The Adventures of Memento Mori D.S. Moss

D.S. Moss comes back from the jungle for more adventures in death, yo. Life coach turned death coach, Devin Martin, gets filled in on Moss’ post-psychedelic reflections. This leads Moss to the ultimate question: how to live life with psychological anxiety of knowing you’re going to die? To help answer this question, Moss gets social psychology professor and egghead crush Sheldon Solomon on the horn to discuss if the fear of death truly is the worm at humanity’s core.

After discovering that the fear of death is the worm at the core of the human condition, D.S. Moss stands quivering on the threshold of psychological oblivion. He figures the best way out of this state of anxiety is to actually experience his own passing (obviously). In this episode, Moss crawls into his deathbed and is taken to total body failure with the hope that upon return he’ll have a new perspective on life.

While on his imagined death bed, Zen Buddhist Chaplain Trudi Hirsh-Abramson suggests D.S. Moss would make a good chaplain. And since his most significant life decisions are made from peer pressure, dares and flattery, he is actually considering it. The problem is - and it’s a big problem - Moss is religionless. In a three part mini-series, Moss sits down with a priest, pastor, priestess, monk, imam and rabbi to explore their religious belief systems, views on the afterlife and if, in fact, he can find a religion of his own. He begins with Jesus and the Buddha.

The adventure into the afterlife continues with Hindu and Vodou. In this episode, D.S. Moss sits down with a former Vedic monk and a bottle of mezcal to discuss the divine consciousness and taking monumental leaps of faith. Then Moss heads down to the city of New Orleans to chat with a Vodou (Voodoo) priestess where he discovers things are rarely as they seem.

The three-part series into religions and their beliefs in the afterlife comes to a close with the Abrahamic traditions. The conversation begins with NYU’s Islamic Chaplain where Moss revisits the draw to change his life and become a chaplain. Still faithless, he talks with a mystic Rabbi who literally wrote the book on the Jewish beliefs in the afterlife.  In this surprise ending, Moss takes the biggest leap of faith yet.

Ever written an obituary? Yeah, neither had D.S. Moss. In this episode, Moss is asked to write a memorial to his grandfather with the challenge of a limited word count. How do you capture a person’s life in two paragraphs? And, what exactly is the purpose of an obit? Is it a matter of record or a legacy statement? To make it even more awkward, his grandfather is actually still alive and will be proofreading. Worried he’ll fuck it up, Moss enlists a professional NY Times journalist to help write his first obituary.