A Few of Our Favorite Things 2025

It's time for the annual holiday episode, and this year we're revisiting a few of our favorite conversations from 2025. (It was tough to pick, they are all favorites!) You'll hear excerpts from Sarah's interviews with puppeteer Basil Twist; death educator Joél Simone; poet Danusha Laméris; journalist Oliver Burkeman; and writer-illustrator duo Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman. Each of these guests brought a new perspective on death and grief to our podcast. We are grateful to all of our listeners this year. May your holidays bring you peace.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and today we're doing something a little different for our annual holiday episode. We're going to revisit some of the amazing conversations I've had over the last year. My guests are inspiring and it was really hard to pick because I love and learn so much from all of them. These conversations stood out to me for many reasons. These guests tapped into a feeling or an experience I've never considered before. I hope you enjoy the holiday season with your loved ones, and if you're grieving, I hope these interviews bring you some peace. Thank you as always for your support this year. It means so much to me and my team.

We're going to start off with Basil Twist. He's a world famous puppeteer, but he's so much more. Basil and I talked about how death is always under the surface of every creative act and [00:01:00] especially puppetry. We explored what it's like to express life in the form of a wooden puppet and how doing so helps us question what it really means to be alive.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Seeing you with the marionette it seems like an extension of your body. It's mesmerizing. Can you talk a little bit about this particular marionette?

[00:01:22] Basil Twist: I call him stick man. And he's a carved wooden marionette, meaning that he's operated on strings and I made him when I was in school in France. So I went to this puppetry school in France and while I was there, I met all these great puppetry masters and the puppet is an expression of that. So I was taught by a Brazilian master named Alvaro Apocalypse, how to carve the wood puppet based on a certain design called the Dwiggins style. And then I had a Swedish [00:02:00] master teach me how to string it Michael Meschke taught me how to string it, and he used a certain kind of control, which is a Malaysian style control, which is an H control instead of like a Christian Cross style control. And I gathered all this information in France and then made this pretty amazing puppet, because it's a string marionette. It's very indirect. You don't have your hands right on it. There's strings. So you have a really. delicate relationship with it, how to animate it. And it actually took me years and years and years to figure out how to do it. And now I've had that puppet for over 30 years. He is like an extension of myself now because I'm so used to having him in my hands. But that's because I've had time with him and also because he's actually such a good, excellent puppet because there's all this great mastery and knowledge that's been passed down to me through that puppet.

[00:02:58] Sarah: In any of your [00:03:00] productions, has there been a death scene or a representation of death, and what did that look like?

[00:03:05] Basil: When I share that puppet, what I share is sort of a mini lifecycle so that the puppet starts as an inert pile of sticks and it comes to life and at the end of the performance, he'll arch his back and throw his head back and make a beautiful kind of shape with his body. And then I'll lift him up and pull him with a string. So he lifts to my hand. and then he's back to being a limp doll. So that's always an expression of something coming to life and then returning to its maker in a way. That shows up regularly. In puppetry I think it's that question of something being alive or not [00:04:00] alive and the veil between those two states is I think what puppetry actually pushes elegantly in front of us to consider.

[00:04:09] Sarah: You're animating something that's inanimate.

[00:04:11] Basil: Yeah. And the question of spirit and spirit being in something, or expressing itself through something and then leaving something and what's left behind. These are all kind of, you know, big mysterious questions that actually make puppetry pretty profound. It's part of what gets people about puppetry. They're not quite aware of how it's touching them so deeply, but it always does.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I loved my conversation with mother-daughter, writer-illustrator duo Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman. They've collaborated on two illustrated guidebooks, “What to Do When I'm Gone” and “What to Do When You Get Dumped.” What struck me most during our conversation was that I found myself wondering, [00:05:00] what kind of a book would I have written with my own mother? In this excerpt, Hallie and Suzy talk about what it was like to hole up in a cabin in the woods together for five days as they brainstormed ideas for their new book and talked about practically everything. I especially loved hearing from Hallie about how her mom's writing has informed her use of visual language as an illustrator.

Sarah: Many of the authors that we've talked to on Peaceful Exit podcast have talked about how healing writing is, even if you're not a writer, to actually put words and language to what you're going through.

