Lo Carmen: Some years ago, I became friends with my Los Angeles neighbour, Pete, in the most unexpected way, because life has a way of taking our expectations and throwing them out the window. We were new to the neighbourhood and all I knew was that we had moved in next door to some kind of lawyer. Then I backed our car down the drive and smashed straight into his car. My heart sank as I immediately envisaged being yelled at, sued, and probably bankrupted and jailed for my bad driving skills. I left a very apologetic note on the windshield and soon after he emerged and saw the damage. I saw this from the window of my house and nervously forced myself outside to apologize in person. And he was so unexpectedly kind to me about it, that I accidentally burst into tears. He nicely patted my back and said, ‘it's just a car, we'll work it out. Don't worry, and welcome to the neighbourhood’. I think that probably made me cry some extra tears of relief. 

Anyway, our families became good friends and neighbours. And then, Pete would often drop in and join my husband and I when we were relaxing with a glass of wine in the garage of our shared driveway late at night after he had been spending his evening volunteering at a local hospice. Just sitting and chatting at bedsides, being an ear or a friendly voice to people nearing the end of their lives that may not have had family or other people around them. Sometimes he'd share little stories about his experiences there with us that I found incredibly profound and often thought-provoking too. But I'd never asked how this volunteering came about, or more particularly why. 

So I asked Pete if he would share some neighborly wisdom and help explain some of the mysteries of life and death.

Peter Marcus: The more accurate description would be that I've been helping people die. So, you know, my experience has it's come to me in different ways, sometimes formally through the hospice program I've worked with, sometimes through friends, or it originally started with family. yeah, I lost my brother when I was younger and he was younger, he was thirty-three when he died, and spent his thirteen months of illness, he had lung cancer, and we had a journey through uncharted territory where we had just kind of grown up together and were brothers, and death was never part of the conversation. We had never lost anybody close to us. Life was an adventure, but it was also permanent. We were not exposed much to anyone close in the family or friends who had died. Or at least I hadn't. He I think he had a little bit more experience. But when he died, it was I was completely unprepared, and the experience was revelatory. I came to understand how much I didn't know and how much I mean it may just be my nature, but when it was happening, I did my best to look it in the eye and when I was out of my element to acknowledge I was out of my element and to try to come to grips with the reality of the situation, and the more I did that, and the more I experienced it in a family that didn't necessarily have a common approach to it, and we hadn't had experiences as a family as to dealing with death. Going through that experience, I did my best to learn from it. Not for the purpose of learning, it was just my approach to dealing with the fact that my brother died and was dying. And when it was over, I tried to put what I had learned to use on some level out of maybe a tribute to my brother that I was young to be dealing with the issues we were dealing with and try to make try to turn it put a positive spin on a really tragic and dark period.

04:38 Lo Carmen: Yes, I have to say you're one of the most positive people I know, or you manage to pretend to be anyway.

04:49  Peter Marcus: Well, we get choices and every any time we're challenged and it's how you approach it and what are you gonna do with it. I mean, there are s believe me, there are dark roads I've walked down. Yeah. And I think I've learned from those experiences that I have a choice as to how I'm going to approach it. And and it's not like I always choose the other path.

 05:08 Lo Carmen:  It's pretty much the only choice we have, isn't it? How are you gonna deal with what's put in front of you?

 05:14  Peter Marcus: Exactly.

 05:15 Lo Carmen: Is there anyone there that was helping to guide you both through it, or were you on your own?

05:20  Peter Marcus: I was fairly on my own. But so when I found myself in the hospitals, you know, my brother was a rock and roller. When he would walk into a hospital with his dreadlocks and his attitude, he didn't always win the praises of all of the people he ran into and the professionals. And because of that, I made sure I always had my jacket and tie on when I was with him and to advocate. Just sticking on a tie led to people wanting to speak to me in ways that opened doors. So you know, I I held his hand his hand and tried to learn what I I could learn about what he had and tried to guide him towards the right people.

05:58 Lo Carmen: Were you open with each other about his impending death?

