Death Virgin

Ellie Media
  • 4.9 (10)
  • Personal Journals

Hi, I'm Kristen. I've never lost a close loved one, and that terrifies me. Join me as I tackle the universal experience of death with humor, honesty, and sincere introspection. Through personal stories, interviews, and my journey to becoming a death doula, I'll explore how we mourn and how to prepare for life's final chapter. This podcast is for anyone curious about life, loss, and finding laughter along the way.

  1. May 26

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: Time of Death - It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere

    In this final living chapter of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen records in real time as her father dies at home overlooking the Atlantic. What unfolds is not a dramatic television death, but something quieter, stranger, and more human: hospice phone calls, olives for Coronas, oxygen tubes, morphine, family pacing in the kitchen, and the surreal administrative reality that arrives moments after someone leaves their body. With dark humor, tenderness, and documentary immediacy, this episode captures the liminal hours between a person being here—and not being here anymore. It’s about witnessing death for the first time, realizing there is no adult in the room, and discovering that grief can coexist with practical decisions, nausea, laughter, cigarettes, and vodka shots in equal measure. Not the final dispatch from Temple Heights—but the final one where Dad is still alive.

    9 min

  2. May 25

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: A Pinterest Board for Viking Funerals

    A few quiet days at Temple Heights. Ryan arrives to spend time with his father and grandfather — a delayed 21st birthday and 50th birthday celebration no one imagined would happen under these circumstances. There are beers on the beach, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, morphine schedules, Family Feud at full volume, and the strange intimacy of caring for someone at the very end of life. As the nights stretch into 3 a.m. vigils filled with ocean sounds, medication charts, and half-awake Googling, thoughts turn toward funerals, rituals, Viking ships, wooden boats, and what it means to build something with your hands for someone you love. A dispatch about caregiving, exhaustion, humor, practical rituals, and the small strange thoughts that arrive while waiting beside a dying person.

    23 min

  3. May 23

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: Proof I Was Here

    Dispatches from Temple Heights continues with a wandering walk down to the beach on one impossibly beautiful Maine afternoon. Kristen reflects on first love, old cottages, lobster shacks, disappearing landmarks, family mythology, Spiritualist history, teenage summers, and the strange ache of realizing the places that shaped us never stay the same. Along the way: Ozzy Osbourne t-shirts, mixed tapes, mayflies, sea glass, star magnolias, and a painted rock that vanished into a seawall decades ago. As her father lies dying just steps away, memory itself becomes its own kind of shoreline — shifting, eroding, preserving fragments no one else knows are there.

    47 min

  4. May 22

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: Clean Sheets and Birthday Cake

    Seth turns fifty in the middle of hospice care, and somehow the day becomes both heartbreaking and strangely joyful. In this installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen recounts a sleepless night, hospice workers who bring humor and humanity into the house, the surreal intimacy of caring for a dying parent, and a birthday celebration filled with Guinness, grocery store cake, party hats, inappropriate death jokes, and moments of real tenderness. It’s an episode about exhaustion, friendship, family, ritual, and the strange beauty of continuing to celebrate life while death sits in the next room.

    17 min

  5. May 22

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: Birthday Balloons and Morphine

    In the third installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, the vigil continues. Kristen and her brother Seth make it through another night beside their father’s bed, surviving on raisin toast, gallows humor, ice cream, and adrenaline while waiting for the inevitable. As neighbors stop by, hospice nurses arrive, morphine enters the picture, and Seth’s fiftieth birthday approaches, the episode drifts between absurdity and heartbreak with startling intimacy. There are conversations about gatekeeping death, family roles, sea glass, Costco sweatshirts, NPR, birthday piñatas, and what it means to love someone while slowly letting them go. Through exhaustion and tenderness, Kristen reflects on the strange in-between space of vigil keeping — where ordinary life continues even as death waits quietly in the next room.

