At the threshold

We are all just passing through this strange plane — together.

Humans have always used the most powerful technology available to them to try to reach across the threshold of death.

The séance table. The spirit photograph. The Victrola — that first uncanny moment when a dead person's voice came out of a machine and filled a room. Each era finds its own way to hold on, to reach back, to refuse the silence.

I think about this when I sit down with someone to record their story.

I'm not trying to cheat death. I'm not trying to contact the dead. I'm trying to do something simpler: to capture a voice, a face, a way of seeing the world — before it disappears. To leave something behind that lasts.

I've been doing this work quietly for years. Sitting with people who are aging, or ill, or simply ready to talk. Recording their stories. Capturing the particular way they laugh, the things they remember, the things they want someone to know. These archives live with families. They are private. They belong to the people who asked for them.

Some of them have been played at memorials. Some have been pressed onto vinyl. Some have been found years later — by grandchildren, by friends, by neighbors.

I get emails sometimes, years after the recording. Someone found it. Turned back to it. Played it.

This is some of my favorite work that I've ever made, and almost no one knows it exists.

I came to this work the long way — through years of caregiving, including time as a full-time live-in caregiver for someone I loved deeply. Through a master's degree in oral history. Through years producing audio at national media institutions, learning to listen closely and shape a story. Through training as a death midwife. Through cooking at a hospice.

None of it was separate. All of it was preparation for the same thing: learning to sit with someone at the edges of life and capture something that outlasts us.

I believe that to witness someone fully — to record their voice, to hold their story, to play their songs at their funeral — is one of the most profound acts of care available to us. In a world that treats death as a medical problem to be solved, I think witnessing is its own form of resistance.

The DC Death Collective

In 2024 I co-founded The DC Death Collective — a membership organization for death and grief workers in and around Washington, D.C. I lead the branding, communications, newsletter, and collaborate on the creative programming.

We've hosted a Valentine's matchmaking event for death workers. I'm dreaming of a grief disco. We're building a directory, a community, and a reason for people doing this work to find each other.

→ Visit thedcdeathcollective.org

What I'm dreaming toward

A social model of hospice — somewhere like the Omega Home Network, where dying happens in community rather than in isolation. Learning to weave willow caskets. A brick-and-mortar space in DC where the living and the dying can be together without euphemism.

I'm not positioning myself as a clinical expert. I'm building toward the hands-on work with the seriousness it deserves. In the meantime, I'm building the community infrastructure — and sitting with people, one recording at a time.

If this resonates

If you're doing death work in the DMV and looking for community, the Collective is for you.

If you're interested in legacy work — recording a voice, capturing a story, leaving something behind — I'd love to talk.