06:02  Peter Marcus: At the time it felt terrible, but it was kind of extraordinary. He had left home at maybe sixteen years old and had been in and out of our lives from that point on until the last few years of his life, and then he'd come back, and my thirtieth birthday was four months before he was diagnosed. And he was living up in Massachusetts, and he came down for my 30th birthday to New York and took me out and bought me a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch, and we sat in my living room and talked and sort of forgave each other for anything we had done as brothers to each other that made our lives difficult, and sort of gave sort carte blanche. You know, we were close and then we weren't so close, and we reconciled and had a great night, and then we hopped in the car and we went to Birdland and heard some great jazz and got really close again. I mean, we had been very close when we were younger, and then not at all for a while, and then we got close again. and in that four-month period we found each other, and then he got sick. I think that was in November that we got together and he was diagnosed in March. And there was maybe three or four weeks before the diagnosis where he was having some symptoms and things. But it was, I just felt really lucky that we had found that point in our relationship before he got sick. Both because when we were dealing with each other when he was sick, it was it was honest and it wasn't just trying to sort of make up because there was this circumstance, but it also gave him sort of a level of trust in me. He turned to me at some point and asked me to help him, and that's how I ended up sort of taking him to the doctors and spending my weekends up with him and you know, thirteen months of an odyssey of good news, bad news, hope, and dashing of hope. And ultimately learning to write. I I remember his best friend and I each did a eulogy for him, and I remember thinking that that was sort of the last lesson he was giving me. He had always sort of he was my older brother, and he always broke down the doors ahead of us, so by the time it was my turn to reach new stages in our lives, I had at least a version of it that I could learn from. You know, and sometimes respond to and do the opposite. But the last lesson he gave me was to learn to write a eulogy. 

08:21 Lo Carmen: Wow. I bet that was a a big lesson. I bet it was a beautiful eulogy, too. 

08:27  Peter Marcus: It was it was funny because he had done so many things. He died at the age of 33, and he had sailed the seven seas and worked the Caribbean, and as an 18-year-old, he hitchhiked across country with his best friend from Massachusetts to California, and had remarkable adventures, had a reggae band, they bought a school bus and drove around the country and ended up playing in Key West at Jimmy Buffett's place. They would, you know, sleep in his driveway on a school bus, and then maybe on Tuesday nights they'd get a gig and and play.

 08:58 Lo Carmen: So he packed a lot in.

09:00  Peter Marcus: Yeah, I talked about how at the age of 33 my brother died of old age. He had done more than most of the people in the room ever would at the age of 85.

 09:09 Lo Carmen: How long after his death did you start volunteering? 

09:13  Peter Marcus: So I did a couple of things. One was I got involved with a siblings group at Sloane Kettering in New York, a sort of a support group just to sort of ,I don't know, study, understand, find other people that had similar situations. And I probably went a handful of times, but it was I think the first and second time I went were eye-opening just in terms of you know, every story is specific and our family and the dynamics of dealing with my brother's death was not without its challenges. And going into a room full of people that had had their own stories and sort of sharing with each other and realizing that all these other people had their own crazy stories as well, and that it was that's what it means to be human, I guess. Yeah. There is no perfect way to deal with any of these things. So that was, you know, maybe my first step into realizing that, you know, if we hold each other's hands we can get through some things, and and in having that moment of truth of realizing that death wasn't the scary thing I thought it was, that it was horrible that my brother was sick, and it was tragic that he was going to die at the age of thirty-three. But I was with him when he died. Maybe this was the first lesson was the morning that he died. I was with him eyeball to eyeball at the very end, and sort of watched the train pull out of the station, and held his hand, both literally and metaphorically, and just sort of escorted him down the hallway.

10:44 Lo Carmen: Was he scared? 

