Key Points
- Talking to children about death
- Death doulas
- Psychedelics
We’ve talked before on this podcast about death curiosity but Ben Lee is curious about everything. The musician, producer, podcaster, and more approaches life with an open heart and mind, squeezing every drop of knowledge and wonder out of every opportunity and experience. And he’s decided to approach death in the same way.
It’s an episode full of surprises from an intriguing thinker and masterful storyteller so we won’t give too much away. But if spirituality, psychedelics, and talking to children about death pique your interest, we highly recommend pressing play.
You have to face the tremendous tidal wave that is human experience without controlling it, and I aspire to embrace my death in the same way.Ben Lee
LISTEN TO
Everybody Dies: Ben Lee on Life, Death, and Ayahuasca, Baby
SBS Audio
07/05/202443:49
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us understand both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: Ben Lee
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting . Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
This episode mentions death, drug use and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Anthony: Nadine Jessipina Cohen, hola.
Nadine: Hola, como estas?
Anthony: Va Bene?
Nadine: You forget I actually speak Spanish.
Anthony: I know, I know, and I speak Italian, so.
Nadine: We could go for ages.
Anthony: Yeah, well.
Nadine: Can you believe it's our last episode?
Anthony: I can, almost. We did it.
Nadine: We did it! Against all odds.
Anthony: What odds?
Nadine: All the odds. You know, those odds that we had.
***
Nadine: Anyway, today we're changing the vibe a little with someone you probably never expected to find on a death podcast. In our final, super fun episode, we talked to Ben Lee. Yes, that Ben Lee.
Discovered at a library book sale and sausage sizzle in 1992, Ben Lee has written and recorded music ever since, winning multiple ARIA Awards on the way. He's toured the world, acted in films, advocated for psychedelics, run the Weirder Together podcast network with his wife, Ione Skye, and thrown many excellent parties.
What is he doing on a death podcast? You're about to find out.
Hi, Ben.
Ben: Hello there.
Nadine: You're a man of many talents.
Ben: Questionable, but.
Nadine: Musician, producer, writer, podcaster, seeker, adventurer. Did I miss anything?
Ben: No, that's OK. I mean, I can, you know, I make a nice cup of tea too. I don’t know what that's called professionally, but you know.
Nadine: Before we get into how a musician got into this area of becoming a qualified death doula, can you briefly tell our listeners what a death doula is or death midwife, whatever you prefer to call it?
Ben: Yeah, well, I mean it seems to be a bit of an evolving craft, in a sense. So I think the definition is continuing to change as a society, we get a little more comfortable hopefully once again with incorporating death into our life.
Because, you know, there used to be a time where when Grandma died, she'd be in the living room and everyone would come and visit her. And it really all changed in America around the time of the Civil War, when people were dying further from home and then they had to be embalmed, and it started becoming a medical process to move the body back and forth.
So anyway, that's a long answer to say that my understanding of death midwifery or being a death doula is simply someone that's there for the person who's dying or for the family. It might be in more in service of all around, to help just ease the process along, the same way a birth to a birth midwife would.
Nadine: And how did you come to, you know, wanting to equip yourself with these skills?
Ben: Yeah, well for me it all came about through my experiences with psychedelics. I was doing sort of volunteer work in assisting with ayahuasca ceremonies. I'd done a lot of ceremonies as a participant, but also would regularly, sort of, be a helper.
-
Anthony VO: Ayahuasca is a plant-based psychoactive tea traditionally used by Indigenous cultures in South America for shamanistic ceremonies and healing. It is also used recreationally in ceremonies all over the world and is believed by many to treat certain physical ailments, addictions and mood disorders.
-
Ben: It was an interesting job because you're walking around basically while people are in the midst of incredibly deep and often difficult confrontations with themselves and with their own conscience, and with their fears and desires.
And you know, there were physical things you could help with, like if someone needed to go to the toilet, you could help them because they might be a bit wobbly and, you could, you know, guide them along to the bathroom. Or someone might need a drink of water. And also, sometimes someone just needs some company, they just need their hand held for a scary moment. So things like that would happen.
But there was a growing realisation in me that in some ways the experience of sitting with somebody who was on psychedelics was both the most intimate thing you could do with somebody, but also the most helpless. Because really they were just facing themselves and what was really required was your ability to bear witness and kind of just hold space for them to have whatever experience they were having. And you couldn't really dictate or change what that was.
