Transcript of Storytime with MrBallen | Rosie Grant

Time slowed down as I'm watching this grenade hit my shoulder. As it hit my shoulder, I actually actively thought, Okay, you're about to die. There's no escaping it. I was told it was maybe 30 seconds from death.

From my experience, growing up, death is a pretty taboo topic. Now, I'm around people talking about death all the time. Are you a big cemetery person yourself?

I don't know if I'm a big cemetery person.

That's a weird way to phrase it.

I do think about death. I want to do more with my life with the second chance. I do have that feeling, but it's not nearly as pronounced as I don't have a fear of death. On today's episode of Story Time with Mr. Ballen, we have a truly unique guest. You'll see in a minute what I mean when I say unique, because what they do, I didn't even know this was a thing, but it definitely is, because when she made her first post back in 2021 about what she does, it went super viral. Sure enough, what she's discovered really is a phenomenon, but it's one that I promise most of you have never heard of. It's fascinating. Not only do we cover what she does, but it also led us to this really deep discussion around death, mortality, and what happens when you die. I didn't expect the conversation to go that way, but that's the way it went, and it was great. It was an amazing conversation. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Also, side note, my voice is terrible, but I was just so excited to get this interview in that we decided to push forward.

So I apologize for my voice, but it's because I love all you fans of the Strange, dark, and mysterious. Without further ado, let's get into today's episode.

I am Rosie Grant, a. K. A. Ghostly Archive, and this is Story Time with Mr. Balin.

All right, so Rosie Grant. I know what you do. I mean, what you do is one of the more unique things I've seen, certainly on the internet or just at large. You find recipes on gravestones, and you make those recipes, and you post about it online, and you get in touch with the families and the relatives, and it's gone super viral. But I guess now I've explained what you do, but tell me how the heck you got here. How did you start doing that?

Well, I got started with this when I was trying to become a librarians. I was living in DC, and I went to library science school. It was pretty much, I think, 2020 is when I started the program. In 2021, I had to do an internship. So it was early days of COVID. All libraries were closed to new people. I interned at the only place that I could find, which was in a cemetery. Of course. Of course, yeah. When you're trying to become a librarians. Hot internship. Yeah, really. They were busier than ever. It was wonderful. I should say my parents are both ghost tour guides, so being in a cemetery wasn't that weird from things that I did growing up as a kid. Are you a big cemetery person yourself?

I don't know if I'm a big cemetery person.

That's a weird way to phrase it. How have you go on to cemeteries?

I've frequented cemeteries.

You've frequented. I think I was very similar going into this. I've frequented cemeteries. But I didn't know anything about the death industry or how that worked. I got to basically do digital with their archivist, and I would take photos, and I'd go on these site visits to geo-locate different gravestones, and I made this online tour of the cemetery. And in the process, I started a TikTok of like, What's it like to enter in a cemetery? And pretty much everything came from there. I didn't learn about my first gravestone recipe until maybe five or six months after starting the account. It was just at first different gravestones and memorials. And then I found a Spritz cookie recipe on a gravestone in Brooklyn, New York.

And so you actually brought me some of your Spritz cookies. Yeah. And in full candor. I've already tried them and they're quite good. Actually, as I'm tasting this, did you know it was a thing that people literally engraved recipes on gravestones?

Did not know it was a thing. I was surprised to find one. In the early days of it... They're good, right? They're nice and buttery. Really good. In the early days of TikToking about different it was just different interesting gravestones. In Baltimore, there's a Ouija gravestone. In other places, there's these... Edgar Allan Poe has an interesting gravestone. So I was just featuring unusual gravestones around DC. And so when it came to gravestone recipes, I learned about Naomi, who has this Spritz cookie recipe in Brooklyn. And I thought, what do those cookies taste like? They're on a gravestone. And it didn't just say she liked baking or cooking was important to her. It literally is the ingredients to make her recipe. When I posted it on TikTok, it went super viral overnight. Like, NPR called me the next day, and they're like, What's going on with this? And I was like, I have no idea. I've just learned about this woman. I was like, Even more so, the number one comment that I was getting from people, of course, people were like, This is so interesting. I've never heard about this. But even more so, I was getting comments like, My mom died a few years ago, and I make her cake every year when I miss her, or my dad died 10 years ago, and I make his chili every Sunday, and it helps me feel like he's closer to me.

