Death Matters Live A show about death? Oh, how jolly! Something you’d love to listen to at noon on Wednesdays with your lunch? Five dynamic hosts bring their expertise to the airwaves.
The purpose of Death Matters Live is not to depress listeners, but to persuade us to give some thought about the one experience we are all definitely going to have -- eventual death -- and the other one that most of us will have -- the death of a loved one.
"The mission of the show is to bring resources and information to listeners about death," says Sharon Simpson, one of the five hosts of Death Matters Live along with Stephen Garrett, Jeffrey Young, Mara Lees, and Abegael Fisher-Lang.
Subjects covered range from the most hard-nosed practicalities: making of wills, planning of funerals, purchase of cemetery plots and/or headstones; to the most emotional: coping with grief and loss, in oneself or in a surviving loved one; to the most spiritual: theories about death and what it means.
"We've had Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists (as guests)," says Stephen Garrett, Death Educator and Co-host. "We're about giving air time to all these philosophies."
In the nearly 18 months that Death Matters Live has been on the Co-op Radio airwaves, guests have included cemetery workers, hospice proprietors, doctors, lawyers, grief counselors, poets, community artists, and people who have suffered the deaths of loved ones.
Co-host Jeff Young is a Funeral Director and Celebrant, and the show came about after he presided at the memorial service of Marie-Claire Chinniah, the mother of Co-op Radio's Director of Programming. Out of a conversation between the two came the genesis of Death Matters Live, which premiered on July 1, 2015.
As well as providing factual information, Death Matters Live includes music and poems on the subject of death and loss, eulogies that honor loved ones and an interactive "Dying to Ask" portion where listeners call in with questions.
It's worth a listen, because, as Shel Silverstein wrote, no matter how much health food you eat or exercises you do, "You're still gonna, still gonna, still gonna die."
And that matters.
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Find out more at the Death Matters Live show page on Co-op Radio. You can also connect through their Facebook page.