The Podcasting Way of Death
The futuristic Aeternal hearse, designed by Abhishek Roy.
I discovered funeral-industry trade podcasts during a dark night of the soul. I’m allergic to wine, but I’d been drinking it anyway, and as I lay in bed feeling my heart thrash and my sinuses cloud, I contemplated the fact that I now have a circulatory system but someday won’t. This is a fixation of mine that arises with inexplicable and alarming frequency—I’m twenty-five and healthy; I haven’t experienced tremendous loss.
My abstract anxieties about death tend to coalesce around my most concrete repulsion: embalming. That night, in a desperate ploy to overwhelm the circuitry of my fear, I searched for a podcast that would explain the process with clinical precision. That’s how I stumbled across the embalming episode of in which the former body remover Kelsey Eriksson describes draining the body of blood and pumping it full of preservatives. Her voice was lilting and reedy, the sugary pitch of Kristen Bell narrating, which did not make her description of my grisliest nightmares easier to swallow. In fact, as I learned about “eye caps”—thick, barbed contacts that close eyelids and lend shape to postmortem shrunken eyeballs—my dread clotted into a neurotic fixation. I downloaded podcast after podcast of “death professionals” trading industry tips, promoting hair-raising products and telling one another stories of the trade that are as startling and macabre as urban legends.