It was just these really personal food stories of using food and death, and they blended together when they miss their person. I was like, There's something here. What is this of connecting to the lost loved ones through food? I was learning more about Naomi when I learned about a woman named Kay, who was a fudge recipe. Then I learned about a woman named Maxine, who has Christmas cookies. That started the journey of learning about Gravestone recipes.

You speak about these folks like you clearly have put a lot of time into learning about them, not just their recipe. It seems like you also have a pretty deep connection with some of the family. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I would say. Through the process of it, it didn't begin that way. And the first three folks who I learned about, they were already very viral and online before I came along. Facebook groups had posted about them, lots of online cemetery groups in the world, and they had all featured these three over the years. But then as I started learning about more folks, and I think when I was at about eight recipes, family started reaching out and they were starting to say, I thought my mom was the only one crazy enough to do something like this. Try her cheese dip recipe. And so from there, I was like, Oh, I need to start interviewing people. And so it became a community archive in the sense of I would reach out to the family members. I have this crazy Google map of where each of the gravestone markers are. I have this insane Google Doc. I have a spreadsheet. This is the library science in me of the data behind each person. But then with each, that would be oral history. I would interview the families. It would just be like, Who is this person?

Who's the person behind the recipe? What is this What does this recipe mean to your family still? And things like that. At this point now, it's also included traveling. I visited all of the recipes in North America, so I went up to Nome, Alaska, and down to Florida, and New Orleans, and Nova Scotia, the Midwest, and up and down California. New York State actually has the most gravestone recipes, so I've been all around New York for that reason.

You were studying through your library sciences degree. My mom actually got her library sciences degree. Get out. I'm very familiar with how technically difficult it is to get one of those degrees. That's incredible.

I love that. Is she a libertian or does she work anywhere in that?

She's also a writer, and she pioneered writing our podcast. She's one of our writers.

Oh, my gosh. I'm obsessed with that. Yeah, so- Yay, librarians.

Yeah, What degree is the degree is gnarly. But so did you have this this cemetery internship. You go viral with this really unique idea, basically posting about these Spritz cookies from Naomi. How do you go from, well, what I'm doing is I'm getting my library sciences degree. On a course to be one of the most introverted, quiet, private lives being a librarians to now you have this amazing new book called To Die For, a cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. This is incredible. Is this all the recipes that you've done?

All the recipes with all the family approvals. There's a few more that I haven't gotten approvals from the family yet, but these are the ones that I was able to connect with, visit, photographed, and of course, on your stories. So it did become a lot more public and social than I think I was expecting.

Yeah. So how have you responded to this new life path, or do you feel like you're still like, What's going on?

I think every time I find a new gravestem recipe, I'm like, and that's it. The door is shut. I have no more people to research. But now it's turned into this... It's grown almost beyond me. I'm getting phone calls. Some of the folks featured in this book, they learned about it from the project. So they had seen a TikTok, and then their parent, they decided to do a gravestem recipe for their parent. One of the women who was featured in it when I connected with her daughter, and I was like, Hey, your mom has this Gravestone recipe, this really good Kasha Wernishka. She's buried in New Jersey. I was like, Can I include your mom in the project? And she was like, Well, what are you exactly planning to do with this information? I was like, Well, I'm working on a book. Could I include your mom in the book? And she's like, Are you the right person to be doing this? And I was I had this whole moment. I was like, I'm just a library science person. Maybe I'm not the right person to be doing this. I should say I didn't really play up the TikTok side because I wanted to show my other credentials.

I was like, Well, I was an English major, and I was a creative writing minor, and I love and all of this stuff. She's like, Well, there's this TikToker who does gravestone recipes, and I think she should be doing this. That's me. I was like, Yeah, I'm like, She should be doing this. Also, that's me.

What has this experience of becoming the go-to person to talk to these families and make these recipes and connect with the dead in a sense. What has that done for, I guess, your relationship with mortality?