[00:05:35] Suzy Hopkins: Yeah, and of course writing to me has always been an analytical exercise. I was trained in journalism. I know how to do synopsis, big picture view stuff, but this was just a different animal. And we had already done one book and Hallie was ready to do another with me and said, well, if you do this we'll do this together. And so I wrote a first draft and then we began our collaborative process,

[00:05:59] Hallie Bateman: [00:06:00] These two books are similar, but our process with the second one, with “What to Do When You Get Dumped,” is unique because it's really my mom's story. So my mom wrote this draft and then we met at a cabin for maybe five days to basically work together very collaboratively to kind of turn the draft into a graphic book. And what that looks like is going over my mom's work, talking about everything, throwing ideas back and forth. And what you end up with, and this is how I write comics as well, is there's text and then I'm describing the artwork, like in brackets, basically. It's like a script. It's unique because, you know, as an illustrator sometimes I'll receive a book and I never even speak to the author. The words are locked in and I'm providing the art. And this is quite a different process where I'm [00:07:00] deeply enmeshed in my mom's life and I know very firsthand, I'm a part of this family that experienced this split. It's a lot of back and forth, a lot of laughing, a lot of squabbling, a lot of like frantically sketching something to try to get an idea across, and then challenging each other to, to understand, the other person's idea.

[00:07:22] Sarah: I am trying to imagine you in the cabin for five days. Were you also processing the loss? For both of you it's very different

[00:07:31] Hallie: I'm still very close with my dad. I love him. I certainly lost this idea of my parents as a unit. I certainly had a lot of my own grief to work through, and my mom was very much still in the midst of her own grief. So it was really cathartic. I mean, there was laughter, there were definitely tears. There was a lot of, let's take a break and go for a walk. There was, like, things where I'm pushing my [00:08:00] mom to have an answer to something that she does not have an answer to yet because she has not reached that point of healing yet. I have my own ideas from not being the one whose heart is broken and my mom's like, that's not what it's like at all. Then I have my perspective of my dad as a flawed human being, and my mom has her perspective of my dad as a flawed human being who did something that really sucks and hurts and we're bringing our different perspectives together.

[00:08:28] Suzy: And myself as a flawed human being at the end of a marriage. I couldn't have done one more day in the cabin. I love working with Hallie, but I would love to work on a, a happy tale, a children's book about little fairies in the forest instead of the end of my marriage and the grief that followed because it was very painful to work on. I knew I was in process and had made progress, but to do a work like this is to examine things you'd really rather [00:09:00] not. And then when I saw what she did in, in “What to Do When I'm Gone,” our first book, I understood at the completion of that project exactly what was happening and the value of beautiful graphic illustrations conveying emotion in a way that all my wordiness can't quite do.

Hallie: There's like a, a visual language that can be learned. Like I certainly learned this as I started to study comics and graphic novels: oh, this is a language that you can speak and you can become familiar with. And my mom as the person who taught me to write, she's an incredible writer and incredible editor. And so working together has just been an experience of merging her expertise with mine. And I think we together come up with something that's, like, really different than what we would do individually.

[00:09:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: Joél Simone is a death educator, and she's on a mission. When Joél went through mortuary school, there was almost no information about caring for bodies of color, [00:10:00] which is why she founded the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy. In this clip, we talk about the aesthetics of death and why it's important we see our loved ones in a certain way after they die. Joél and I also discuss the spiritual meaning she finds in caring for the dead.

Sarah: What is it about our grieving our lost loved ones that make it important for us to see them as if they were sleeping?

[00:10:27] Joél Simone: We use the term memory picture in our profession, and that basically means the last memory or mental image that you're gonna have of your loved one. We are so tied into the aesthetics of death more so than the experience of death and grief. And so it's hard to answer that question one way because we all don't die in the same way. For example, a mother who possibly lost her child in some type of traumatic accident, whether it be a fire, a car accident, a gunshot wound, a [00:11:00] fall, any scenario that you could think of — that mother's memory picture, especially if she saw that child in that state, it's important for that mother in our society to see them again in a more peaceful light, something that she can hopefully look back on and not be as traumatized by. But I think that also is deeply rooted in our psychological detachment from what death looks like in our society. There are some cultures that the physical body being destroyed is important. For example, Tibetan sky burial, where they intentionally take their loved ones to the top of mountains and hoist them off so that their body hits the rocks and, for lack of better word, not to be too graphic, burst open, and the vultures then consume whatever's left. That's important in seeing and feeling and knowing that's happened. I think that [00:12:00] sometimes it is important to the deceased to be seen a certain way. It's their final wish to be presented in a certain way, even if their family doesn't necessarily want to see them in that way.