10:46  Peter Marcus: I did not sense that he was scared at the end. I think he was there's a saying about how it's always the step before the last step, that's the scary one. Before you step - by the time you jump off the cliff, you've already decided to jump off the cliff with your parachute, right? So there had been scary time leading up to it, but it was a really peaceful morning and it was beautiful, and the sun was coming into his living room where we had set up his bed, and it was quiet, and it was very peaceful. And it was normal and natural. And the experience of watching it, having had all my own fears and having gone through this experience with him and trying to face things as they came, it was the most natural thing in the world.

11:37 Lo Carmen: Which it is.

 11:38  Peter Marcus: There's only two things in life that are certain. Right? When you're born and they ink your feet and stamp them on that birth certificate, that's the contract, and it says there's only two things in life, and you've already completed the first one. And the last one we never talk about. We hide it and put it in the closet, and you know, by the time it's time to deal with this. So, there was a sense, I developed a sense of understanding that having been eyeball to eyeball with my brother at the end of his life and realizing how normal and natural it was and how lucky I was to be there in that moment. The light bulb went on over my head. I realized that nobody had taught me this. I had had all of my sort of made-up fears and what I had seen in TV movies and books and known that this was something taboo that nobody speaks about, that it must be something terrible. Right? And then experiencing and realizing as much as I miss my brother that it was the most natural thing in the world at that point, after chemotherapy, after surgery, after being scared, after all the craziness going on, that it was peaceful, it was natural, and it reminded me when I later on had grown up and gotten married and had kids and been there for the birth of my children, that it was very much a similar experience. It was it was how it works. It was what it means to be a human being. 

13:11 Lo Carmen: Yeah. Beyond our control.

13:12  Peter Marcus: Well, not only just beyond our control, but that's human beings are born and live and die. And that's what we do. And if you don't if you cut off part of it, you're cutting off part of your humanity. And you know, I don't know what other cultures were like. I know, you know, before we were as compartmentalized as we seem to be these days, that people lived in greater communities with generations living in the same house, and you know, just the small-townness of life. I live in Los Angeles now and the big citiness of it, and it's hard to find connection, but we're more isolated. But there was a time when your grandmother or uncle or aunt died in the house with you and the family responded to it, and you know, I know my experience is my experience. People sometimes in some places still have that experience. But for me, I remember, and I guess on some level I resented that nobody had ever let me in on the secret. Right?

14:14 Lo Carmen: Which was that it's natural and not to be afraid?

14:17  Peter Marcus: And that you don't - maybe it's that everybody's afraid. But everybody's afraid of something - the reason I think we're a lot afraid of a lot of things is because we don't know what to expect and we don't understand what's coming next, and the scary thing around the corner that you can't see scares us. And recognizing that we're all just peering around that corner and we're all scared, and maybe if we just put our arms around each other and collectively looked around the corner, we would get to know that, you know, it's the putting our arms around each other that matters. And I was, I don't know, 30 when my brother died, and I realized that I was sort of one of the younger ones in my peer group to have just been through this extraordinary experience, and in order to maybe have that attitude of take a negative and do the best with it you can, I decided I would make myself available. I knew that you know, I g I was the first one to this particular party and I could welcome other people. My formal hospice work came later. I did some, I did a lot of volunteer work. You know, I'm a practicing attorney, I'm a litigator, I, you know, do business litigation and yeah, help people fight about money and on the side I've been doing a lot of volunteer work over the years that have, you know, allowed me to make some modicum of help in in other people's lives. I, you know, did some work in the human rights world for a lot of years. 