-
Anthony VO: The effects of ayahuasca can be extremely intense, mentally and physically. So sober guides or helpers are often present to support people through the experience.
-
Ben: Yeah, I know there are people in the psychedelic realm that are more considered like, guides and all that, that try and shape experiences, but that was never my my interest. My interest was in how people could have their own experiences and confront what they needed to confront.
So I just started thinking a lot about, like, what was the skill set of being with somebody while they're going through a very intense personal experience that you can't necessarily fix. And you know, there was a lot of conversation and theory and ideas going back a very long time about the connection between psychedelics and death.
There's a beautiful book that really influenced me by Timothy Leary and also by Ram Dass when he was Richard Alpert at Harvard, and that was a reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. And it really moved me because they really equated the idea that to have a psychedelic experience that was as helpful as possible, you had to die. You had to let yourself die. You had to let go.
-
Anthony VO: Look, there's a lot to unpack here. But Ram Dass was an American spiritual teacher, researcher and Harvard psychologist with a special interest in psychedelics.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche in 1992, is an interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead from the 14th century.
-
Ben: So I just started wanting to get better at all of this stuff and I just started to want to be a better friend. Because I was always a bit like, I guess I'm a bit like, dominating as a personality. Like, you know, I talk a lot and I can be loud. And I realised that in some ways I wasn't great at just holding space for people going through things.
And so all of that led me to how can I get these skills? What can I learn? And I can't remember the exact moment, but it really led to me wanting to understand how to volunteer with people who are dying and what I could learn from that experience.
Nadine: And was that exactly what led you straight into volunteering at the hospice?
Ben: Yeah, well I did a course with a woman called Olivia Bareham in LA, in Topanga, called Sacred Crossings. She was actually running a small hospice. And it was a series. It was a great course and involved where we had to also learn how to, you know, everything from how much dry ice you need to keep a body not decomposing if you wanted to have a period in the house - you know all of these things that have sort of become, like you almost giggle now because they're so taboo in our society.
I remember one of the most beautiful things I learned was that everybody is going to have their own personal approach to the period before their death, right?
You know, when I started doing hospice volunteering, there were some people that wanted to have very profound conversations, and it was very meaningful, and they had stuff they were working through from their life, and they wanted to reconnect with family members or they had reflections. And other people wanted to watch reruns of Cheers.
And I would say the biggest lesson that I learned in all of this death midwifery and hospice volunteering, was that it's not your job to dictate what a good death is; that your job is basically to be the person that holds the menu and however this person wants to have their experience, you're just there to support them and be there with them for it.
***
Anthony: I wonder if we can kind of segue into a related question because I know you're not working professionally in this space, but you think very deeply about these issues and even though you might not call yourself a death doula, I've heard you say that the skill set you need to be a death doula is the same skill set you need to tuck your daughter in at night.
I wonder if you can tell us what you mean by that.
Ben: Well, I just mean that it's presumptuous to think that you can solve anybody else's fear. When you tuck your kid into bed and they're scared of the dark, it's dismissive and it's reductive and it's condescending to tell them not to be afraid or that there's nothing to be afraid of. Because humans having a fear response in front of darkness, in front of the unknown, is one of the healthiest responses we can have. That's actually incredibly… it's a huge part of self-preservation and as a species, we've needed that. We need to be scared of the unknown.
But there is a lot of courage that comes from sitting with people who allow you to have those feelings and believe that you can kind of have the experience anyway.
Anthony: I feel like that's a nice point at which to talk about being a parent and talking to your kids about death and dying. Your daughter, how old is she now?
Ben: She's now 13 and a half.
Anthony: And I imagine along the way, she's asked you about things that have happened and wanted you to explain to her or your wife to explain to her what death is and where people go. How has the work that you've done in this space helped to inform your ability to have those conversations with your kids?
Ben: Well, me and Ione actually had a fight about this once because when Goldie was like 5 or something, there was some talk of death. I can't remember, maybe the dog had died or something and she said Mum, I'm not gonna die, am I? And Ione looked at her and went no. And I was just like, you’re literally setting this kid up. Like as hard as that conversation felt in that moment to you, you've set up an even harder conversation that's gonna happen in about 18 months.
So I wrote this song called Everybody Dies that was meant to be a celebration song. Like a song partly for kids, partly for grown-ups, just normalising that we're gonna die.