[00:12:11] Sarah: That's fascinating and I so appreciate you bringing up other cultures who handle it differently. And you know, my last memory picture, if you will, of my mother — my uncle and my cousin who ran the funeral home and cemetery near us had come and they'd wrapped her in a cloth around her head, but her jaw was open. And that is the last picture I have of her. It's really interesting for me right now because what's coming up for me is like, we didn't really have a choice. If we were to say I'd really like to see her again, I don't think that would've been an option. One of the things that I really want for people in Peaceful Ex Exit is to consider what are the choices and what people want. I feel so gifted by the fact that we've met really [00:13:00] early on in your journey. and you've now started the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy and you help educate people about cultural awareness. Will you tell us a little bit about how you started that and what you're working on now?

[00:13:15] Joél: Definitely. So the Multicultural Death and Grief Care Academy, again, I think chose me. I didn't so much create it. I just was obedient to bringing it to life, and it was started for this simple fact that we talked about earlier. In our textbooks and mortuary school, I was referred to as a negro. My colleagues were referred to as Mongoloid. There was no education about how to take care of anyone outside of white people, and having several traumatic experiences throughout my career when I was working in the funeral home part-time and seeing the impact that those experiences also had on [00:14:00] families, that heartbreak and trauma and anger and frustration became education. And I'm so grateful to my mentor, Miss Anita Grant, who found me on YouTube and said, these are continuing education credits. Not only could you be getting paid to talk about these things, you can be educating other professionals and having a big impact on the families they serve.

[00:14:23] Sarah: Congratulations on such good work you're doing. [JS: Thank you]. It's incredible.

[00:14:27] Joél: I appreciate it.

[00:14:28] Sarah: It has such a ripple effect. So, as a death educator, what are some of the questions you're asked the most?

[00:14:34] Joél: One of the questions that I'm asked the most is why has nobody talked about this until now? And it's not that no one has talked about it, I don't think anyone has consistently talked about it before. Prior to COVID, the death care industry was probably one of the most segregated industries in our country. Black people went to black funeral homes. Hispanic people either went to [00:15:00] Hispanic, Black or white funeral homes. White people went to white funeral homes. COVID erased that because families were simply trying to get in where they could and have their loved ones cared for. And “cared for” is a stretch of what we were able to do during COVID. It's a stretch of a description because of the demand, we just weren't physically able to give as much detail and commitment to each individual family as I'm sure many professionals wanted to. But a big theme that comes up a lot is guilt. I used to think strongly that everything that people didn't know was rooted in racism. They just didn't care about other people other than their own race. And that is not the case. A question that comes up is, why weren't we taught this in mortuary school? And I can go on and on about that, but it's questions like that. And then when we are getting into the meat of our context, whether it be faith and [00:16:00] religion, body care, or conversational, it's how can I do the work within myself to not feel uncomfortable addressing these issues? And I haven't figured out the answer to that.

Sarah Cavanaugh: The poet Danusha Laméris has lived through two big losses in her life: her brother and her son. And yet when we spoke earlier this year, I was struck by the light she continues to carry. Danusha is incredibly connected to all of her emotions, those wonderful things that make us all human. In this excerpt, she reads one of her beautiful poems about her son, called “The Sound.”

Sarah: Let's talk about your son. You wrote in your substack, “I had a lovely big-eyed baby with a chromosomal variation that meant he'd never walk or be able to feed himself, nor communicate with us his thoughts, needs, and feelings. My marriage fell apart under the weight of all the decision making and [00:17:00] sleeplessness that came with this new life. Soon I was a single mother sharing caregiving.” There's a lot of grief in those few sentences.

[00:17:08] Danusha Laméris: Yeah, boy, I really was packing it in in my early thirties, just having so many intense experiences of loss and of grief, so much. And I’m glad I wrote that in a substack because it's like a Cliff's notes that people can visit and know the background. And there's a period when you go through something like that, that everyone's asking you all the questions and it can be so overwhelming. And I remember at that time, the worst thing being when people were nice. I would go to the grocery store, see someone I knew and they'd say, oh, I'm so sorry. and I would just fall apart and go home. Ao I remember it just being hard to be in public even, because I couldn't quite bear the retelling, [00:18:00] which now doesn't feel that way,

[00:18:02] Sarah: One of the things I love is talking to authors and poets because you have processed the grief in a way that you've put language around it and you're able to share it with others. And once you do, you're making space for other people who have been through a similar experience. Someone out there needed to hear this, and needs to hear it today, and will feel less alone.

