The Reckoning

Audio Program November 9, 2014

Did you hear? There’s a death movement going on in America. After decades of sanitized death, with dying, funerals, burial and grief shielded from public view, some people are now working to make death a greater part of life. In this hour, we talk with experts about how to begin these difficult conversations, and how they can transform both the dying and the surviving.

Let's Talk About Death

Welcome to the death revolution. Across the country – in cafes, dining rooms, and community centers – there’s a new conversation taking shape. Funeral professionals, hospice workers, academics, artists, and just plain folks are working together to change the way we talk about death and dying.

We Don't Have to Be Alone With Dying and Grief

Lani Leary has worked with thousands of dying people and their families. She’s been at the bedside of more than 500 people at the moment of death. Her dedication to working with the dying and bereaved goes back to the painful experience of her own mother’s death when she was a child, when her family told her nothing about how her mother died.

Living with Your Coffin

What would it be like to live with your coffin? To see it every day? Woodworker and home funeral advocate Chuck Lakin has designed a series of coffins that double as furniture.

The Museum of Death

“I had never known that beauty and death could go together.” Joanna Ebenstein runs Brooklyn’s Museum of Morbid Anatomy, which celebrates the memento mori that were part of daily life in the past. From art sculpted out of a dead person’s hair, to death masks molded from a corpse’s face, she give us a tour.

"Death Doesn't Bother Me, Anyway" Pt. 1

For 26 years, Dan Pierotti knew — really knew — that his days were numbered. In 1988 he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. In this first installment of his story, the former Lutheran minister talks about his feelings on death and the afterlife.

Muhammad the Mortician Confronts Black-on-Black Violence

Tyrone Muhammad is tired of seeing so many young black men die from street violence. So the Newark mortician is using an in-your-face strategy to show people the effects of that violence: taking his work into the streets.

Nikki Giovanni Reads a Poem of Remembrance

The show closes with something to think about: Nikki Giovanni’s poem “One Ounce of Truth Benefits Like a Ripple on a Pond.”

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