So much of my enjoyment of life and the vigour with which I attack life comes from an understanding of my own mortality. There is an urgency, you know, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So I try supporting the kids in an acknowledgement of how mysterious this is and… how do you make sense of this experience in the face of this great unknown?
There's no one answer to it. We try many different things. We try distraction. We try looking at it directly. We try ambition to be bigger than it we, you know, we try desperation and despair. And you know, human beings have remarkable strategies for coping with the unknown and I guess it's also like, whatever gets you through the night like John Lennon said. But acknowledging it does feel respectful.
And I think with kids, it's funny because they look to us to have answers, but in the face of death, we actually don't have any more answers than they do. So in that way, there's no parents and no children, there's just… we're all brothers and sisters because we're all equal in that we don't know what the hell's going on and what happens when you die. And whatever's after you die. And I think a lot of parents resist feeling like equals with their children in that.
(Song plays)
Well, my gran was 97
Lived as long as she was able
But my dad went kind of suddenly
On an operating table
My neighbour went from heartbreak
Because his son went in his prime
And I’m more aware than ever
That I'm here on borrowed time
But it's alright, 'cause everybody dies
So, tell her what you're feeling when you look into her eyes
Yeah, it's okay, everyone's afraid
So, wrap your arms around the one you love tonight
'Cause everybody dies
Ben: Look, we do have to cushion our children slightly because we have to monitor their emotional maturity and what they're ready to hear about because there's atrocities that happen in the world and you just do not want, for their own emotional well-being, a three, four, five, six-year-old exposed to certain ideas.
But in general, I've sort of had the approach - and this is very general - but I've just had the approach that when they're asking a question, they're ready to hear the answer to it, and you can monitor how you tell that answer. Like I've been accused of being a little bit too, telling a little bit too much truth in a way that might not be the most sensitive at times, because I think it is our responsibility to support people in the way they receive information.
So yeah, but in general I think when the kids have asked something, I've felt it's an appropriate time to tell them.
Nadine: One of the things that Anthony I've and I've spoken about a lot and one of the things that led me kind of into this space myself was the idea that I feel like, as a child growing up in a Holocaust survivor family, that I always knew about death, and I always knew about these atrocities.
And I can't speak for all Jewish people or descendants of all survivors or victims of the Holocaust but I feel like we were kind of, that was taken away. And I'm not saying it's any better or any worse, but I think death is something that in some ways our culture and other cultures who've experienced mass genocide and atrocity. Something you do have to reckon with from the beginning because you know Nana and Zeida are sad because someone tried to kill them and kill their whole family.
I don't actually know your background in that regard. Did your grandparents survive?
Ben: My grandmother left Russia, basically she went through the Bolshevik Revolution. Like she saw a neighbour, a little girl, get killed. But she was in Australia then already in the ‘30s.
But yeah, I think it's a mixed experience growing up under the spectre of tragedy. It's funny, my daughter’s really into films and we were talking, and she was asking me all about Spielberg because she thought it was so interesting that he made Jurassic Park and Schindler's List basically back-to-back. And that is interesting. And she was asking me if I liked Schindler's List and I went into such a long answer.
I was like, I can't tell you, in my generation anything to do with the Holocaust was held over our heads and beaten into us so intensely that I couldn't even judge that as a work of cinema. It was like, there's a Holocaust movie out, we've got to see the Holocaust movie, everyone see it, it's very sad, it's very important, Spielberg's doing a good thing, see the Holocaust movie, everyone needs to see it.
It was like, yeah, being that close, sort of, to tragedy, maybe to mortality, maybe to genocide, it does give you, on one hand, this sense that death looms near. It's not as abstract a concept. But on the other hand, it also colours your experience and sort of the innocence of we're all individual animals that are all within a lifespan and there are many types of death that we can have and there are many different scenarios we can find ourselves dying in.
I think growing up feeling that basically the inevitability of that look, everybody wants to kill you, they want to kill everybody like you and everybody in your family and your job is to marry a Jewish person so that when they kill you, you've at least left a Jewish person in your place. Like that does kind of colour your ability to have your own opinion and experience about what your attitude to death and life is. And I think the way Jews have decided that our method of dealing with this trauma is to continually re-traumatise ourselves and make sure generational trauma is passed on - surely there's a better strategy. Surely.
***
Nadine: My first experience of death was very formative in how I relate to it. It was a very positive experience, even though someone died, and it kind of set me up to be comfortable, I think, in this space and not as afraid.