My own my father had a car accident and was in the hospital and out of the hospital and out in and out of the hospital for a while, and he was ailing for about seven months, and before he died, he was in the intensive care unit in a hospital in New York. And I met a man who was an electrical engineer in the intensive care unit, and he was the only guy in the room who wasn't a doctor or a nurse that didn't have an agenda, that didn't have stakes in the game as to whether or not the patient, you know, responded to treatment, and this was a pretty sophisticated hospital in New York, and there were, I don't know, maybe two or three dozen patients all in this one large room, and they were all on the precipice of life, and my dad was one of them. As you might imagine, there are all sorts of things you see and hear in that environment. But my friend Joseph, the electrical engineer, was the one person who had ears that didn't require a result. And so when you would hear when he would hear somebody moaning or groaning or making comments, it wasn't his job to take care of them, but he was a human being and he would go over and talk to them and hold their hand and chat with them and look them in the eyes and you know, allow them in including my father. I met him while he was talking to my father. And watching him was educational for me. And just watching somebody in the room that wasn't the specialist, that was maybe you know had his own set of wings and could hear in a certain way. I learned from him. And when my father was in his last weeks, I spent a lot of time in the hospital and my father was in and out of consciousness, and I would find myself in a room with a sleeping father and three other patients in the room who were making their own noises, and I would I found myself sort of gravitating and I just started talking to them. And I found myself in these wonderful conversations, and I found that people that were, you know, some of them didn't make it through the time I was there, but I got to spend some time with them and seeing them light up in being able to talk about themselves and their experience and their children and their travel and things like that. 

18:07 Lo Carmen: Because I imagine you're never closer to life than when you're close to death, that everything must come into very stark relief.

18:15  Peter Marcus: Yeah. And it was again, it was it was eye-opening to feel like I was being helpful to being some sort of a channel that would allow these people to express themselves. And I came to recognize that it was just something I had there are a few things I have innate abilities I I usually have to work really hard at some things, but this was I could just be conversational with something that was natural to you.

18:39 Lo Carmen: Yeah.

18:40  Peter Marcus: And I had had some experiences that were singular to me, and I was open to talking to other people about them, and that I had some ability to help. And I liked I liked that. It's a remarkable feeling to be able to help somebody. So, I continued for, you know, in my own way over time, you know, other people got sick and other people, you know, died.

19:03 Lo Carmen: And became the go-to guy to ask questions about how to face death.

19:09  Peter Marcus: Yeah, people knew I could talk about it, and it didn't - it wasn't like dark and depressing, and you know, it was, you know, people facing, lurking, looking around the corner and not knowing what to expect. And I could, you know, on a little bit, whatever little help I could be to them, I could make it a little easier to look around that corner.

19:29 Lo Carmen: So, the dead sometimes bequeath us unexpected gifts, unexpected ways of seeing the world or of keeping them close. For Pete, his profound experience at his brother's side gave him a new way to be of use in the world, which is, of course, not only a gift to those around him, but a gift to himself. Is there any better feeling than to be of use? We are all transformed in subtle ways by the people whose memories we carry. They live on inside us. It could be in ways of saying things or seeing things, in the clothes we wear, the furniture or objects we surround ourselves with, in food we eat, in little jokes or favourite books or songs. We absorb all that we love and become a living, walking museum of love. In Poems from the Afterlife by Andrea Gibson, who died too young from illness very recently, but whose work will resonate forever, they wrote, Feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? One of the things I've been so curious about along this exploratory journey is those strange, unexplainable connections that happen whether we choose to believe in them or not. There's often some kind of practical or scientific explanation that sometimes rings hollow, but these experiences, dreams, visions, flights of fancy deliriums, however you choose to look at them, often occur in the days or hours before someone dies. Or in the intense period of time for those left behind after they've gone. The dying might suddenly emerge from a period of being incommunicado and begin conversing happily with their dead friends, pets, or family members. Birds may appear in unusually insistent ways. They've been seen in various voteforms as spirit guides or messengers, as harbingers of death. There is a saying. When a cardinal appears, an angel is near. An instinct to play a meaningful piece of music at the perfect time might kick in.

22:10  Peter Marcus: Bach’s B Minor Mass was, and a particular recording of it, was something that I think he found epiphanies in, and I recorded a mono LP version of the Mass, and my father had found this particular recording to be one of the greatest recordings of all time. My dad was a professional in the field and he knew what he was talking about. So, I managed to get an electronic, I electronically recorded the LP and brought it to his hospital room and played it for him the afternoon before he died. I mean it's all music. Everything's music.

