When I Almost Died

When I Almost Died

A few years ago, I asked you to share your near-death experiences. You told us about car accidents...plane crashes...illness...suicide. And, you told us what happened after, when you didn't die. Ellen's near-death experience ended her marriage. Kelsey's forced her into sobriety. And Paul's left him feeling impatient: "Every moment has to matter, but then it doesn’t." We also heard from some of you about near-death experiences that weren't your own, but that deeply affected you just the same. Rachel* had only been in a relationship with her boyfriend for six months when he was diagnosed with lymphoma and hospitalized. She was terrified that he was going to die. But she was also terrified to admit that she wasn't happy in the relationship. "He didn’t miss me, the way I missed our closeness, because he was so preoccupied with the disease taking over him," she told me. "That really, really hurt me." And many of you told us that coming close to death changed the way that you think about dying. "It’s not as horrific as I thought it would be," said Elizabeth Caplice, who described her life as "one big near-death adventure." A listener sent us a link to her blog, Sky Between Branches, where she wrote about her life with stage 4 colorectal cancer. When I talked with her, she'd just been given an estimate of three months to live. "It obviously is a really terrible and rancid thing to happen to anyone," she told me. "But in a lot of ways it’s simultaneously been worse and not as bad as I thought it would be. It is a natural process. It’s a very human thing to have happen to you, is to die."  This episode was originally released in 2016. To read updates about some of the people featured in it, sign up for our newsletter here.

Episoder(150)

I Wanted To Be A 'Good Girl'

I Wanted To Be A 'Good Girl'

*This episode originally ran in 2019.  Andrea grew up attending an evangelical church in Texas, where she was taught to abstain from sex until marriage and keep herself sexually "pure." That early sex...

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India Walton: I Knew It Was Gonna Be Tough, But I Didn't Expect it to Get Nasty

India Walton: I Knew It Was Gonna Be Tough, But I Didn't Expect it to Get Nasty

India Walton grew up in Buffalo, New York, a starkly segregated city, where 85 percent of the city's Black residents live on the East Side. She started a family there at 14 and then a career as a nurs...

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Inside John Waters' Home (But Not Inside His Colon)

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John Waters is the writer and director of such cult classics like Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom, and his biggest mainstream success, Hairspray. He’s been making movies since the 1960s and this year he re...

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How Clothes Help Us Find Our People and Ourselves

For many of us, the last few years of the pandemic has given us time to reflect on different aspects of our identities and how we show up in the world. That's meant more room to explore what silhouett...

14 Sep 202231min

Lucinda Williams Says Whatever the Hell She Wants

Lucinda Williams Says Whatever the Hell She Wants

*This episode originally ran in 2016.  When Lucinda Williams was in elementary school, all the other kids brought rock collections and other standard fare to show-and-tell. But she brought a folder. "...

7 Sep 202230min

Big Freedia Bounces Back

Big Freedia Bounces Back

Even before becoming Big Freedia, Freddie Ross was known around New Orleans. Her "signature call"—an operatic bellow that she lets out when I ask to hear it—was legendary in the city. "They'd be like,...

31 Aug 202226min

Finding Meaning After My Husband's Public Death

Finding Meaning After My Husband's Public Death

When talking about the death of his husband, Terry Kaelber doesn't use the word suicide, "I tend to say he took his own life out of deep distress about the environment through self-immolation." Terry ...

24 Aug 202235min

Knock Knock, Who's There? Bob the Drag Queen

Knock Knock, Who's There? Bob the Drag Queen

If you lived in Columbus, Georgia in the 90s, you might have spent time in a queer club called Sensations. But Bob the Drag Queen knew Sensations by day, not night – she was in elementary school when ...

17 Aug 202230min

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