[00:18:24] Danusha: That's the hope. That's definitely the hope that you're sort of building a house that other people can take refuge in

[00:18:32] Sarah: What was your son's name?

[00:18:35] Danusha: Santiago. I called him Santi or the bubs or just, you know, you call all these nicknames, but, but he had a very elegant and formal sounding proper name.

[00:18:51] Sarah: I have one poem I selected. How about “The Sound?”

[00:18:55] Danusha: The Sound.

I'm not sure if I want to [00:19:00] tell you this, but it's only a story and like all stories, it's held in time. It begins with death. My son's off life support. The doctor's wheeling him into the OR to harvest his still living organs. He was not conscious. He had, I told myself, already vacated the frame. Something he'd been close to doing since he was born. I sat at home alone on the couch, while the surgeons, no doubt with great care, severed him from his heart, his kidneys, his liver. I don't want to know what else. I could not think about it. And so instead, I closed my eyes. Imagine him a wisp, a breath of air [00:20:00] moving upward out of the confines of the body. And then I heard it, a humming that seemed to be everywhere at once, but not everywhere. For a moment, I couldn't say if the sound was coming from inside. As a sound might in a dream seem to arise from inside the dreamer. But then it was clear that it was outside and circling the house, A song of arrows and all at once I saw them, the one body, they made a kinetic cloud at the window. Those wound givers, honey makers, and something like fear arose in me. Would they enter the house? I must have risen, crossed the room to close the window, though I don't remember. They moved as one, the whole of them, [00:21:00] a clustered orchestra, first dense and singular, then dispersed Agile entity, both bound and unbound. I watched them hover like that until I could no longer say what they were. If they were one or many. Or what anymore was a body

[00:21:27] Sarah: How do you think about your son now? What's the shape of your grief now?

[00:21:31] Danusha: I think of him as almost the most pivotal figure in my life because the experience of having him and the experience of caring for him and the experience of losing him are probably the most defining things that have happened to me in many ways. But he just taught me so many things: how to be in not knowing, even when it was [00:22:00] painful, how to enjoy things like just combing his silky hair. And I took all these black and white photos of him and made a little album. It was just so cute. And I would show it to everybody, and celebrating him in that way, and that I could still enjoy so much about him, about his presence and about his snuggliness. I could just enjoy so much about him and we were just hanging out there not knowing really anything of what would happen.

[00:22:38] Sarah Cavanaugh: Oliver Burkeman is an author and journalist who wrote a book about productivity and time management called “Meditations for Mortals.” We devote a lot of energy toward managing our time here on Earth, so we thought it'd be interesting to hear from an expert. In this clip, Oliver and I talked about why it's so important to make time for what really counts.

Sarah: I wonder if [00:23:00] listeners are thinking, why are we talking about time management, because what does that have to do with death? But that connection is central to your work.

[00:23:10] Oliver Burkeman: I do feel slightly odd having a conversation for this podcast because I, I do think the books that I've written and the subjects that I write about are not overtly about death and dying, but they are about finitude. They are very much about the limitations that ultimately all come from the fact that we do die. I'm expanding the notion of time management up to the question of, how do we deal with the fact that our time is finite? And as soon as you talk about our time being finite, you're talking about death in some sense.

[00:23:38] Sarah: And accepting your mortality makes life worth living. I love the premise of the limited time, the limited amount of projects you can finish, really acknowledging that is really what we talk about a lot.

[00:23:50] Oliver: I've definitely come at it from the end of like, I've got too many emails in my inbox and too many items on my to-do list as opposed to really huge [00:24:00] encounters with the sort of absolute nature of mortality. But they are completely the same thing, yeah.

[00:24:05] Sarah: Well, I found a lot of peace reading about showing up and accepting your limits and letting go. Let's talk about your book for a sec.This passage from “Meditations for Mortals” explains exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with you: “If you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin or when you can finally start enjoying yourself or feeling good about yourself, then you'll end up treating your actual life as if it's something to get through, until one day it'll be over without the meaningful part ever having arrived.”

