining anyways.

This podcast is driven by curiosity and is a desire for illumination, so its partly conversational, partly educational - it doesn’t purport to have any answers, secrets or portals, I just look at it as an opportunity to think deeper about the stuff that matters, expand knowledge, get prepared for dealing with our end-of-life (sudden or slow), discover fascinating stuff and join metaphorical hands as we gaze into the mysteries of the future together.

Over the course of doing all these interviews, what really resonated is that we die as we live - it appears that people that are curious and open tend to face the great unknown with more ease.

Thank you for being here and please go listen to the trailer and hit the ‘Follow’ button on Death Is Not The End so you can come travel through the valley of death with me.

Lo x