I know your father died when you were very young - was that a formative experience?
Ben: Yeah that was very formative for sort of a strange reason. I was living in New York at the time and I had this night where I was just tossing and turning in bed. Like, you know those nights where something's sort of on the edge of your consciousness, of your mind?
And I was tossing and turning and then I sat up in the middle of the night like 4:00 in the morning, 4:30 in the morning, and I was like, my dad's gonna die soon. Like, I just said it that way, like when you've realised, like something, usually about yourself, like, I want to quit my job, you know? I had this moment of, like, I just said this thing and I totally relaxed and I went back to sleep.
And then the phone rang a little bit after and it was my sister saying that my dad - who’d had heart issues his whole, not his whole life, my whole life, his whole later life - he’d had, like a triple bypass and a tear in his aorta. And she said Dad's back in hospital, they found another tear. And that began sort of this chapter that was the last couple of months of his life.
And with nothing other than my own sort of gut feeling about it, I made the decision to go back and spend some proper time with him. He'd recovered from all of these hard things before and everyone was very optimistic because he'd always bounced back. But I just had this feeling he was going to die, so I just allowed a number of conversations to take place that I might have had my defences up to without that sort of weird, intuitive moment happening.
And he did die and I felt some degree of closure with it or peace with it because I had some degree of preparation. And now I know that life's not always like that and there's sudden deaths and there's tragedies but there was something about just living in the understanding that if he hadn't died then he was gonna die eventually. Like it was hitting me, it was really hitting me, his mortality, and as best I could as a 19-year-old…
Look, a 19-year-old Australian male is not the kind who is going to be the most emotionally articulate with their father who was, like, born in World War II in London - you know, able to have, like a real heart-to-heart particularly. But in our way, we had some understanding together and some connection. And I think maybe that's where the idea of a good death comes in. That in some ways, even though he died… I would have loved him to, you know, meet my wife and my daughter and my stepdaughter and obviously those would be beautiful things.
That being said, to lose someone where you do have some time to contemplate how you wanna spend that period. I think that did inform my interest in kind of bringing some kind of consciousness or mindfulness to the process of dying and the value of that.
Nadine: Yeah, I understand that. I think watching someone die slowly of a terminal illness or over time is harrowing and complicated but I at least feel like you get to say everything you want to say. You know, you may not say everything you want to say, but you are given the opportunity to say I love you, thank you, all of these things.
Ben: Yeah, of all the feelings I have about it, I don't feel robbed of that experience. I got the experience to actually say farewell. And because he was going into surgery, he ended up dying in surgery. So you know, you have to put on a brave face and you're optimistic and you're like, I'll see you after. And you know, there was a latent understanding that this could very well be a goodbye.
Nadine: And you've said that you've never been to see his grave?
Ben: No, I think I have.
Nadine: Oh you have.
Ben: I don't know. I just like, I sort of don't care about graves.
The honest truth is the fact that I can't remember it… like I know I was at his funeral. I don't think I was at his stone setting, cause you know in Judaism, that's a year later. I have no sense that he’s there, like I have zero sense of that.
Like to me, I mean, I will probably be cremated. I don't feel like putting the body somewhere is particularly meaningful. Like it’s essentially, it's nice if the family wants it and it's for them, it's not really for the person.
Nadine: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I don't go to visit my loved ones' graves that much. And I definitely don't have any feeling that that's where they are physically or intangibly located. But if I feel like I need to tell them something or work through something myself, I will just go there because I can talk to the headstone and it like, it's something.
And you know, there are other places, like sometimes I drive near my childhood home and this is less and less you know, as I get older, this is less and less what I do. But, you know, finding a place where you can talk to them or just sit and be with them, I think is important.
Ben: I would probably go to the old location of the Bondi Diggers and go to where the poker machines were, and just remember all his nights coming home from there, drinking beers with his mates down at the Diggers. But now it's just an apartment complex, so I'll just be out there talking to myself.
Nadine: I know I think the people started seeing the girl in the car outside the house, and were just like, what is this woman doing?
Anthony: So apart from the pokies, where is your dad for you now?
Ben: I think one of the things that I loved about my dad was for a man he was actually very physically affectionate. Like I remember him hugging me a lot and I remember, like, watching TV in his arms. And that kind of masculine tenderness and sensuality is something that I didn't realise until I got older was sort of rare. And I I've been a very tactile person with my kids and that was never weird or foreign.
