Imaginary Worlds - Befriend The Reaper

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

One of the most common tropes in fantasy genres is personifying Death – turning this abstract and often terrifying concept into a character that people can interact with. Sometimes Death is portrayed as a Grim Reaper, but Death doesn’t have to be grim. Death can be compassionate, and even funny. And more often in recent years, Death has been depicted as someone with deeply ambivalent feelings about their job. I talk with listeners about their favorite portrayals of Death from Discworld to Sandman to Dead Like Me, and why imagining Death as a character changed the way they felt about death and grief.  Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. List of media mentioned in this episode: The Sandman comics and Netflix series Dead Like Me Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Critical Role podcast The Seventh Seal Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey Monty Python and The Meaning of Life Personification of Death academic study from 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. And before we get started, I want to give you a heads up. This episode can get pretty emotionally heavy at times. Suicidal thoughts are mentioned. When I was in college, I had a crush on death.

I'm talking about the character of Death from the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. In that world, there are a set of siblings that are basically like gods. They're called the Endless. They have names like Dream, Desire, Destruction, Delirium. Death is drawn as a young woman with a mop of black hair. She wears goth clothes and has a necklace with an ankh symbol. The character is funny, compassionate, and she had a great smile. Reading the comics, it blew my mind that Death could be portrayed not as a grim reaper, but looking like somebody that I could have seen on my college campus.

And The Sandman was just adapted into a big-budget live-action show on Netflix. Death is played by the actress Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and she found the right balance between gravitas, compassion, and playfulness. Hey, did you see that? That car came like this close to hitting me. This close, huh? Yeah. Come with me, Franklin.

I need to show you something. Okay. Recently, a listener named Scott Brawley suggested that I do an episode about the different ways death has been personified as a character in fantasy genres. I thought it was a fascinating idea. We got in touch, and he told me he is also a big fan of Sandman comics. But the Sandman was not the first time that he'd come across the idea of death being a character. When he was younger, he read the novel Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. In that story, death is also portrayed as a young woman. But she decides one day to stop reaping souls.

When death stops reaping souls, what happens to society on one level? Why would death do this? What's the impetus of this individual's choice? So that got me thinking of, oh my gosh, death has feelings. Death could be a persona that has feelings, that has thoughts, that has impulses. In fact, the character of death ends up falling in love with a human. In the meantime, society falls into chaos.

If you look at it from a business perspective, the life insurance industry will collapse as people take their money out because they're never going to need it. Funeral homes and funeral parlors, what happened to them? Did they start preparing bodies of pets to be disposed of if no longer people are dying? And then you have kind of the where, you know, if you're supposed to die and you have the log of the logs come off the truck in front of you and stab you in the chest, but you're in the hospital with a log in your chest but can't die, then what does that do to the healthcare system as nursing homes populate, as care facilities are overrun? At some point in time, the system

will collapse. Around the same time, he came across another story where death is a character, the novel On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony. That's another scenario where an individual is getting ready to commit suicide because his life is so horrible and has the gun pointed at his forehead and that last minute decides that he doesn't want to die and actually turns the gun on and shoots the persona of death. And unbeknownst to him, the person that kills death has to assume that role. So he then, as the mortal, becomes immortal and takes over that role. From an intellectual perspective, Scott thought these books were interesting,

but they also spoke to him on a personal level too. As a young man, death was on his mind a lot. I came of age as a gay man during HIV and AIDS, the height of AIDS. And so there was some fatalism in my younger years that I probably would die at an early age. And so I think when you have that presentation of HIV and AIDS in your formative years, looming in the background, you have to realize that you have to come to terms

with it in some way. And so it's kind of weighing the option of do I stay in the closet and miserable there? Or do I accept that I may die to be the person that I innately am on the inside? And finding comfort in death, knowing that everyone will experience it at some point in time, gave me the strength to be who I am. Death is something we usually try to avoid thinking about, unless we're confronted with it directly. Even then, death is an absence that's so profound it can be hard to comprehend. absence that's so profound it can be hard to comprehend. So what happens when death becomes a character with a capital D? Does that help us think about the concept of death for longer than we normally would? Does it change our attitude about death when death is a character with a