22:46 Lo Carmen: Walking each other home is experienced in unexpected ways. Dr. Christopher Kerr is the chief medical officer at the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care, where he has worked since 1999. His background in research has evolved from bent science and a PhD in neurobiology towards the human experience of illness as witnessed from the bedside, specifically patients' dreams and visions at the end of life. Although medically ignored, these near-universal experiences often provide comfort and meaning, as well as insight into the life led and the death anticipated. This is from his website. He's conducted hundreds of end-of-life interviews and published several scientific papers, as well as a powerful TED talk that I will link to in the show notes. He states that he always tries to approach every experience with openness and respect and objectivity. He describes death as being like a door and that there is a keyhole. You can look in and see things in many different ways. About a third of the people that he interviewed at the end of their lives report topics such as travel, or most commonly, people who they have loved and lost. And he says it's interesting that as you get closer to death, the frequency with which deceased people are seen by the dying increases. And it's these experiences that bring them the most comfort and calm. He entirely refutes that this is the result of drugs or delirium, explaining that those kinds of experiences or visions are generally accompanied by confusion and distress. Whereas what the people he is talking to are witnessing feels 100% real and is very clear and very comforting. He states that he's concluded it's simply important to have reverence, that the fact that he could not explain the origin and process does not invalidate the experience for the patient. That made him decide that trying to medicalise or scientifically comprehend these visions was unimportant, that the witnessing and learning was what mattered. He has said, an analogy I often use is that I cannot explain the origin of love in the same way that I cannot explain the origin of these experiences. It's something abstract, but we know it exists. He has also said, There are some things that become clear. One is that we never truly lose the people we love. They continue to exist for us, not just in ways that are distant, in photographs or remembered in memory, but in presence. He says, I've seen 95-year-old men who lost their mother at the age of five, and nine decades later, she's there. He hears her voice, smells her perfume. So, you do end up feeling like there is something more, that death and dying cannot be defined as something empty. We see people as if they are enveloped by love and meaning. So, it's the opposite of what we think. The vision we have of death, the death we anticipate, is not the one we experience. Pete had a couple of stories to share about things that he's witnessed at the bedsides of the dying.

26:12  Peter Marcus: So I experienced it a little bit with one of my hospice friends, who on I think the afternoon before she lost her ability to communicate, we had a lovely stroll through the rainy streets of Paris, and she showed me the windows and was talking to me all about the paintings and things, and my understanding it was a trip she had been on maybe fifty years earlier, by talking to one of her relatives later.

26:38 Lo Carmen: But she was talking as though she was there?

 26:41  Peter Marcus: She gave me a tour. Yeah, it was it was it was lovely. And, you know, it reminded me so when my dad was in his last days, he started to what some people might call a hallucination. He started to give a concert. He was suddenly he was in his bed in the hospital. He started to - he was in an auditorium and he was giving a lecture about a particular piece of music to an audience, and he was speaking to the audience, and at some point I initially I tried to correct him or feel him out and say, Dad, you know you're with me in the hospital, and he completely rejected what I was saying out of hand, and I just decided to go with it. And I listened to this lovely lecture. It was a very strange lecture that he was giving in a in a concert hall, and the concert hall was also on a New York City bus. So, his mind was doing something interesting. You know, this was also - musically minded people have different experiences too, right? Like, so, the day or two before he stopped communicating completely, I got off the elevator in the hospital, and I could hear him down the hall. And he was making these noises that to the untrained ear sounded like distress. This is what I heard. And I arrived in his room just after the nurse had gotten there and she was preparing to give him some morphine to help him with the obvious pain he was going through and this which is what she told me. And I said to him, Dad, are you in pain? Which seemed like a reasonable question. And he nodded his head. He was starting to lose his ability to speak, but he nodded his head no. And I asked him if he wanted the morphine, and he nodded his head no. And I asked him what he was doing and what you know, was he in distress, and he gave me a nod again. Or he just kept, you know, no, he wasn't having a problem. Through a series of sort of questions and yes and no answers, I got to the point where I came to understand that he was, again, what you might call hallucinating. He was visualizing and notes were coming by, and I said, Dad, are you singing? And he was singing the notes that were flying by his eyes as he was going, and those sounds he was making were his attempts at vocalizing the sound of the note that was passing before him. 