So in that way, I think the way I like to physically connect and to touch and show affection is that way, I feel his, I feel the genealogy in that tactile expression.
Anthony: That's lovely.
***
Nadine: Can you tell us a bit about the time you played music for a recently bereaved family and what that was like and how that came about?
Ben: Yeah, I think that what's interesting is where with the hospice volunteering, how the line between supporting the person who was dying and supporting their family was actually much blurrier than I initially thought. It all does seem to kind of go together because you're working to some degree, if the person has a family who's present, you're kind of connected with them, like you're kind of a member of their team.
And going back to the idea of not rushing the body out and not making it this alien, scary, diseased thing you know. It used to be quite normal for the body to remain for a few days, at least in the house.
So anyway this was a scenario where there was a family, I think it was a Mexican Catholic family, and they had a viewing for a day of the body and they had it set up in this sort of tent kind of thing outside. It was beautifully decorated and people were just coming one at a time and spending a minute and then they said would I want to come and play some guitar and they just played, you know, very quiet. It's not a particular moment you want a spotlight on you or want to do anything too intrusive.
But again that sense of just being there and how underrated that is in our culture. Like we're such an achievement-oriented species and everything is basically either adding or subtracting to the GDP, you know, everything's just monetisable and like, the idea of just presence, of being there with people as they go through something and using music for that was really interesting to me. It's an experience I think about a lot.
Like there's times when I'm on stage where I don't know, you feel like you might be losing the room a little or a song's not going as well as you want or you know, whatever the type of value judgment that performers put on themselves. And then you just sort of go and stand in here making sounds and these people are standing here, too, and they've each got their own problems and they really don't have to do anything else.
Anthony: I was just while listening to you, I was reflecting on when my own mother died and she died in hospice and they invited us to be with the body afterwards, and it was a kind of uncanny experience actually, but so important to be there with family, with the body. I'd never been in a room with a dead body before so that in itself was unusual and a bit unsettling, but at the same time struck me as being so crucial to the grieving process.
Ben: Yeah, I didn't like it when my dad died because he died in surgery, and then they, like, sew the person up and you're in a hospital. I actually felt quite nauseous when I went in and it just felt like this was not at all a peaceful setting that was contemplative or anything. It was like a room off the ER type thing. And yeah, I didn't get to experience that that much with my dad.
But it's something that, it's not always and not for everybody is it the right experience, but I think there is something about… it grounds things. It just makes it concrete and real and something that is very abstract.
Nadine: And it makes it, I think, not scary. I mean, maybe in your situation, like that's more surgical or medical and clinical and cold. I know for my loved ones who have died when I wasn't around, I've opted not to see the bodies, but my paternal grandmother, I was there when she died so I saw her become a dead body.
And then my other grandmother, my maternal grandmother, died in hospice and my sister was there. And my sister called me - cause, as you know, but our listeners may not know - a Jewish body is not meant to be left alone at any point between death and burial. It's supposed to always have an accompaniment and there are volunteers who sit with the bodies until they get buried, even overnight. And my sister called me, and my sister's not good with this stuff and was like, she was in the hospice and she was like YOU HAVE TO COME NOW.
And seeing Nana for me was, it was beautiful. It was, you know, it was still a clinical and medical experience, but again, she didn't look like Nana anymore. Like all the Nana was gone.
Ben: I know, that's what's so weird, isn't it?
Nadine: Yeah, like you know, they physically resemble who they were but you can just see they're not there anymore, like, whatever it is. But again, like, it's just another thing that takes the fear away and it is beautiful being with a dead body and if I had the chance again to wash and prepare and have in-home…
My mum died at home but in a hospital bed with medical care, and I would definitely jump on the chance to kind of re-personalise that experience for sure.
Ben: Yeah, I think it can be very tender. I mean, I've never done that. I haven't had anyone close to me die where I've helped prepare the body. But I've heard people say it can be quite a tender, intimate experience for the loved ones.
***
Anthony: I wonder if we can sort of move in a slightly different direction, which is back to your spiritual seeking, which is an important thread in your life and in your creative work. You've described yourself as a spiritual seeker and you draw inspiration from different religions.
One concept from Tibetan Buddhism which has inspired you is the idea of practising dying. What does that look like?