point of view? After Scott suggested this idea, I put a call out to you, listeners, to find out which versions of death appeal to you. One of the listeners who wrote in was Ella Watts, and she wanted to talk about the podcast Critical Role. Critical Role is an unscripted podcast where a group of friends play a game of Dungeons & Dragons in real time. play a game of Dungeons and Dragons in real time. Those friends also happen to be actors, so they can take the skills that we all use playing D&D, like improvisation, getting into character, doing voices, to a whole new level. One of the main characters in the game is Vax'ldan,

or Vax for short. He's played by Liam O'Brien. Vax is a paladin warrior who pledged himself to a god of death called the Raven Queen so Vax could save his sister's life. In real life, Liam O'Brien's mother passed away. And he wrote on Twitter, quote, In the weeks following her passing, I felt pretty swallowed up by loss, but spending time with my trusted friends every week,

exploring the very thing I was haunted by, taught me volumes. As a fan of Critical Role, Ella was moved by the way that Liam was using gameplay to process his grief. But she says within the game, the other players were concerned about the way his character was processing grief and death. His character Vax'ildan in Critical Role is wildly suicidal for a lot of the campaign. He consistently throws himself into very dangerous situations without any help from the other player characters to the point where the other players

feel frustrated and worried because they can see him as a player making these bad decisions, but their character doesn't know. And so they're like, but I don't want your character to die. And I don't want to watch your character die. And he keeps being like, you know, putting himself in all of these difficult situations. And so what would happen a lot in campaign one, and one of the things that

honestly was the reason that I loved that first campaign was that often player characters, the players in an effort to try and discourage Liam's character from putting himself in these self-destructive situations would give him these big speeches about why life is important and he was valuable and he shouldn't throw himself away and he had friends who cared about him and wanted him to be around. Promise me you'll come back with me no matter what even if it doesn't happen just promise well that's an easy promise to make i promise i just need you to believe it those speeches were all deeply personal and very moving like a lot of people related to what liam was going through and also had had those

conversations from from both directions like i've given speeches to friends of mine who've been depressed, trying to convince them that their life has value. And I've had people give that speech to me. And so seeing that on this role-playing game with this group of friends was also really meaningful. And then when it became part of the actual story, that there was this like A plot about this embodiment of death and our relationship with that embodiment of death, it became even more special. And when Liam's character Vax meets the Raven Queen, the god of death that he's pledged himself to, she has a lot to say.

The dungeon master, Matthew Mercer, does the voice of the Raven Queen. I know that you hate me. I know that you fear me. Most do. But only because they are without understanding. Without death, life has no meaning. Finality drives change. Innovation. Greatness. greatness. She sort of takes the time to explain to Vax why these things happen and you know when he asks her about his sister or his own death

she sort of takes the time to be like okay well consider a world where no one dies. Is that a good world? Consider a world where some people can reverse death but other people can't. Is that a good world? Maybe one of the things that gives our lives meaning is death and maybe one of the things that gives our love meaning is death and

ultimately all of these stories are ways of telling ourselves again and again and again that we cannot change this thing so we must find beauty and peace in it I think the Raven Queen kind of represents that idea and that's an idea that I take a lot of peace from. So I love her. A lot of stories about meeting death, the character, often come down to the theme of accepting death as a natural part of life. But they're also a way of examining how we're spending our time while we're alive. Logan McDonald wrote in to tell me about their favorite personification of death. But first, they wanted me to know that they have always been fascinated by death

from a young age. When I was about like seven or eight, my great grandpa died and I was like, oh, well, this is a thing that happens to everybody. And so I decided to plan my own funeral. It was very bad. I don't stick to that funeral plan anymore. But I had a funeral binder, and I had a bucket list binder that was color-coded and everything. And I know I worried my mom to death, but I showed her my two binders just in case I died

and she needed to plan my funeral how I wanted. Their attitude about death was pretty irreverent. They even had their friends come over to help them make those binders. So let's go ahead and plan my funeral. I'm prepared. I'm ready to go. And then when Logan was in middle school, they read The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak. They wanted to read the novel because there was a film adaptation coming out. The story is set in Europe during World War II. Death is the narrator of the book and the film. One small fact. You are going to die. going to die. Despite every effort, no one lives forever. Sorry to be such a spoiler.

