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Friends,
It’s time to talk about death and activism and death activism, and oh yeah, Marianne Williamson and stuff. There is no one better to discuss all this with that my good friend Caitlin Doughty. Caitlin is the host of the wildly popular youtube series, Ask A Mortician and her work has served as a foundation of the death positive movement, which is seeking to change our relationship to death in our culture.
She’s also the author of the death memoir, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory; as well as her book about death rites, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death; and the forthcoming book about death for kids, Will The Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions fromTiny Mortals about Death.
When Caitlin and I spoke way back on AEWCH 8, we mostly discussed death in a theoretical way. This time, I bring to her the recent death of my friend, to work through some of the feelings and intensities I went through in mourning and gratitude.
We also spend a lot of time discussing being advocates and activists, and what challenges that brings. It’s a very personal episode and very different conversation than Caitlin’s used to having on a podcast!
On this ep:
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what we’d like to do more of before we die
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how to pre-mourn our own deaths by confronting our anxieties
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HIV “bug chasing”
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externalizing death drives vs turning them on yourself, and how that’s gendered
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why we should destroy heterosexuality
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the Dalia Lama and cultural conflict
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the problems have a healthy relationship with death can bring
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how a breakup gets a ton of conversations with friends, but a death tends to only get one
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Pompei volcano sex deaths
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why we need to acknowledge what sex positivity and feminism have brought to us
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mediating social media exhaustion
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the relief of others taking up the same causes you have
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why I want to have more underground people on the show
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the problem with only having one face for a given cause
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what doing activism is for
SHOW NOTES are always free.
Conner Habib 
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