Ben: I think it just looks like, it just means that whatever happens that day and wherever life goes, you let go and go with it. I mean to me, practising dying is practicing letting go. And I don't think it has to be a very elaborate thing dressed up in rituals.
It's about, you know, you get to the airport and you're too late for the plane and you've missed it by five minutes. Do you have a total panic attack? Or do you reassess and make a new decision? And then you’ve experienced a death, that was a death of that plan, you know. I think that's that's practicing dying.
Nadine: And I've heard you mention before, the idea of a psychological death or a mystical death.
Ben: Yeah, mystical death or psychological death is something from shamanism. They talk about it in a lot of different cultures. And in psychedelic states or altered states of consciousness, there does seem to be like, you know how in dreams there are common symbols? Like a lot of times, people will dream of the old, mysterious woman. You know what I mean?
Nadine: Teeth! Teeth are really important, apparently.
Ben: Yeah, like teeth. Or the room in the house that you never found. You know, there are these symbols that are, like really archetypal.
There's a type of death that people go through in these states where you can't remember your name or identity or any of the things that you've held onto about yourself and you've identified with, they've become foundational to your experience, they're gone, and you let go. In a lot of shamanic cultures, they talk about it almost like you're pulled apart by spirits like limb from limb, and then you're rebuilt. It's a more dramatic way of saying what we just said about missing the plane at the airport.
It's a real balancing act, life. Like on one hand, I have to wake up as Ben Lee and I have to look at Ben Lee's calendar, I have to prepare Ben Lee's kid’s lunch and I have to take her to school and I have to do all my obligations as this identity, right?
But there's this other thing happening in parallel where I don't know who the hell I am or what the hell I'm meant to be doing. And that is the death that's happening in every moment. And it's the secret that we carry around with each of us - that none of us know what the hell is going on.
And we're either forced into that through something surprising - it can be tragic, it can be positive, you know, it can just be expansive - or when we lean into it through practices like meditation or psychedelics. We experience that death and we are rebuilt again and we then reapproach the iCal with with a somewhat, hopefully, slightly more detached approach to our obligations and I think the light touch that comes with experiencing a death of your ego can be really positive for your life.
Nadine: I would just like to say that knowing your life and what's probably in your iCal, I will happily become Ben Lee for any amount of time that you wanna, like, sublet yourself to me.
Ben: Like Being John Malkovich.
Nadine: Yeah.
***
Nadine: I just wanted to ask, I know that this is something that's constantly evolving and you don't want to dictate your death but have you and Ione, your beautiful wife, discussed anything in terms of wishes, either before or after passing?
Ben: I mean, we've talked about it, yeah, I think we both would like to be cremated but not really. I mean, you know, when you're a parent of younger kids, your sort of main concern is, like, who's going to take care of them. And I want all my creations, I want the management of those, whether there's money to be made from it or if there's not, that that should be the responsibility of my kid.
But we haven't kind of gone into it all that much. It's weird, I think we sort of don't care that much. I see it as like if I die, I would like Ione to do whatever she wants to do to celebrate or memorialise it, or not, in a way that would make her happy and the family and friends happy. I don't see it as a thing that would be for me and I think she pretty much feels similarly. Neither of us particularly feels the need to dictate, like I want my coffin to be carried along to Tubthumping by Chumbawamba or something like that.
Nadine: I'm going to send this to Ione and be like, this is what he wanted. You have to do this.
***
Anthony: You mentioned a good death earlier, Ben. Do you know what that looks like for you?
Ben: Ah no, because it seems totally personal. It's similar to having birth choices, that there are people that want home births; there are people that want to be in a hospital or close to the emergency room in case anything goes wrong; and there's everything in between. There's people that want to like basically pull the baby out while they're standing up.
Anthony: That was my preference too.
Ben: Yeah, exactly. So I think the only question that really has value is what is a good death to you? And that may also evolve as you live your life, it probably will.
I can only speak, essentially from my psychedelic experiences, which is probably the closest thing I've experienced to dying. You don't know that it's that similar, but it's as close in the sense that there is a complete surrender of control and massive terror because of the unknown, and I imagine that there's got to be elements of that in dying.
And I guess my hope is that I have courage and that I can relax. I don't wanna really, I don't imagine dictating what that looks like, like oh what kind of light is in the room and are the windows open? Because I do think when you're going into a very personal internal space, you're not that concerned with what's going on externally. I just hope internally, I hope I feel brave enough to relax and pay attention. That's my hope.