That's a great question. I would be curious to hear what you're doing entry point is because for my experience, growing up, death is a pretty taboo topic. I think my parents are ghost tour guides, and we go to cemeteries all the time. We love visiting cemeteries, and death is still really taboo. My parents don't want to talk about where do they want to be buried, how do they want to be remembered. It's just a very uncomfortable topic because it implies that we will die, which we will. Well, unfortunately- It's common. Yeah, exactly. I think, growing up, I remember my my first awareness of that I would die and my loved ones would die. I went to my great grandmother's funeral. I think I was maybe seven. Right afterwards, my cousins were planning a trip to Disney World, and they invited me, and I said no, because I was like, What if my parents die? So I didn't go to Disney because I was so scared of my parents just randomly dying while I was gone. But I was really freaked out by it as a kid, and I was so consumed. I remember reading books I was just like, I was so freaked out by it.

And I think moving into adulthood, I had a girlfriend die in college. We were English majors together, and I just did not know how to process it, didn't know how to talk about it with friends. And my whole little friend group who this girl was a part of just fell apart. And so we had no idea how to process it or talk about it. So then flash forward to now where I feel like I'm around people talking about death all the time. And it honestly has taught me that it gets easier the more you it, which is why I like Grafstone recipes in the sense of it's easier to talk about food to be like, What meals do you like? How do you want to be remembered? You make really good cookies. Do you want that to be served at your funeral? Maybe you don't even want a Grafstone. Maybe you want your ashes scattered somewhere that's important to you. Maybe you like this song and you want this played at your funeral or you want this on your deathbed. There's just a lot of things and the idea that it's healthy to talk about these things.

This is also, I should say, based on the death positive movement. Are you familiar with it?

I saw a reference to that in one of your interviews. Oh, no way.

I'm not familiar with. I wasn't either until this. It started in hospice, basically this idea that people and society are better off if we talk about these things. It's not like, yay, death, like we're going to die someday. But it's healthy if we talk about these things with loved ones of how do you want to be remembered? Again, I think food, to me, is a much easier access point to it rather than the this sense of failure or whatever that we'll all die. So yeah, in any case, I think I feel a little bit better about it, but I think I still have a journey to go for getting more comfortable with my own mortality.

I'll tell you a quick story about my own feelings around mortality. So I was in the military before I started telling spooke stories on the internet. Hell, yeah.

A natural crossover.

Yeah, it is. And when I was overseas in Afghanistan, we we effectively were ambushed, and a grenade actually detonated quite literally next to me. Oh, my God. Yeah. In fact, when the grenade came over the wall, it's nighttime, I'm on night vision, and The way there was a drone overhead that was shining down on us with infrared light. You can only see it on night vision. So to the world, it's pitch black, but in this circle of light that we're in, we can see. And on night vision, the light began to strobe, which is actually a targeting system. It means the drone is saying, We're going to attack here. It was a mistake. But I'm basically in a strobe light. Okay? Suddenly, I'm in a strobe light as this grenade comes over the wall. It's like chaos. The grenade kept coming in and out of focus because the light cast on it over and over. This took a matter of less than a second for the grenade to literally-But there's this flashing thing coming? It was like time slowed down as I'm watching this grenade, like appear, disappear, appear, disappear, hit my shoulder. As it hit my shoulder, I actually Okay, you're about to die.

There's no escaping it. I remember thinking what a bummer it was that it was going to detonate at this point and that my head will be blown off, which is really graphic, but I really was just- But it's like you experience that, yeah. I was thinking about how I won't be able to... My mom won't be able to see me again. I was like, Oh, my God. That was the pain. It wasn't I'm going to die. It was my poor mom. Then as the grenade is falling in this fraction of a second, it reached my torso. Then Again, it's just falling, the speed it takes to fall, but everything really did slow down. I thought, Okay, I'm still definitely going to die, but at least my face will be intact, and my mom will see me again. Then by the time it reached the ground, I was like, Oh, it might just hit my legs, blow my legs off. I might live. This is pretty good, right? It detonates. I was with six other guys that I was in the unit with, and it was honestly horrific. I mean, everybody's down. There's a gunfight going on, and I basically was immobile.