[00:24:38] Oliver: That's finitude, right? The idea that this experience will end means that we should be very, very cautious about this very forgivable tendency to treat the present moment as leading up to some time where we'll have our lives in better working order, or be on top of things, or finally know what, what we're doing. [00:25:00] Obviously, you know, people do go to school and university and learn things to prepare themselves for later in life to some extent. But I think a lot of this has to do with, it has directly to do with, mortality. Because it's about wanting to feel more in control of experience than we do, right? Right now in the present moment, you feel vulnerable and you feel like you can't be sure what's gonna happen next, and you can't protect yourself from distressing emotions, but like soon, with the right techniques and some more self-discipline that you're going to apparently locate from somewhere, and all the rest of it, then you'll get to this place where you can have that kind of security. And my argument, I don't claim to have invented this argument at all, but my argument in the book is that desire to feel more in control is really a desire to not be a limited human in the way that we all are. It's a way to sort of get out on top of your life instead of accepting the reality that you're just in it and the river of time is bearing you forwards towards death, whether you like it or not.

[00:25:59] Sarah: Do you feel [00:26:00] it's the same in England that it is here in the United States, where productivity and achievement and all of that, you'll give back when you retire, you'll give yourself time back, you'll give your money to good causes, you'll do all of this at 65.

[00:26:14] Oliver: Yeah, I mean, I think on some level this is a sort of timeless and universal human tendency, right? It's definitely this sort of living for the future is exacerbated by all sorts of cultural and economic forces, but right at the bottom of it, I think it's a sort of baked in human discomfort with being, as far as we know, the only creatures who are both finite and able to be aware of what that means.

[00:26:44] Sarah: Or we'll stay young forever.

[00:26:46] Oliver: Right, that's the other way of doing it, right. So you can say three ways, basically. You say, I'm never gonna die. You can say, I'm gonna die, but in the future now, but before I die, I'm gonna have the time that made it all worth it. [00:27:00] Or you can just go fully into sort of optimization culture and say, like, I can do a limitless amount of things right now, which is this kind of immortality as well. If I really could make it so that I could answer every email, pursue every ambition, meet every obligation, and go to 50 different places around the world every year, it would be sort of functionally equivalent to living forever, because I could do everything, in the present. but neither is possible,

[00:27:24] Sarah: Yeah. Well, your second book is called “4,000 Weeks.” If we live to 80, then how many weeks we have in a, a lifetime and putting in another number like that really also illustrates the point of a finite life. Do you think of life being short or long?

[00:27:40] Oliver: I mean, at first blush, I think of it as being short and the, the use of weeks in that title was obviously deliberate, having figured it out myself and had the panic attack — I wanted to make everybody else suffer too. A week feels like a very easy unit of time to waste, like what happened to the last week? But also 4,000, [00:28:00] it's a few more than 4,000 if you don't round it down. But 4,000 is not very many of them. Whereas a year is hard to waste. So the fact that we get fewer years isn't so bad. Days are very easy to waste, but you get thousands and thousands of days. So maybe it's not so bad that a week really gives you the worst of both worlds in that, in that topic. But I think when you think about that question, like, is life short or long — compared to what? Compared to the history of humanity or the life of the cosmos, it's obviously incredibly short. And compared to the life of a mayfly or whatever, human life is incredibly long. It is interesting that our minds naturally tend towards the first comparison rather than the second. I think, on some level we feel like we should be entitled to be present for the whole history of humanity, and it's an insult that we're not, which is completely fascinating when you stop to think about it. And not many people regret not having been alive in the past in the same way that they hate the fact that they won't be alive in the future. So we've got some, we've [00:29:00] got some curious intuitions going on there for sure.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find us on Instagram at apeacefulexit and on YouTube at Peaceful Exit Podcast. To learn more about this podcast and my work, please visit peacefulexit.net. You can also send us an email and let us know what you thought of this episode, or share an idea for a new episode. We're at peacefulexitpodcast@gmail.com. Our senior producer is Julie Kanfer, and our sound engineer is Jason Gambrell. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin. I have an amazing team. Original music provided by Ricardo Russell.Please make sure to follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, and rate and review us wherever you listen. It really makes a difference. And please tell your friends about Peaceful Exit. As always, thank you for listening