My advice is, when the time comes, don't panic. It doesn't seem to help. It's just kind of relatable. Like, death can be scary to a lot of other people, and having it just be like, okay, well, I have to do this, punch in, punch out. It just makes it a bit like you can sympathize with death and you're like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to die and you're going to have to come pick me up and take me wherever. I'm sorry, man, I understand.

That's so interesting because like every time in every version where it's a character meets death they're like why me can i have some more time i had more things to do you know it's it's very obviously me focus is your death i don't think i've ever heard somebody imagine themselves beating death and being like okay i'm so sorry you probably had other things to do i'm gonna try to make this as easy as possible for you. Yeah, my friends have described me as the type to drive myself to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance

because I didn't want to bother them. Because he describes a lot of the times, there are some souls that like sit up to meet him, but the rest just kind of are like, it's kind of like you're waking a sleeping kid. They're going to get out eventually, but they don't really want to. So you kind of pick them up and help them out. And I think just that kind of description of like, oh, this is pretty gentle, but also

you hate your job and I'm sorry. and it takes place during World War II where he saw just how carelessly humans killed each other without abandon or how they justified whatever reasons they had. He's just like, hey, I recognize I have to do this day in, day out, but I don't get it. I don't understand why. The fact that death himself is affected get it. I don't understand why. The fact that death himself is like affected by it, I think really shook me out of my like, oh, everyone dies, get over it mentality where I was like, oh, this actually means something to people and isn't just like a concept that happens. Huh. So it's almost like the fact that you were sort of numb to the idea of death,

but then when the character of death was not numb to it, it actually made you, that's what made you realize that there's a lot at stake? Yeah, I think, because also around this time, I was getting more depressed and thinking thoughts. And then this, I was like, oh, this is going to affect more than just me and more than the few people I think it would if I did anything.

Your actions have consequences and death hurts lots of people. Well, I mean, when you wrote into the show, you also said that your parents were getting a divorce, too, around this time? Yes, they were. And when you're in middle school, you're trying to figure out who you are. So there was a lot of trying to figure out who I am while also dealing with my family no longer being together, my brother potentially moving out to be with my dad. It was a whole bunch of stuff I wasn't super equipped to deal with. Since it personified death in a way that I really never experienced, especially not having death as a narrator, it added more of a sense of gravity to the situation. And I think it kept me grounded and get through it. Yeah, because it seems like also a lot of stories about death, when you look at it from death's

point of view, life seems small, our human concerns seem so petty, life seems meaningless. This seems like the opposite. It's almost like death saying to humans, your life matters so much more than you realize. Like, don't throw this away. Yeah. And he describes in the prologue as well how he'll hang on to people's stories. And the book Thief is one of the stories he collected to try and get him through. So he values our lives despite knowing that he's going to be there at the end of it. I wanted to tell the book thief she was one of the few souls that made me wonder what it was to live.

But in the end, there were no words. Only peace. words, only peace. The only truth I truly know is that I am haunted by humans. Logan was not the only listener who said that they liked the idea that death could be portrayed as a job. And in some fantasy worlds, death is a business or a bureaucracy. In fact, the TV show that most people wrote in to talk about was Dead Like Me, which aired on Showtime in the U.S. from 2003 to 2004. The main character Georgina, who goes by George, is played by Ellen Muth. And right after she dies, she gets recruited to be a reaper.

So, what are you, like, angels or something? Oh, no, no, ma'am. Angels don't like getting their hands dirty. You know, uh, upper management types. We have the unfortunate distinction of being called Grim Reapers. They're actually more like Cranky Reapers than Grim Reapers. They're actually more like cranky reapers than grim reapers. And this team of reapers is led by Rube, who is played by Mandy Patinkin.

And the show has a lot of fun with the bureaucracy of being a reaper. Oh, please tell me those are not what I think they are. It is. They are. Time for your self-evaluations. Again? The Reapers don't get much information. They're simply told that they have to be in a certain time and place to reap someone's soul before they die, so the soul doesn't feel pain.