I was literally under fire, dragged out to this other alleyway where I'm not safe. There are combatants literally firing rockets and just shooting arbitrarily in our direction. I'm watching Tracer rounds, which you can see every period, when you shoot five rounds in a row, one shows up. It's a bright light. I'm seeing Tracer rounds skipping all over the place. The people we've just attacked who are attacking us, they're 15 feet away. At any moment, they could come into this alleyway, and I'm alone in this alleyway because they're dealing with this huge contact down there. I have this like, I've been mortally wounded. I can't pull my tourniquets to stop the bleeding off of my kit because I just was so weak from blood loss. I can't take off the life-saving equipment. I know I'm dying, and it's not sad. This is where I'm getting to with mortality, and I tell people this story for this reason. I was not sad. It was shockingly matter of fact. I was sitting in an alleyway, anticipating that I'm Okay, I should have died down there at the contact site. Now I'm bleeding to death for sure. Or if I don't bleed to death, the people that we are in the middle of a gunfight with are for sure going to come over here and kill me.

It was just factual, like my brain process that is like, You are about to die. Hard stop. This is in 2014. I was 26 years old. Oh, my God. The thought that was going through my mind, in addition to the matter of factness, as my vision actually went completely gone, I couldn't hear anymore. So I'm in this black void, but I'm still alive. All I thought about was my wife, Amanda, and we had made the decision to wait on having children before I went on this deployment. I'm like, Oh, we'll have time. And I was like, Man, I guess We don't have time. And I pictured her on the couch in our home in Virginia, just like with our cats, just watching TV. And probably tonight, someone's going to tell her that I'm dead. And what I also thought was like, We don't have kids. She's young. She'll be devastated, no But what's going to happen here is time's going to go on, and she's going to marry somebody else and have a different life. She'll respect me and honor me, but I'm gone. Then I also thought, I wonder what the newspaper will say about my death.

Not the story. Just, will they write Jonathan Allen? Like, Killed in Action, Jonathan Allen, or Killed in Action, John Allen? It was just like, I wonder if it'll say my full name or John Allen.

These are the things that you're going in of fire and everything, one year death experience after another. That's so crazy.

The one guy who was not gravely injured on this contact, there was seven of us. He was our medic, luckily. Oh, my gosh. He's up for all sorts of awards. He came over to me, and I could feel him. I couldn't hear or see him, and he put tourniquets on me. They literally whisked me out, carried me out to a helicopter. They saved my life. Amazing. I Yeah. So I survived. Obviously, I survived. Here I am.

Not a ghost.

But the reality for me is that, of course, we had to process this thing, which I really didn't do a good job of. For a while, I actually ignored it. I just never talked about it. It took me four years after coming out of Afghanistan to just talk to the guy who saved my life. We're at the same team. We see each other in the halls. We didn't talk.

Because you never recognize that? Yeah.

But eventually, when I came around to maybe the death-positive side of things, I was like, I need to look at this. I looked at it as a tremendous gift. It wasn't that like, Now I have a second chance. Definitely that. The lasting impression it gave me was, right now, we are living, and we don't think about it. You don't wake up and think, I better make sure my heart beats, and I got to breathe, circulate my blood.

You just live. You're like, I got 100 emails to whatever. You just live.

But what I Well, in my, almost certainly had I not been rescued, I would have died. I was in the final stage as I was told I was maybe 30 seconds from death.

Oh, my God.

You are ready to die. You just don't know it. For me, I was very badly injured. I didn't feel anything. If anything, it was just like, Yeah, this is it. That said, I'm thinking about my name spelling in the newspaper or something. What it did for me is it made death feel not scary. Wow. I want to do more with my life with the second chance. I do have that feeling, but it's not nearly as pronounced as I don't have a fear of death. I simply know death is coming, and I do think about death. It informs a lot of my decision making. Whatever I want to do, it's timed against how much time I think I have. But it's not sad, it just is. I think people are so weary or scared of what's going to happen when you die. Granted, I don't really know, but I got close enough. To me, it was like, you're ready to die, you just don't know it as messed up as that really is. Yeah.

