State of the Human: Dying
In this episode, we’re going to think about death. All things must come to an end, but that does not mean death is all ending. What can death teach us about life? Featuring special reflections on death at the beginning and end of the show by Lazarre and Simone Elias, aged 6 and 9.
Transcript for Dying (Full Episode)
Lazarre Elias: [00:00:00] In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. I don't even know what that means.
Isabella Tilley: From the Stanford Storytelling Project, this is state of the Human. Each episode we look at a universal human experience like caregiving or lying and tell stories to deepen our understanding of that experience.
Lazarre Elias: Death is a wild night and a new road.
Isabella Tilley: Today we're bringing you stories about death and dying.
Simone Elias: After all to the well organized mind death is, but the next great adventure.
Isabella Tilley: I'm Isabella Tilly, and those were quotes about death by Benjamin Franklin, Emily Dickinson, and Dumbledore read by Simone and Lazar. They're nine and six, so they don't think a lot about death, but honestly, neither do I. It's kind of a hard and scary thing to think about.
No matter how young or old we are or how much life experience we have, no one who's alive knows what it's like to be dead. We only know what it's like to live. We're gonna think a lot about death today, not because we want to know what it's like to be dead, but because we want to learn more about life.
What can death teach us about living?
Today we'll hear from people who are dying, people who have already died, and of corpse, people who are still alive and just trying to make sense of it all. The first time I visited Stanford, I took a campus tour. The tour guide told us that the full name of the university is Leland Stanford Junior University.
It's named after a boy who died of typhoid at 15. [00:02:00] After he died, his parents, Jane and Leland Sr. built this university to honor him. I can't speak for all the students here, but I don't really think about Leland Junior that much yet. We wouldn't even be here if Leland Junior hadn't died. Lecturer, Jake Warga gives campus tours too, ghost tours because he wants to remind us that the history of Stanford isn't dead.
Jake Warga: On the morning in October, 1974, one night watchman named Mr. Crawford opens the doors to Chu Memorial Church and discovers the body of 19-year-old Arla Perry. She was murdered with an ice pick to the back of the neck. Um, yeah. Any questions?
Mike Mahowald: Kind of scary, right? My name is Mike.
Nick Hill: I'm Nick Hill,
Warren Christopher: and my name is Warren. A few weeks ago, a member of our Stories Everywhere section told us that there is this guy, Jake Warga, who takes people on ghost tours around the Stanford campus. We reached out to him and he agreed to host one for three bars of dark chocolate.
We began our tour at one of the most iconic spots on campus Memorial Chapel, with the story of a young woman murdered with an ice pick. But the direction the tour would follow. However ominous the beginning was one we could never have expected.
Jake Warga: Every ghost story is a history story. Every story is a history story.
Mike Mahowald: We were surprised by the level of history in this ghost tour. Given Mr. War's opinion, it made sense that our tour quickly took a turn from the spooky to the scholarly instead of ghosts and ghouls. We heard a lot of names and dates.
Jake Warga: The a hundred year war, 13 hundreds, but in 1906, historic landmark number 976.
This is 1903 yellow journalism, William Randolph Hurst.
Warren Christopher: Mr. Warga, after all, is an educator who is beginning his fourth [00:04:00] year as a lecturer at Stanford before coming to the farm. However, he spent a year living with actual ghost hunters. Maybe this makes it all the more surprising that the Ghost tour he gave us really wasn't about ghosts at all.
Nick Hill: After a grim beginning at Memorial Church, we visited the statues of the burghers of calais and the man quad. We expected to learn that these statues were responsible for a series of hauntings and frights over the past century. What we received instead was a lecture about politics and the 1%,
Jake Warga: this is the burghers of calais. You've probably passed it many a time. Philippe St. Paul here is carrying the key to the city that he's going to offer his captors in exchange their lives for that of the entire village. The question is, would the one percenters today do that for us?
Nick Hill: We then moved to the Memorial Arch where we learned how the university was built in remembrance of Leland Stanford Junior.
The son of the founders,
Jake Warga: Leland Stanford Junior University was built so that Leland Junior can come back. Notice we went from Memorial Church to Memorial Court to Memorial Arch, and of course we got the Memorial Chapel and the memorial right? Everything here is memorial.
Mike Mahowald: Jake then led us to the chemistry building in the Cantor Art Museum, where we discussed the mysterious death of Jane Stanford.