Penny Rubin told me that she finds that idea comforting, even though, in the show, the character of George is often frustrated that she's at the bottom of a management hierarchy and when she tries to work outside the system it often backfires on her. There's comfort in being and not being responsible so George is not responsible for these people who are dying or their deaths she can just do what is asked of her to make it as comfortable and as peaceful as possible. But having it as part of in the framework of like a job or a bureaucracy means that you just sort of have to accept it and work within it as opposed to changing the system or like trying to take responsibility yourself. When Penny first started watching the show,

her dad was watching it too. Yeah, my dad was a fan of the show too. And then a few years later, her father passed away. There are other shows that Penny can't watch anymore that deal with death, but she still likes to re-watch Dead Like Me. Yeah, so a lot of the other shows tap in more to the philosophical side of death and dying. And that just could cause my mind to spiral with all of the existential dread and crisis that grief brings on. But I think because Dead Like Me doesn't try to dive into the philosophical too much and it doesn't try to provide answers or even really comfort about death it doesn't hit me like in the grief area quite as much i mean what do you think it means about the show that the characters are reapers because it could be

i mean similarly like the good place is a show that deals with the afterlife and death a lot, but there is no Grim Reaper, or not Grim, but there's no Reaper characters. Like, these are all Reapers. Like, what is it, why do you find that really kind of satisfying to watch them in that specific role? I think it's comforting the thought that there exists something in like that liminal space between life and death, that the Reapers are there to be guides and be shepherds. It's a very bare kind of comfort in terms of like, you know, somebody is here. We don't have any answers. This sucks. But we can help with your onboarding process. Yeah. I actually think that, that, um, you saying that makes a lot of sense to me because I, the, the journey that I've had

with grief and like what I find most useful and comforting, it's, I come, I keep using that word. I keep using that word. It's not that it's comforting, but there's no fixing what has happened. You can't change the circumstances, but having people who get it, who can sit with you and just say, you know, this really, this really sucks and I'm sorry. And I wish there were more I could say than I'm sorry, but that's all I have other than being with you in this space. Like that is incredibly powerful, just knowing that you're not alone. After the break, we'll find out why some fantasy fans are hoping that if they do meet a Reaper type character when they die, he would sound a lot like Christopher Lee. Some things end. when they die, he would sound a lot like Christopher Lee. Some things end. This is what I am.

When we come back, death in the Discworld series. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. One of the most popular depictions of death comes from Discworld.

There are over 40 novels written in the Discworld universe by Terry Pratchett. there are over 40 novels written in the Discworld universe by Terry Pratchett. Discworld is set in outer space, but society in Discworld is like a mix between medieval and Victorian England, with other cultures and anachronisms thrown in. The series has a big cast of characters, of witches, wizards, trolls, vampires, city bureaucrats, incompetent policemen, even the Tooth Fairy. Some of the characters show up in several different novels, but the character who appears the most is Death. I spoke with three listeners about Discworld.

Sofia Larsson, who lives in Sweden. Terry Pratchett writes a Death that I want to meet. Even if he looks scary. He fights a death that I want to meet. Even if he looks scary. He is a skeleton with a scythe and a black robe and has a white horse that names Binky. His name is Binky and he is a real horse because death tried to use a skeleton horse, but pieces just fell off. And he used to have a fiery steed, but it just kept house on fire. Chrissy Barney is also a fan.

In the books, he always speaks in all caps. I don't believe with any quotation marks, which is just a really fun way of reinforcing his inhumanity. Death is always charming. Death is polite. This is Eric Hanna. Death is extremely respectful of individuals' choices and the ways they live their lives. And he has absolutely no malice in the execution of his job. He's very professional too. He wants to provide everyone with a personalized service.

There were several animated and live-action adaptations of Discworld, which aired in the UK. And in most of them, Christopher Lee did the voice of death. Like in this scene from The Color of Magic, when a hapless wizard named Rincewind is hanging off a tree, trying not to fall into a pack of wolves. Death is getting impatient. Death may have a morbid sense of humor, but he understands that our concerns are important to us. It makes him curious about us. And in the series, he actually adopts a human daughter. That relationship eventually turns sour, but he later reconnects

with his granddaughter, Susan, who has special powers of her own. When Chrissy was a kid, these stories meant a lot to her. I grew up in evangelical Christianity, and I felt very othered within that culture because my dad died when I was, uh, six, seven years old of pancreatic cancer. And I, um, I don't have many memories of him, but I do remember him dying because of growing up with an evangelical Christianity. There is a very strong moral lesson attached to everything. Everything was a lesson in good or bad, and even his death was treated as a lesson to be learned. That idea was not helping her grieve her father's loss. Then she came across Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

