At the threshold

On recording the living

There's a woman I read about once who made her living finding missing Arctic ships.

This was the late 1800s. She'd sit across a table from a grieving family, close her eyes, and tell them where their husband, their son, their brother had gone. Whether she was right isn't really the point — the point is that people needed her. They showed up for the chance that someone, somewhere, could reach across and bring something back.

Humans have always used the most powerful technology available to them to try to reach the other side and make it legible. 

The séance table. The spirit photograph — that uncanny Victorian impulse to point a camera at a bereaved family and see what showed up in the negative. The Victrola, and that first moment when a dead person's voice came out of a machine and filled a room. These are all impressions of someone lost.

We are always trying to figure out how to be with our dead.

I think about this when I sit down with someone to record their story. I'm trying to catch a voice before it goes. It’s in the particular way someone laughs, or the prayer they say before meals. It’s the joke they've told a thousand times that everyone groans at (but secretly loves). My favorites are songs and love stories.

These archives live with families, belonging to the people who asked for them.

Some of these recordings have been played at memorials. Some have been pressed onto vinyl. Some have been found years later, by grandchildren going through boxes and finding jumpdrives, or by friends who went back into an email archive.

I get emails sometimes, years after the fact, when someone sits with a recording. Even if for just a few minutes, the dead come alive.

This is my favorite work I've ever made, and very few people know that it exists.

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Before any of this, there was Anthony.

I was twenty-two and looking for a bureaucratic job when a friend called and offered me something else entirely: the care of an adult man I had never met. We met on a Monday and got on a plane together that weekend, the beginning of a three month adventure.

Anthony was a journalist from the golden age of magazines — a world traveler with an editor's eye and a wicked, incisive sense of humor that never left him, even at the end. His father was a famous war correspondent. His mother, a ballerina. He had been places and seen things and written about them in the way that people did when print publications still had money and time. His wife, Kylée — a firey body worker connected to a place far beyond this plane — would become one of my dearest friends. They both did.

I had never cared for an adult person before. What then transpired was a few months of the most profound living and learning of my life — love and anger, rage and despair, joy and humor, all living side by side in the same day, sometimes the span of minutes. We celebrated Thanksgiving at what I can only describe as a Mussolini-themed restaurant. Kylee danced flamenco in the living room. We watched storms roll in off the Tyrrhenian Sea.

It was the greatest education in being human I have ever received. I had no sense that it was coming.

Anthony died in 2021. In his last summer, I helped him edit his final manuscript — all lip reading and letterboards, catching his words as they became harder to give.

The day he died, the neighborhood fox came into the living room and sat next to his bed.

Would it be too on-the-nose to say he felt like a sentinel of sorts? Keeping the watch, standing guard.

After Anthony died, the fox never came back.

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I want to tell you about George.

I was driving through Western North Carolina when I passed a place called the Discount Monument Center — a small, one-room building in a gravel parking lot ringed with blank headstones. Curiosity got the best of me, and when I got cell service, I called him up and asked if I could come and talk to him — he said yes.

George was a retired pastor with an old tobacco country accent. We talked for hours about home, memory, death. At some point he asked me to turn off the recorder. He didn't know why I was there, he said, but he felt it was ordained by God. He later took me out to his Christian work camp — a place where he'd seen visions, where he’d go to connect with something beyond.

I've thought about him a lot since then. He had a lot of thoughts about memory, about dying. How he was just there, in a gravel parking lot, surrounded by blank headstones, waiting for someone to ask him.

He fell ill suddenly and died a few months after we met. His family has the recordings now — the most complete record of his voice in their possession.

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And then there was my friend Sally.

I found her on the internet (it's a long, and might I say, great story). I came to stay with her and her family, and she introduced me to everyone in her tiny town in the way you introduce someone you've known forever. It’s through becoming her sidekick that I learned very quickly that she was dying. We went everywhere together — around mountain passes, out to pizza, across town to contra dancing, up to her gravesite. We spent a lot of time on her porch and in her kitchen, our feet kicked up and eating popcorn + drinking root beer with her beloved husband, Ike (Sunday supper, of course). She taught me how to make fig leaf tea, and I think of her every time I pick them here in August. That sweet almond.

I don't know what to call what happened in those conversations. But I know that her openness and warmth remade something in me, and I know that I left North Carolina different than I arrived. That twinkle in her eye was unforgettable. Her voice now lives with the people who loved her, to return to whenever they need to hear her. She said that couldn’t believe I dare recorded her off-key singing — but I know that she secretly loved it. She wanted her family to get the songs right at her funeral — a laugh.

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You see, I came to this work the long way.

Through a master's degree in oral history, which taught me that listening is a form of argument, that the stories we choose to preserve are a political act. Through years producing audio at national media institutions, learning to shape a story around a voice. 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 catch something before it goes.

I don't think of this as fighting death. I think of it as keeping good company on the way. I believe that to witness someone fully 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

I kept meeting people like George. Like Sally. Death workers, grief workers, the grieving and the dying, and people who had stumbled into this territory and were doing extraordinary things within it — quietly, mostly alone, often without knowing anyone else was doing the same thing nearby. Folks hungry to find others like them.

I found some collaborators and we are architecting a place for people to find each other. That's The DC Death Collective — a membership organization for death and grief workers in the DMV. I run the creative side: the branding, the newsletter, some programming. We've done a whole bunch of stuff, and we continue to find each other and grow.

I'm still dreaming of the grief rave, so stay tuned for that.

→ 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. It’s a brick-and-mortar space in DC where the living and the dying can be together without euphemism. In my mind’s eye, it looks like an old victorian house, a huge wrap-around porch, music, quilts, lovers and loved ones. I want to so badly to learn to weave willow caskets, and grow willow in this place.

I'm not a clinical expert on death and dying — I want to be clear about that. What I am is someone who keeps showing up to the edges of it, in whatever form that takes. Building the community infrastructure. Sitting with people, one recording at a time. Trying, slowly, to shapeshift how we relate to death in this country.

If this resonates

If you're doing death work in and around the broader Washington, DC area and are 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 connect.