Sometimes we don’t want to say what’s going on because putting it into words would make it real. At other times, words don’t seem to capture the weight of what we want to say.
In the 1920s, at the height of the Spiritualism movement, a friendship blossomed between two men with opposing views on the topic: Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Houdini was a skeptic.
Amy Bloom tells the story of her husband, Brian, getting Alzheimer's and wanting assisted suicide. Her search to find a way to do that led her to Dignitas, in Switzerland.
Producer Aviva DeKornfeld tells the story of Bill Edgar, who accidentally ended up helping people have a say at a moment when most people don’t get to say anything at all.
Comedian Casey Wilson’s mom was a stabilizing force in her family. So after her unexpected death, both Casey and her father felt devastated and unmoored.
Senior editor David Kestenbaum helps his kids set up an ant farm. They follow all the instructions, to the letter! But he ends up learning a lesson he’s pretty sure the manufacturer did not intend.
Ira talks with comedian Rob Delany, who suffered the worst kind of loss a parent can endure — the death of his two-year-old son, Henry. Rob describes what his grief has been like and what he’s learned from it.
Producer Chana Joffe-Walt wondered what it was like for surviving MTA employees coping with the loss of their co-workers due to Covid-19. She met one in particular who’s had a hard time saying goodbye.
Producer Sean Cole has, unfortunately, experienced something known as “cumulative grief” this year. He writes about the multiple upheavals he’s been dealing with.
Producer Bim Adewunmi travels to the site in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. It’s become a huge, make-shift memorial, big enough to absorb the grief of all-comers who wish to pay homage.
There’s a problem with having a Facebook account after you’re dead that you’ve never, ever, ever thought about. Producer Stephanie Foo tells this story, about Dave Maher.
When a pet dies, to what degree can it be replaced by another? And to what degree can pets replace people in our lives? David Sedaris tells this story of cats and dogs and other animals.
There is a four mile long bridge in Naan-jing China, famous for how many people jump off to die by suicide. In 2003, a man named Chen Sah began spending all of his weekends on the bridge, trying to single handedly stop the jumpers.
Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a phone booth in Japan that attracts thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. A Japanese TV crew from NHK Sendai filmed people inside the phone booth, whose phone is not connected to anything at all.
Nema and Neda Semnani have extraordinarily similar first names – and completely opposite ways of dealing with what happened to their dad when they were little.