Then she came across Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. deeply humanistic in a way that is just really gentle and kind while also not really shying away from the darker sides. But death is, he's just a part of the way things are and is very understanding towards the mortals that he connects with. And it was the first time that I had encountered a kind of, that kind of humanism connected to death. And that was a deeply needed, deeply needed thing. Eric Hanna teaches philosophy, and he thinks that Pratchett's humanistic take on death is similar to the philosophy of existentialism. And he says before the 20th century, most philosophers thought that meaning in our lives came from serving a higher power or trying to live your life by a set of

rules. But in existentialism, meaning comes from the choices that we make, because the number of choices in our lives are limited. So death in Terry Pratchett is somebody who tells characters that all of their choices have value, even if nobody else sees them, because they're meaningful to the person, because they're made in the limited amount of time they have to spend. And of course, death has a certain amount of envy of the human characters because death has unlimited time and he has no choices. So he keeps getting involved in these misadventures where he wants to become a farmer or get drunk or make the kinds of choices that matter to humans and have them matter in that way to him. And does that relate to the idea of death, like adopting a human daughter and then later having a working partnership with his granddaughter, Susan?

Oh, absolutely. I see Death and Terry Pratchett trying to understand humans and having a certain amount of empathy for humans. And the only times he gets excited is when he's in a human scale of time involved with another human person. He's seeing things from their eyes on the human scale. And because things matter to Susan, things matter to death, even if there are some hard lessons that he might have to impart to Susan. He's willing to be involved in the possibilities of sorrow and loss because of the joy of being in a relationship with somebody in time.

Terry Pratchett used to get letters from people who were terminally ill, and they told him that when they eventually meet death, they hope that he got it right. He said, quote, those are the kind of letters that caused me to stare at the wall for some time. Sadly, Terry Pratchett passed away in 2015. And when he was sick, someone asked if he was afraid of death, and he said, I can't be bothered about death. I have made him so popular that he owes me one. I asked Eric if he thinks when Terry Pratchett created this character of death, he was kind

of giving a gift to the readers and to himself. It's a wonderful gift. And as a fiction writer, you can help people grapple with things that they've never experienced. I'm never going to be riding a magical dragon, but it's really wonderful to be able to get on top of that in the world of fiction. And much more seriously, I haven't died, so I don't know what that's going to be like. But as a fiction writer, we can face it and prepare ourselves for it and think about what it means to ourselves personally. By the way, were you a fan of, a lot of people have said that Christopher Lee as the voice of death really felt truly canonical to them? Oh, absolutely. I can't picture the voice of death in any other way. In fact, whenever I'm talking about it to my students, I always say, well, does death have any advice for us? Death's usual advice is don't start any long books.

That's very good. Sophia Larson feels like death in Discworld is a character she can actually relate to because she works in a cancer ward. It's like a taboo subject. And when you talk about cancer, people don't want to talk to you about it. In a way, I become death. When I say in a party that, oh, I was on the work today, and people like, oh, right. And you work with death. And you said that, you know, when you go to parties, you sort of feel like you're, you've become death because nobody wants to, people get all uncomfortable. When you're at work, are you able to talk about this with other people at work and say, you know, like you could bring up

Terry Pratchett's death at the cancer ward and the other people you work with would want to talk about that? No, because I'm a nerd and they don't. They are not. But we talk about death on our job and with our patients. And some patients say that, yeah, we don't talk about that. We can talk about everything else. But me and my colleagues talk about it a lot. Because we have to because it's our job and we have to do it again and again.

Sometimes death is portrayed as somebody who has a job they're not crazy about. Sometimes they're pretty dedicated to it. But it sounds like for you it's a job that you are um find a lot of personal satisfaction yes yes and i and i love my job but sometimes it is hard and i love i saw sandman and uh in the sixth episode she talks to her brother and she says that, I thought I was alone, but then I realized I'm there with them. They are with me. The people that dying don't do it alone and I'm not doing it alone.