Jake Warga: She went to Hawaii to try to get away from things, but that is where she met her fate. Woohoo. Plot thickens. Yay.
Nick Hill: Finally, we finished at the mausoleum, the burial site of the Stanford family. Though the location was spooky, as we saw at the other locations, history was still the dominant theme.
In [00:06:00] the end, the tour was not what we expected, and we pulled our participants to make sure we weren't alone,
Warren Christopher: but we didn't just want to ask our classmates what they thought we wanted to hear from the tour guide himself.
What
Jake Warga: I hope is that what starts as a Ghost tour turns into a history tour, and then that's my secret agenda. You have to understand a little bit about the past and then let that have a conversation with the present. If there is something that is bugging you, if there is something you don't have closure on, a ghost will appear, and it could take any shape.
We make our own ghosts.
Nick Hill: He certainly has an unconventional perspective on what a ghost is to Jake. Being haunted comes from a lack of closure or a regret. Ghosts exist in our minds to translate hauntings into feelings.
Mike Mahowald: Jake's story wasn't the spooky ghost store that had been advertised to us, but it definitely did get us thinking about the place we were calling home for four years of our life.
As Jake said,
Jake Warga: I love demystifying. Tonight's all about demystifying Stanford.
Warren Christopher: Besides being a computer science mecca in the tech hub of Silicon Valley, Stanford is a university founded on memorializing the death of a 16-year-old boy.
Jake Warga: And all of this here is built on a haunting. And a haunting, remember, is something that bugs us.
This is something that whispers in our ears that will grow louder if we ignore it. This is this entire place. Why? It's mem this mem that is based on an absence. It's based on grief. It is the presence of an absence, basically, is what all you guys are here for. So let me ask you a question. If Leland Junior did not die, would there be a university?
Nick Hill: Would any of us be here today if Leland Stanford Jr. Hadn't [00:08:00] died? So tragically young, this question may not send a shiver down our spine, but in the end, this is what we walked away from our tour with.
Isabella Tilley: That story was produced by Nikhil Raghuraman, Mike Mahowald and Warren Christopher for a class at Leland Stanford Junior University.
I remember the first time I realized I was going to die when I was a little kid. The idea of not existing anymore freaked me out. I couldn't sleep because I was crying so much.
I asked my mom how old she was, and she told me she was in her forties at the time, but I didn't have any concept of numbers, so I got scared that she was going to die soon. 40 something just seemed so old to me. I spent days worrying about it. Now that I'm older, the thought of death doesn't bring me to tears, but most of the time I just try not to think about it.
For some people though, facing the reality of death makes it a bit less scary. In our next story, Michelle Chang drives around the country hosting Death Cafes, a place for strangers to gather and talk openly about death.
Michelle Chang: Adeeb is someone I met as the best friend of my ex-boyfriend in high school. He had this laugh that was just from the gut, like bellowing, sort of a laugh, just totally goofy, full of life, really radical in his inclusivity, and was obsessed with Tame Impala.
Specifically getting the base in your car to shake as loudly as possible. I think he was really formative in teaching me a lot about what it means to love and to be loved. I miss him a lot.
So my name is Michelle Chang. I am a lover of life and this summer I went on a trip across the [00:10:00] country to talk to people about death. The way I framed it was picking a couple places in the US where I could stay longer term, and really diving into hosting death cafes there and trying to get intimately attuned with the way that people could give me new insights into death.
Albuquerque was my first real death cafe. Um, there's a really rich cultural tradition of the day of the dead there, and so I thought it would be a really cool space to try to get a piece of the death conversation. I got to host, um, a death cafe there alongside this woman Gail, who's been hosting Death cafes there for years and years, and she has, uh, a house that is all decked out in skeletons and day of the dead imagery.
She has a skeleton named Lola that sits on her entrance of her house and people like to take photos with Lola. Something about that group was really irreverent and found a lot of humor in death. Like there was one woman at the death cafe who was talking about um, how she wears a hundred percent cotton, nightgowns and underwear because if she happens to die in her sleep, she wants to be able to just have her body taken right to the green burial, which requires all natural materials to be buried in.
Um, and she doesn't want anyone to have to rip off her microfiber underwear. I don't come with a list of questions prepared or anything like that. I think the space is really meant to serve the people there and their unique context and histories. Usually I'll start off a death cafe by just saying, let's go around in a circle and say who you are and what brought you to this space.