29:22 Lo Carmen: That's beautiful.

 29:24  Peter Marcus: It's a beautiful sort of little poetic story, but it's also, what agenda do you have when you walk in the room? Right? That old saying, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The nurse heard the sound, and that means give him morphine, right?

29:40 Lo Carmen: Yeah, right. Quiet him down as opposed to listen.

29:44  Peter Marcus: And had I not, you know, showed up in those moments, yeah, I would have come to a drugged-out dad and we would have had different experiences and things, and you know, yeah. But that's you know, that's the nature of being in a hospital and having an agenda.

30:00 Lo Carmen: When I first embarked on this journey, I knew so little and my questions were more of a curious and practical nature, with a dash of science and history and a smidgen of philosophical wonder. I expected to learn about how death works, not about lessons from the dying. I've learned so much now, and much of it has been unexpected, which is not surprising considering most of us actively avoid thinking about any of this until it lands in our laps and we have no choice but to walk through the door. If you've been following along with me from the beginning, you might remember that what initially sparked my fascination was wondering about the possibility of having my ashes sprinkled into a record after my own death. This will probably sound silly or foolish, but to begin with, I didn't really realise that it was necessary to be cremated first in order to become a record. Or a diamond or a paperweight or a parting stone or a marine reef or any of the other cool, beautiful things that you can do with ashes. And I also didn't understand that that of course would double the costs and make these options very expensive investments, probably out of reach of many of us. I didn't have a clue that cremation and traditional burial are not very ecologically sustainable. I didn't know that there were options for natural burial, I didn't know that it was legal to be buried at sea. I didn't know that being cryogenically suspended was a real option and not just something out of a science fiction movie, or that you could choose water cremation or resumation, or body transformed into compost, if you live in certain countries where it's available, or that you could choose for your body to be donated to a body farm to help solve forensic mysteries, or that you could donate it to a brain bank to help advance brain studies. I didn't know that if you wanted to donate your organs or your body to medical science, that you needed to prepare all of that before your death. And I didn't know that when you did that, that there would be a ceremony and the ashes would be returned to the family at the end of the process. I didn't know that you could choose not to have a funeral, or that you could choose to have any kind of funeral that felt right. I didn't know that you could have a living wake, or that you should have a living will that specifies your wishes in case you're incapacitated and your family need to make decisions for you. I didn't know that dying without a will and leaving pertinent information and instructions leaves chaos, expense, and frustration to those left behind. I didn't know about all kinds of rituals and beliefs and ceremonies from all kinds of religions and cultures that can help make our experiences around dealing with death more meaningful, uplifting, spiritually nourishing or valuable or ecologically sustainable, more beautiful, more simple, which often means returning to old ways. I didn't really even understand the powerful connections between music and death and spirit. I didn't know that all the scientific and anecdotal evidence points towards the idea of dying as being a little like dissolving more than anything else. In Death Walker Zenith Virago's TED Talk, she suggests we think about the fact that we are practicing dying every night as we fall asleep. I've learnt that knowledge is indeed empowering and calming and reassuring. I've had more meaningful conversations in the past four years that I've spent researching and slowly, painstakingly putting this podcast together, and I truly feel comfortable that whatever happens I am going to be alright with. I purposely haven't really delved into grief in this podcast because I think that that is better addressed by people that experienced it in a very personal way. All I've been trying to do is remove as much of the fear as possible by understanding. The only thing in this life that we have control over is what we choose to do and how we choose to react.

 34:30  Peter Marcus: Some people want to talk about death, some people don't want to talk about death. Some people want to tell me their life, and other people just want to, you know, sit quietly. But you know it's people.

34:41  Lo Carmen: Talking with my neighbour Pete, more formally known as Peter Marcus, definitely helped me realize and understand a few things that I don't think I would have understood otherwise. I hope that he has also helped to illuminate a few things for you.