We're doing it together. I mean, people feel as pleased to have been born as if they did it themselves, People feel as pleased to have been born as if they did it themselves. But they get upset and hurt and shaken when they die. But eventually, I learned that all they really need is a kind word and a friendly face. I recently learned about a set of academic studies that put the idea of death as a character in a whole new perspective for me. Starting in the 1970s, researchers looked at how people imagined death as a figure, and they categorized the answers into four archetypes. Each of these

archetypes relates to a different way that somebody might die. And even though the study wasn't looking at fantasy genres, it lines up perfectly with those characters. The first archetype is the macabre figure of death, like in the Final Destination horror movies, where death is a monster hunting the main characters. I'll see you soon. Next, death is automation. That's like the version of death in the movie Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, Next, death is automation.

That's like the version of death in the movie Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, where death doesn't care what you had planned. I am death. Yes, well, the thing is, we've got some people from America for dinner tonight. Who is he, darling? It's a Mr. Death or something. He's come about the reaping. The third archetype is death as a deceiver or a trickster. That's like in The Seventh Seal, where you can try to beat Death in a game of chess, but he will find a way to win. Or if you're Bill and Ted, you can trick Death into playing

Twister instead. You played very well, Death, especially with your totally heavy death robes. I'm the patron, not Smee. Well, whatever, dude. But you got a lot to learn about sportsmanship. And finally, there's Death as a gentle comforter, like the character of Death in Sandman. And some Death characters are a combination of these different archetypes. I learned about this study from Oscar Sinclair. You might remember him from my 2018 episode, Faith and Fantasy.

Oscar is a minister in Lincoln, Nebraska, and this study interested him because he feels like in his work, he encounters all of these archetypes. I've been in Lincoln for five years, and I think I've done somewhere between 50 and 60 memorial services in that time. It runs the gamut of folks who had this sort of gentle comforter experience, right? Who died at home, surrounded by family that they loved without any regrets, to people that died in accidents, to people that died with really complicated relationships with their families. And so the necessity of having language around this and having some comfort with the conversation

is a real part of my professional life. Having a personification allows us to take that anxiety and focus it on symbols. I told Oscar that I was not surprised a lot of people were drawn towards the archetype of death as a comforter, but I was surprised how many listeners told me they really liked the idea of death as a bureaucracy, death as automation. Yeah. I mean, it's weird and it's what allows us to think about this stuff. So this idea of death as business, I think, is really tied to the modern way of death. I think there's a lot of work in hospice particularly, and hospitals are trying to do this too, to back away from that business-like model, to say that this is a thing that is deeply human

in addition to being cold, clinical, and medical. I was a hospital chaplain for a while, but one of the things that we did that we had to do, because the hospital asked us to, was to bring in the forms for DNRs, do not resuscitate orders, and living wills. So we chaplains who were either ordained or about to be would have literal paperwork to sit down and fill out with folks, whether they were dying or not, to say, what do you want your death to look like?

I think also, too, just the simple fact of having death be part of the cast of characters. You know, people do fan art of the Endless in Sandman or, you know, Discworld or whatever, and there's death as part of the cast, you know? And I think even that alone, that simple act of it must be literally accepting death as part of life instead of denying its existence. And that's a really healthy thing, because the more we we find ways to say this is a natural part of who we are. And so how do we how do we proactively befriend death and know it to be a friend rather than this macabre figure at the end. I think a really good way to do that is by seeing it,

by putting it as a character in film and book and in ourselves to say this is the conversation that I want to have over the course of my life. In a way, it's giving a sense of character to our own deaths and to use our imaginations to guide us right up to the very end. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Scott, Ella, Logan, Penny, Chrissy, Sophia, Eric, Oscar, and everybody who wrote into the show. By the way, if you liked this episode, you should check out the episode we did in 2018 called Imaginary Deaths,

where I talked with listeners about the deaths of fictional characters that made a big impression on them. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. There's now an ad-free version of Imaginary Worlds that you can subscribe to in Apple Podcasts. It's easy, you just click the button, and from that point on, you pay $4.99 a month to get all upcoming episodes of Imaginary Worlds ad-free, and you'll be able to listen to the entire back catalog ad-free as well. I set up a similar benefit for subscribers and Patreon. If you're at the third or fourth tier of Patreon subscribers, you'll get a private RSS feed, which you can put

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