In May of 2017, Adeep pulled off to the shoulder of the 10 freeway [00:12:00] and had just gotten into like a really small accident, got out of his car to check if there was any damage, and that's when a drunk driver hit him. I just remember having these shaking heaving sobs on the floor and not sure what it meant to sit with the gravity of someone's permanent removal from life. I think about him a lot and I think about. The journey that he set me on,
Michelle Chang: At the very last death cafe, um, I hosted in Dubuque, Iowa, we ended it with a group of singers called the Threshold Singers who sing to people on their death. They came to our death cafe and led us in a couple of songs,
Singers: though all around
me,
I'm grateful to be.
I am grateful to.
Michelle Chang: I ended every death cafe by, um, sharing a memory or a story of ADI as I promised his mom. I would do so in the last 20 minutes or so, I would do that, and then open up a space for anyone to share about someone on their hearts who has died. I wanted to remember in a way that was authentic to the messy, beautiful people that these people were.
I remember the very last little day I spent with Adeep, and I remember like Aade cranking up eventually by Tame Impala,
the beast just like shaking the car and Adeep just driving so fast and so recklessly, and this moment of feeling infinite with him. Really intimately [00:14:00] confronting the fact that I need to celebrate the privilege of each day that I have, um, was really hard because I just had a lot of questions of like, why am I here and why is Adeep not here, and what does that mean for me to be a good steward of the time that I've been given? Any ounce of life that is wasted, not loving, just feels so sad.
And so, um, such a wasted opportunity. I just really miss Adeep.
You know, one of the biggest things that I took away from this summer was I was able to. See that my relationship with Adeep did not stagnate and end. It's still continuing to grow and evolve. Like every time that I would share a memory of him, and every time that someone said, you know, you're goofy. Adeep reminded me of my friend who always called me, sir Ru the princess, or your, you are risky and looking right in the face of death. Ade reminds me of my friend who, um, did this adeep nickname in Bengali was prawn. That was what all his family called him. And prawn means life. That's what I was looking for. Life.
Isabella Tilley: That story was produced by Will Shan.
When I was 14, my great aunt told me something that I still think about today. We were talking about getting old. I said I was scared of getting to her age. I only knew what it was like to have most of my life ahead of me, not behind me. My great aunt laughed and told me that once you get past a certain age, you stop caring about things like that.
She was satisfied with the life she had already [00:16:00] lived. For our next story, we talked to Claudia Biçen, a San Francisco artist who interviewed nine different hospice patients, even older than my great-aunt, about what it was like to be dying. Claudia created life-sized portraits for each of the patients and in each person's clothing she wrote out parts of the interviews at exhibits, she plays clips of those interviews so that you can actually hear the person you're seeing. The project is called Thoughts in Passing.
Daniel: It was one day, I don't remember the day right, this very second. I was probably six or seven or eight. But the anguish of thinking, of feeling, of realizing that I would die one day was overwhelming.
Claudia Biçen: Daniel was a man that I met in one of the, uh, low income housing units in the Tenderloin. He all along was like, I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. He just wouldn't go there. He would talk about death, but he would talk about it in a very deta, pretty detached way, you know? I mean, he was very much in denial.
Daniel: I kind of have the feeling, the idea that it's not going to be a major event, it's just gonna happen.
Claudia Biçen: He said he was gonna be fine. And then when I was walking past his hospice, he was, he was moved over to hospice in the Castro and I'd already finished the interviews like a few weeks before and I said to myself, oh, just go in, just go in and see how he's doing.
You know, he's there and, and I walked into his room and he, he clearly knew he was about to die and he just wept. And he wept and I sat with him and he held me and I held him and, and he just cried. And we didn't really talk and we didn't really say anything. And there was nothing to say. Like he knew. I knew the next morning Daniel had died.
He knew he was dying and it [00:18:00] was. That was certainly one of the most powerful, um, experiences of the whole project. My name is Claudia Biçen and I'm a British artist who lives in San Francisco. I spent two years working on a project called Thoughts in Passing, where I interviewed nine hospice patients from all over the Bay Area about what it was like to be confronting their mortality and how they had created meaning in their lives and, and what their regrets were so that we, the living can learn from people who are dying.
The time I felt most afraid in the entire project was the first interview I was doing. I remember driving to Laguna Honda Hospital and I felt sick and I was like sweating, and I was like kind of shaking and I realized that. I was terrified about having a very authentic conversation with someone who was dying.