    25 min

  6. May 21

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: The Day He Was Supposed to Die

    In the second installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen’s father finally comes home from the hospital to die overlooking the ocean in Belfast, Maine. What follows is a surreal and deeply human twelve hours of oxygen tubes, ice cream runs, commode disasters, family tension, dark humor, and quiet tenderness as everyone adjusts to the strange rhythm of waiting for someone to die. Blending real-time recordings with reflections on caregiving, control, inherited trauma, and the absurdity of end-of-life logistics, this episode captures the suspended feeling of a family gathered at the threshold—where exhaustion, love, resentment, laughter, and fear all exist in the same room.

    26 min

  7. May 19

    Dispatches from Temple Heights, Vol. 1

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: Notes From My Father's Dying The first episode of a new mini-series within Death Virgin. Kristen records from her childhood home on the coast of Maine as her father lies dying on hospice care in the next room. Over the course of one sleepless night, she reflects on what it means to accompany someone through death for the very first time — while also navigating hospital logistics, oxygen tanks, weed gummies, family dynamics, spiders, ocean sounds, assisted living rituals, and the strange absurdity that continues alongside dying. Part vigil diary, part field recording, part dark comedy, this first dispatch captures the liminal hours before bringing her father home from the hospital to die overlooking Penobscot Bay. A series about grief in real time. About becoming “no longer a death virgin.” About how death is both sacred and deeply, relentlessly human.

    45 min

  8. Feb 17

    Becky with the New Hip

    In this episode of Death Virgin, Kristen gets a new hip — and loses a bone. What begins as a routine surgery (everyone says it’s routine) becomes something stranger: a meditation on ownership, body parts, family legacy, and what it means when a piece of you that grew with you is suddenly removed. Before going under anesthesia, Kristen asks the question most surgeons are not prepared for: Can I keep the bone? From there, she wanders — lovingly and irreverently — through medical authority, arrogant surgeons, grandmother pranks, Harvard Medical School cadavers, the mysterious Jewish “Luz bone” of resurrection, and the strange grief of losing a tooth in your twenties. This episode explores: Why “common” surgery doesn’t mean minorWhat belongs to us once it’s cut out of usThe power dynamics between doctors and patientsWhy second opinions should be normalizedThe family story of Grandma Mary, told she would never walk again — and walking anywayDonating bodies to science (and what happens after)The religious argument against cremation and the almond-shaped “Luz bone”Why birth and death are both messier than we like to admitMourning body parts — teeth, breasts, bones — as small rehearsals for larger lossWhether cremation tidies death… or just disguises it Kristen also confronts the hypocrisy of creating end-of-life workbooks for others while having no will herself — realizing, the night before surgery, that she has not practiced what she preaches. Because maybe death practice doesn’t only happen at funerals. Maybe it happens in operating rooms. Maybe it happens when your body changes. Maybe it happens when you realize you are not, in fact, twenty anymore. There is pumpkin pie. There is Beyoncé. There is The Big Lebowski. There are bones — some kept, some donated, some pulverized. And there is humor. Always humor. Because sometimes the only way to talk about taboo things is to talk about them sideways. Referenced & Recommended: Harvard Medical School Body Donation Program Rabbinic literature on the “Luz” bone Ecclesiastes (interpretations of resurrection texts) The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris The Big Lebowski (the Folgers canister scene) Pretty Woman (big mistake. Big. Huge.) The Little Engine That Could Beyoncé — “Sorry” (Becky with the good hair)

    1h 1m
See All (17)

4.9
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

Hi, I'm Kristen. I've never lost a close loved one, and that terrifies me. Join me as I tackle the universal experience of death with humor, honesty, and sincere introspection. Through personal stories, interviews, and my journey to becoming a death doula, I'll explore how we mourn and how to prepare for life's final chapter. This podcast is for anyone curious about life, loss, and finding laughter along the way.

Information

  • Creator
    Ellie Media
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Ellie Media
  • Show Website
    Death Virgin

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