Anthony: Would you like to choose when you die?
Ben: No, not really. I mean, I'm saying this now without having a terminal illness or without being in massive pain. It's very hard to imagine what that's like in that setting, you know.
I love nature and I love the unexpected sort of quality of nature and like, I've always said with my career, my failures have been more interesting to me and I've learned more than my successes. Because it's when life is out of your control that you sort of like, have to, you know, man up, you have to basically face the tremendous tidal wave that is human experience without controlling it. And I aspire to embrace my death in the same way.
But again, all this is incredibly naive as someone who's you know, a healthy 44-year-old man who isn't seeing that on the horizon particularly right now. So I reserve the right to change my answer.
Nadine: We'll we'll come back in 30 years and ask you the same question.
Ben: Thank you.
Nadine: And on that note, Ben, thank you for coming on the show.
Ben: That's a pleasure.
***
Nadine: So that was Ben Lee.
Anthony: Yeah, what a fascinating guy.
Nadine: Thoughts?
Anthony: My thoughts? Well, he is clearly a very thoughtful person and I really love the way that he weaves his creativity and his spiritual life together. It kind of reminded me of various people who have said, you know, you should make your life an artwork.
Henry Miller said that.
What about you?
Nadine: For me, I'm gonna be thinking for quite a while about the way we memorialise and uphold the Holocaust. His comment on, you know, surely there's a better way to do this than just re-traumatising ourselves constantly, that holds weight with me and I think the answer might lie somewhere in between what we're doing and what he's saying. And I’m just gonna have to sit with that for a while and think about that.
Anthony: Maybe for the rest of your life.
Nadine: Maybe for the rest of my life.
Anthony: I know we're almost done, Nadine, but there's something you and I really need to do. We've asked all our guests what a good death means to them, but now it's our turn. So what does a good death mean to you?
Nadine: That's a very good question and thank you for asking. I think that you know, you can say the things that have already been mentioned a lot by our guests on the show. You know, having your loved ones around you and it being painless and all of those things.
And having watched multiple people die painful, torturous deaths, I want it to be quick and possibly I don't want to be expecting it to happen. But if that's not the case, then I want to be able to make an active choice when I'm ready to go.
And you?
Anthony: Yeah, I feel similar to you, fast and glorious.
Nadine: The unknown Vin Diesel movie.
Anthony: Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to involve a car but it probably should.
And I guess for me, agency is really at the core. You know, listening to all the different answers we've heard over the last many episodes, I've learned a lot and seen all those different perspectives, but for me, I want that moment to be kind of intentional.
You know, assisted dying is one thing and people tend to think about that in terms of terminal illness but I'm talking about having agency when you're on the cusp of your best health but you're at the end of a pretty full life. And it's kind of like that liminal moment where you get to choose when you go, if possible. So I'm hoping for a readiness at that time to be able to make that transition.
Nadine: Yeah, that's a great way to put it and I can't believe it, but this has been our last episode before we sign off. Anthony, any parting words? Insights? Learnings?
Anthony: Can I say two quick things that surprised me?
Nadine: Sure.
Anthony: Number one, pigs.
Nadine: There are a lot of pigs.
Anthony: A lot of pigs. They don't fair so well, those sad science kebabs. They don't do well. I'm sorry.
And number two, it's amazing how uplifting it can be talking about death for so many months with so many wonderful people. So that has just filled my cup and I'm hooked.
Nadine: Awesome.
Anthony: And how about you? Do you have a eulogy for the podcast, perhaps?
Nadine: Ah, here lies Grave Matters. It died doing what it loved.
And we're done, huh, boys? Cue Boyz II Men's End of the Road.
Anthony (singing): We have come, to the end of the road, still I can’t let go…
Nadine: Wow. I might get a bit teary.
Anthony: OK, I went there.
Nadine: You really did.
But seriously, thanks again to non-practising death doula Ben Lee and to all our amazing guests.
Anthony: And thank you for joining us on this weird and wonderful journey. We're hoping you've enjoyed it as much as we have.
Nadine: Amen.
***
If this episode has raised issues for you and you'd like to seek mental health support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit .
Also, Embrace Multicultural Mental Health supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Visit for 24/7.
For crisis support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or in an emergency, please call 000.
Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Carolyn Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail [email protected].
Follow and review us wherever you find this.
