Death Virgin

Ellie Media
  • 4.9 (11)
  • 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. Jun 23

    It's Father's Day, one month after Dad's death

    What begins as an ordinary Sunday in Maine turns into an unexpected journey through grief, spirituality, memory, and ritual. A spontaneous visit to a medium at the Temple Heights solstice fair leads to questions about the afterlife, writing, and whether the dead really have anything left to say. There are drum circles, neighborhood conversations, cemetery visits, a stolen bottle of birthday whiskey, Dad's ashes riding shotgun, and a meatball pizza waiting in Camden. Along the way, Kristen reflects on father figures, memorials, where the dead live after they're gone, and what it means to spend your first Father's Day as a member of the Dead Dad Club. A quiet, funny, wandering dispatch about love, loss, and carrying someone with you long after they've left.

  2. Jun 18

    Dispatches from Temple Heights: Dead Dad Club

    In the days after her father's death, Kristen discovers that grief isn't always tears. Sometimes it's paperwork, locksmithing, funeral-home visits, Facebook etiquette, warm vodka in plastic cups, and a stubborn hearse that can't quite make it up the driveway. As family and friends drift through the house overlooking the Atlantic, the ordinary and the extraordinary collide. A locked roll-top desk finally gives up its secrets. Hospice nurses become quiet heroes. Neighbors appear—or don't. The last blossom falls from the star magnolia tree at the exact moment a life comes to its close. Part meditation on mourning, part documentary of what happens after someone dies, this episode explores the strange limbo between death and remembrance, and the unexpected humor, tenderness, and humanity that live there.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

See All (19)

4.9
out of 5
11 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
    19
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Ellie Media
  • Show Website
    Death Virgin

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