And it dawned on me in that moment that if I felt that way and I was choosing to kind of go into this world, like how does everybody else feel? It, it just really highlighted for me just how much fear I had around death. Um, and actually it just, it really compelled me to do the project more. And everything is with graphite pencil portraits.
It's hard to say when, but you always hit a point when just suddenly it goes from being a drawing to it feeling like the presence of that person is with you in the room. And I would sit with these pieces and over many, many hours of working on them at stage would just emerge and it would feel like the person was in the room.
Ina: I made up my mind I was gonna help people. You don't think for yourself when you, when you have a large family. I've always been more interested in other people than myself.
Claudia Biçen: Ina was a lady I met. She was in an elderly [00:20:00] people's home in the sunset, in the outer sunset, and she was just so delightful. You would like walk into her room and she would always have her nails done and she would have her jewelry on and she was very well put together, and she would never do anything other than beam with smiles.
But the more I spend time with her, the more I realized actually the depth of her sadness.
Ina: I have a lots of regrets. I don't think I did much for myself. I had lots of opportunities. I had a chance to. I have a job as a nurse traveling all over the world and, and I turned it down because I had to, had to take care of my mom and dad.
Claudia Biçen: Her whole life she felt had been defined by the expectations of other people. She wish she'd been a little bit more free.
Ina: When you're young, you think everything should go your way. I think go dance and dance all night and all that stuff, and you think that's. That's part of your life, but then it doesn't last for long.
It's not a forever thing.
Claudia Biçen: Yeah. Ah, it's already making me cry 'cause that's what I'm doing. I'm out all night dancing, you know, my friends are out all night dancing. And, um, you don't think about the fact that, that, that, that is temporary. That it's a chapter, that it's a phase in your life. It's meant that the, the embracing of transience is an offering and an invitation to feel much more deeply to feel much more fully about the beauty in of each moment, and the gratitude that my legs will dance all night because hers won't. I asked everyone I worked with what it felt like to be dying, and most [00:22:00] of them said to me that nobody had asked them that question before. And that so often, even the professionals they were working with, like death was still the elephant in the room.
And um, I realized that if I was gonna do this, I was just gonna have to go straight, head on with my fear and just go straight with the honesty. There was no other way to go around to go around it.
Bert: I'm sick as a dog. I know that. And I try my best to forget that. But the feeling of giving up life now is very hard because.
It's too beautiful.
Claudia Biçen: I love, loved Bert. Bert was ama, everyone loved Bert. All of the, I remember when his, um, well it was, it was a volunteer from his hospice called me and said, I have an absolute gem for you. And when I went to go, I mean, it was very clear why he, and he came to a lot of these feelings and these realizations at the end of his life.
And that's what made it particularly powerful.
Bert: I had a very great deal of difficulty with my parents. And I couldn't stand the fact of being around my, uh, my family. I felt something was wrong, but I couldn't lay my finger on it. And when I finally had the stroke, I saw exactly what happened, that he raped me when I was four years old.
I always thought something was wrong with me. I couldn't put my finger on it, and then suddenly I saw what happened to me and I understood and understood the pain that I went through, and it made me feel so much more relieved, tremendous relief. I started to live more intensely.
Claudia Biçen: We were going to do, um, his portrait.
So he has a, a, like a pine cone and um, a couple of other leaves and things. And I had collected a couple of them specifically from this tree that was outside of his window.
Bert: You find that you have more [00:24:00] time to look around, see life, see how beautiful it is, see a tree as it really is. The same, even with human beings, I feel a draw to them much more and a feel they could, I, I can identify with them a little better 'cause I know a little better now. I find myself becoming part of that beauty. It's in me. I don't believe I am that important anymore, but I'm part of the whole.
Claudia Biçen: He was bedbound in a hospital, linked up to all sorts of things on this bed, and yet having this window right there, seeing this tree just became one of the most important experiences for him.
And it just, it's just so simple. It's just so simple. And actually I would, after I would leave Bert, I would drive to the beach 'cause it was on the way back from his hospice. I would stop at the beach and just look at the ocean and, and I think ever since then I have spent more time just looking and listening.
I think what was really interesting with doing this project at the end of people's lives is one of the, the most common words that people used about their experience of both getting old but also dying, is that everything is about loss. Everything you built up throughout your life, you are now one by one, letting it go, which I is a wild experience that I can't begin to imagine because I'm in a stage in my life where everything is about building. And so doing this project with them at the end of life, what felt really, really important, not just about giving them a legacy, but also co-creating something together.