It's hard because I think I don't want to focus on it on the day to day of the fact that I'll wake up and being like, oh, yeah, people I know might die today or tomorrow or in 30 years or whatever. And once you get over that, you can go down the hallway of it's just fear taking over you all the time, or you can go down the hallway of, yes, I accept it, and this is okay, and I'm going to live my life. And if anything, I think the idea of the death positive movement is like, Well, okay, how do I want to live my life then? Because I can either really scared about it or completely ignore it, or I can just live my life. I only have this life that I know of for right now. I might as well take advantage of it and do a very cool storytelling podcast or be a cemetery TikTok, whatever makes us happy, rather than just… I think also the pandemic, for me, I was a lot more death-aware because I think we were all talking about our loved ones might die. I think I felt very similar of…

I'm not really thinking about my death in the sense of, How am I going to go out? It's more of like, Well, what will my husband feel about this? And what's he going to do? And what will my siblings do? I don't know. The brain is so interesting like that. That's crazy.

You mentioned earlier that your folks gave ghost tours. You've mentioned several times that you have this affinity for cemeteries, of course. Was that because your folks gave ghost tours that you have this interest in cemeteries, or is this just innate? You've just always been interested in them?

I think I've always been interested in them. I find them really peaceful places. When I was in high school, I would walk through a cemetery on my way home. Just that was the shortcut, was through a cemetery. It's fun to read their names and see different funny quotes or inside jokes or people's photos and art. There's just so many things on different gravestones that I find endlessly interesting. It's like a little piece of each person. If you walk through a cemetery in the Midwest, the cemeteries in the Midwest are everything. Someone's fishing boat might be or a photo of their favorite beer can or literally anything could be on a gravestone. I don't know. I really have always liked them. But I'd say more recently, I've been learning of what's Cemetery Preservation like and what is it like to bring the community in and what's the history of American cemeteries and all of the extra pieces to it other than just the vibe.

Do you plan to put a recipe on your gravestone?

I feel like I have to at this point. You have to. I have to. Yeah. I do, and your wife talked about doing a cemetery as well or Christians.

No. The thing is that could be a topic of discussion. Totally. That is on limits for us. We have not had it.

Absolutely. It's one of those things of you don't usually deal with it until I have to deal with it. I feel like because of what I do with TikTok and with cemeteries, and I love cemeteries. Of course. Yeah. I feel like it's an exciting topic. I'm working with Congressional Cemetery where I interned, and I am getting a plot there with my husband. We're talking about, do we want to be cremated? Do we want this type of burial space? Do we want our ashes scared? Because you can buy a plot and just have a memorial but not have your body there. There's new things in death studies these days. Aquamation is the new cremation where you essentially are... It's the same result at the end of you just have some organic materials, but it's just through water. Your body is run through water a month, and then you turn into this material. Ruth says, Cremation is just you're fired up, and in a matter of minutes, basically, you turn into the material. So aquamation is an option. You can get your body turned into gemstones so your family could have jewelry of you. You can get your body shot into space.

You can get your body turned into a body farm or donated to science. There's these things called mushroom pots now, which I'm still learning if that's how legit that is, but it sounds interesting of you put this body into a suit, and then it's just it sprouts new organic materials and it's very circle of life thing. I think for me, some of the things that I care about is I want people to miss me when I'm gone. I want to be mourned, but then I want people to move on with their lives. I would much prefer slowly fading into the distance over time. I guess I'm balancing at one point of, oh, it's important to remember people's names, but also even cemeteries won't be around The American Cemetery is unusual as a model that we die and are buried there. And given this expectation that you will be taken care of for forever, but for forever means that could mean anything. A cemetery could be relocated. The gravestones could be lost. This happens all the time. And in particular, so I went to my sister in Los Peruvian. I went to Peru a little while ago, and it's you rent a space.

And apparently in Europe, there's different models of it as well. But in a lot of different countries, You rent a space, and then if your family is not around every five years to pay for it, a new person comes in and you're just cleaned out, and that's that. But outside of that, yeah, most people, you won't be remembered much beyond a generation or two, and that's okay. It feels like engaging with it a little bit more makes it a little less scary. Not that I know what's going to happen afterwards, but yeah, I don't know.

What do you think happens when you die?

I don't know. I feel like I listen to a lot of paranormal podcasts for this reason, and I still am like... I mean, I was raised Catholic, so I'm probably some amalgamation of, I'm no longer Catholic anymore, but I feel like that gave me the sense of a soul, and I like the idea that a soul continues on. I don't know what that is or that means. I think of I think my family is very Pascalian wager of, well, you either know or you don't know, but it's nice to believe in something. I think for us, it doesn't hurt me to believe that we'll live on in some way afterwards, whether it's a second life or or we just become particles and my dust scatters in the wind. There's something very pleasant about that, too. What do you believe?

I don't know. In a way, I forget who said this to me in my life. It was a family member. I think it was my dad. I was talking about death, or death had come up, and it was like, Well, do you feel bad or do you feel sad about the time before you were born? I'm like, No, it doesn't exist for me. They're like, Yeah, that's probably how death is. I don't know if that's supposed to be a good or bad thing. That's also a very intense way of viewing it.

But also, yeah, there's a sense of why put meaning to it if it just it is what it is thing. I think if that is what happens at the end, I feel very non-emotionally attached to that. Again, I think for me in my day to day or even in the work that I do, I like to think that there is something I don't know what it is. It's not that I even necessarily am a heaven and hell person, but I'm like, it's nice to believe that there's something... I think about this, again, maybe less for myself, but more for my parents and my siblings and my loved ones and my friends, where I'm like, what are you going to do with the fact that you know every Taylor Swift song and your cats all have crazy names and you have this crazy personal job and this thing, and we have all these memories from our 20s and our 30s. Anyways, just all the micro moments of humanity. I would love to believe get to continue on somehow. But it might not. It really might just be at the end.

Yeah, maybe. But I also think that I studied philosophy in college, and I used to love thought experiments where the professor presents something that forces the class to take a stance. And I find myself literally constantly. I think about this. When I go to bed, this is a thought I have all the time. I think about, why does anything exist? And it just keep zooming back. You can have this conversation with anyone. Okay, so here we are. Right. Okay, so why are we here? Well, because our parents and their parents and evolution or maybe of a religious reason for it. But either way, that's how we got here. Okay, well, why is the Earth here? Why does Earth support life? Why does life exist? Why is the sun here? Why is the Milky Way here? And then it's science. Things just are out there. It's just wrong. It's like, okay, why? Why? Why does anything exist? Because forces you to realize that if there's a reason for everything to exist, we're part of it. So there has to be a reason we're here, or it's the complete opposite. And we're just here.

We're just here.

Which is very difficult to grasp. It is. But what is this within? What is the universe a part of?

Yeah, this is the the librarians' child of like, But I want the information. I know. It's someday. I really want that information. All the stories that I bet they have. I know. It is really great. I mean, maybe this is a very selfish thing that I do hope there's something else. I think I would love to just either I die and I get some spirit guide who's like, Hey, ask any question. You have infinite access to just what is reality. I'm very excited I want to be like, I want to know everything. I'm so excited if that's the thing. If that's the case, then it doesn't really matter either way. But I just want to know everything. I know. Mysteries of history. I just want to ask all the questions. Honestly, I never to think beyond our planet because there's so many questions I have about our planet that I'm like, Oh, will I maybe know that? Does the universe just become this interconnected soul? I guess this is a very Carl Jung way of thinking about it of just one body of universe, and that's why we have archetypes because it's just a shared consciousness, and we just go back to that afterwards.

But then you know everything. I love the idea of that. That would be very cool. But who knows? We might not. I don't know.

So we'll What would you say is something that you've learned explicitly from doing what you do? What's one thing you've learned?

How to make a good chocolate chip cookie.

Very practical.

Yeah, but I would also say, I think we celebrate death, and death traditions can change so much. I think for me, I grew up with food and death were very disconnected. A comment that I get quite often on TikTok is like, Eew, you bring food to cemeteries? That's so disgusting. But also in the early days, people would picnic We have tabletop gravestones. The first American National Park was the cemetery. Before, we had official National Park. People would just picnic on them on the weekends. You would be picnicking with grandpa or someone else's relatives. It was so normal. Nowadays, we have... I get some very strange comments of people being like, They're going to haunt you, or like, That's so disrespectful. I was like, Well, technically, from the way that we're taught of how to behave in cemeteries, cemeteries. In some cases, I would have assumed that originally. But now that I've learned the history of cemeteries and even just how other cultures do different food and death traditions. In any case, I've learned a lot about how people use food to remember someone, even if for me, I grew up with being… It was a little bit more taboo, I guess.

I guess everything is taboo. Catholic. Lots of guilt. What did you grow up as?

I was Unitarian Universalist.