And it really felt like, this wasn't my project, it was our project. And it felt very strange at exhibitions and things to not have. Everyone [00:26:00] there because it was, it was ours. We, we created it together.
There's something so beautiful about the ocean at being at this, at this sort of the edge of the known and then looking out into just the sheer vast unknown, um, that feels very um, metaphorical with death, right? The edge of life. And so I don't know if there's been a particular occasion, but many occasions where I have like stood at the edge of the water and, um and they have been with me, Randy Harlan, aura, Osamu. Daniel, Bert, Judith, Jenny Ina.
Isabella Tilley: That story was produced by Aparna Verma. I've only been to a few funerals before. The most recent one was after my great uncle died. I mostly remember that everyone was really somber and everyone was dressed in black. There wasn't any music. I couldn't wrap my head around the shock of losing someone, and no one really seemed to be talking about it.
It kind of just felt like a way for family to come together and catch up, but with less laughter than our usual Christmas party.
There's a festival in Mexico where families come together to celebrate ancestors and loved ones who have passed away. It's called Dia de muertos, our Day of the Dead. It's a tradition that traces back to Aztec festivals. [00:28:00] We started our show asking what we can learn about life and death. In our final story, we go to San Francisco for the annual day of the Dead Parade.
That celebrates life and death.
Jake Warga: What do you see Allie?
Speaker 17: I see Mesoamerican traditional dancers with amazing feather headdresses, and I see people holding candles. I think in honor of maybe individuals that are their people or just to honor the moment and the day and the festival.
Speaker 18: I love the altars. I hope to plan one next year
Yeah, to our family,
all the bright colors and that everybody's just so happy and celebrating everything.
Singers: Beautiful people, beautiful altars. The celebration of the dead.
Speaker 18: We love the music part of everything, you know, to honor ancestors in music, I feel like it's a universal language, so maybe it reaches into the spirit world.
Speaker 19: I've been coming to this for about 15 years or longer. This year's really different for me because I lost my father last year, late last year, and it brings a whole different meaning to this event to a lot of people in San Francisco especially, it means dressing up and it's a festive occasion. And now I see it a little bit more solemn.
Speaker 20: Um, this is for my father, Dwayne, William Vo, and I incorporated a lot of his hobbies. He played golf, so I have a golf ball. He was an amazing, um, orchid grower. He had about 150 orchids in his garden, so I incorporated, uh, orchid and he passed away in Thailand. So these are Thai, um, offering bowls.[00:30:00]
Speaker 21: Cool. Jewel, that's what everybody called her. She's the coolest. Everybody in the neighborhood just, she was fun. She loved everybody. She made everybody feel welcome and everybody just knew her as cool. Jewel. She liked grilled cheese, so I made her grilled cheese before I came down. And, uh, she had a bit of a sweet tooth, so I brought her some chocolates and cool whip of all things she really loved her Cool whip.
Um, and Coors Light. We miss you Gram. That's about it. We just miss you. Wish you were here and wish you had your guitar. You'd love this party.
Speaker 22: We miss you so much. Um, we don't, we, we love you. Um, we wanna see you and hear your guys' voices. Again, we're here honoring you because we got, we love you guys so much. I don't know why that they took, decided to take you two, but. You guys are the best people I've ever known.
Speaker 12: I'm very happy and I have an amazing husband, and I'm finally have happiness and freedom to live my life.
Speaker 23: You guys is not dead yet. Stay with us and keeping with the heart and the mind.
Isabella Tilley: That story was produced by Regina Kong, Lena Lee, and me, Isabella Tilly.
Lazarre Elias: To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily. [00:32:00]
Isabella Tilley: I don't want to think about death five times a day.
Lazarre Elias: If you can't, you can't think about thinking about something every day.
Isabella Tilley: But I do think about this quote from poet Mary Oliver, what is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life?
You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Aparna Verma, will Shan. Regina Kong, Lena Lee, Allie Walner, and me Isabella Tilly. Special thanks to Simone and Lazar Elias for reading quotes about death for their generous financial support.
We'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the program and writing rhetoric of Stanford Arts. And Bruce Braden, our stories come to an end, but it's not dead. So visit our website where you can find this and every episode of State of the human@storytelling.stanford.edu.
Any final thoughts on death? Okay.
Speaker 4: Period.