Very nice. What does that mean?

I don't It was very open-minded. It was like, You believe what you want.

You do you. It was great. I love that. No, that's actually… That's so rad. I wish we'd probably all benefit for being a little bit more like that. Catholics were a fire and brimstone. I do love a Catholic Cemetery. They have a lot of motifs. I guess when it comes to death, we have the body and blood of Christ, which is a lot of food in death. You eat this thing. I haven't looked too much into that, but I'm like, it has to be something death is very associated with the traditions of food. We have meals together. I'm Irish, and so we have the Irish wake where we gather around the casket of the person who just passed away and we're drinking around them. That's cool. You know what I mean? I don't know.

A lot of tradition around death. Oh, for sure. It's much more than I think we realize. I think so. Cross-cultures and food is a big part of it.

Exactly. Does your family have any particular funerary traditions that you all do? No.

But I feel like we need to get into this together. It was a death-positive movement.

So I'm thinking about it. That's great. Do you mind if I ask the last funeral that you went to?

My aunt. Oh, nice. Yeah, she died in 2012. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah. No, she was the first person I watched die. Wow. So she had breast cancer. Andy. It was crazy. She was fine. She was 45. Oh, my gosh. And then she went home. She was living in Seattle with her twin boys and her husband Matt, and she just went back in for pneumonia. And it actually really was not a big deal. Oh, my goodness. I was out in San Diego for military training, and my family was like, Hey, Andy's going back in the hospital. But it's really just an overabundance of precaution here because she has cancer. But it just spiraled. And then before long, I was flying to Seattle. Oh, my goodness. Andy's so full of life. And I walked into the hospital, and I know she She's going to die. It's very clear. And her husband's there, and he's in shock. And my dad and his brother, so her brother. And I went and just held her hand. And in a way, because I was the nephew, and I was definitely close with her. But my father and his brother and her husband, they're there, but this is so deep cutting.

It's almost like they can't quite be here in the moment. And I almost intuitively recognize that I'm just going to be super close to Andy because she's here still. She seems to know we're in the room with her, but she's doing the death rattle. It's the end of her life. I held her hand and I was like, It's okay. You can go. Yeah, and then watching her die. It was profound and beautiful and fucking devastating. Yeah.

What a gift that you gave to her, though, of being there with her. I feel like people do full death doula trainings, literally just to sit next to someone while they're there. Because there's something... I heard a peacekeeper, someone who worked as a peacekeeper, saying something like this. Maybe you are this type of person of like, you're either two types of people in life, you're the person who is stopping people from jumping off of the cliff. It's very preventative. It's maybe more at a distance, or you're the person at the bottom of the cliff working with people who have fallen off of the cliff, and it's very like face to face. I feel like people who do grief workers, death doulas, who can just sit at the bedside, are the people at the bottom of the cliff who are like, Things went on beforehand that are out of my control, but I'm with you now, and I can be here. A lot of times, you can't be one or the other. I think some people can do both. I think I'm more of a top of the cliff person, but maybe you're a bottom of the cliff person.

Yeah. I mean, the other side to this, truthfully, is, and I haven't talked about this, but to Andy's death, that's my family, and it was really difficult. It still is. But then when I was deployed overseas, I saw death in a very different way. Candidly, I saw it was a Navy seal, and we're going out effectively with the intent to do harm. No matter how you want to cut it, no matter how you feel about it, that's what it was.

Active duty, yeah.

I remember one of the first times that it wasn't me, but somebody on our team took somebody else's life, and I had to... It's called Seek. There's a machine you use to fingerprint people. Oh, wow. It It's an archive of all the people. For the record, the person we took out, they actively shot at us, shot my work. It wasn't like, Oh, whoops, we got it wrong.

This is how it is, yeah.

Again, people can make the claim that we shouldn't have been in the first place, whatever. But I remember I was fingerprinting him, and he was dead. And the sun had just come up and we're in his compound in his house. I had this really difficult realization that If the roles were somehow reversed and I'm in my home in the United States, would I take up arms against a foreign country that had come into my country? Probably. I probably would. And he had family, I'm sure. They were fine. But I'm fingerprinting him, and he's just been killed. So he's fully looks alive, minus gunshots. And I had to tell myself that this was different than Andy.

Oh, wow. That came through your head while- Because there was empathy.

Even though there's no more gunfighting, there's nothing happening now. We are at the full, it's over and done with, and we're just processing the scene. It's very professional. The post-contact is very professional. We all just do our jobs, and mine was to fingerprint. I couldn't help but have that sense of humanity of feeling bad, even though, I'm not kidding, I walked into a hallway and I went up a stairwell before he was shot, and my teammate came right behind me and the guy was laying in wait and shot a shotgun that hit my teammate right in the chest, and it turned into this whole thing. So it was this horrible thing. Yeah. He lived. But yeah, I think that I left Afghanistan, especially with my own brush with death, and even that and several other people that I seek. It's hard not to feel that humanity, even in the worst of places. In a situation where you've almost been told to look at them not at... They're not Andy. They're not like Andy. They're different. The same way they look at me is different. But we're all just bags of blood and bone trying to make sense of the world.

It's difficult to grapple with.

I think that's a good thing, though. Because I'm imagining it would be really difficult to hold on to a sense of humanity and to be able to do your job. I don't know. I think there's a spark there of the fact that you got to experience that. Basically, I almost sounds like your aunt was there with you while you were experiencing that. I don't know. These are things like that that make me believe in a soul.

I think that's fair. I think it does. I think that also it's such a big part of human experience to imagine that there's some element that is a soul. Why does religion exist to begin with? Because everybody over humanity has thought about it. Yeah, exactly. It's not like one day we said, I think religion's a thing. For the sake of all of time, it seems like there's been some idea that there's a higher power of some kind.

Totally. I hope there is. I hope there is. Whatever it looks like, I'm so down for whatever tradition it turns into. But it's nice to think about these things. I feel like, what an extreme scenario of you're seeking and your aunt is there on some level with you, whether it's just presence of mine. I think this is so… This is such a tangent, but I swear it has… This is just reminding me. Have you ever seen a psychic before?

I think but only as a child and it was ad hoc, and it was not serious.

Totally. Well, you saw a mentalist in a previous episode. That also I'm still curious. There's a lot to unpack with that. But I saw there's a psychic I should say, I love paranormal stories. I love ghost stories. I think to me, it's my very soft level of engaging in these higher topics. But I saw her and she asked me to pull up my phone and voice record us during the whole thing. Then she immediately starts talking about my friend in college who died who took her own life. She's really worried about you. I'd been going through when I first moved to LA, so this was maybe about two years ago that this happened. First moved to LA, very homesick. I'm from Virginia myself. I was like, I miss home and I miss my family and I feel very fish out of water, and what am I doing here? The TikTok was doing great, but I think I personally was just really struggling. I was thinking about my friend a lot who had taken her own life. I was just like, I don't know. She I just was almost disconnected, but I was just thinking about her all the time.

I guess you have the psychic, and the psychic is like, Yeah, your friend Emily is really worried about you. I was like, What? Only my partner I've talked to about this. She's like, Yeah, the one who was probably going to be a teacher. I was like, Yeah, no, I know who my friend... Yes, she was going to be a teacher. That's crazy. She's like, Yeah, you need to start doing things for yourself a lot more. You need to start prioritizing a little bit more. Honestly, it was really crazy to have that confirmation because my friend, during some of these just very dark moments where I'd wake up crying and I'd fall asleep crying because I'm like, I just miss my family. What am I doing in LA? This is awful. Just a lot of dark thoughts. With those dark thoughts, my friend would be there with me. It was so crazy to have a year of this of my friend just always suddenly being there with me in my mind. Then an external person would be like, Yeah, no, she's with you. She's I will say things have gotten much better. I actually really like my life in LA.

My partner and I, we moved to a neighborhood that made things so much better. My friend is less present of mine now that I'm in a good place, and I can't help but wonder if I was being, I don't know, sensing her or something like that. But it was a very strange synchronicity that I kept thinking about with... Yeah, I don't know. Again, soul, who knows? Something's there. Something's there. I don't know.

So obviously, you have incredible book that has just come out to die for, a cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. It's more than just a recipe book. There's stories in here, amazing pictures. You should be very proud of this. It's beautiful. This is incredible. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. This is such an honor to be here. Right on. Thank you. Thank you.