Be The Death of Me, Part IV

This is our fourth and final episode of our Let Me Ascertain You: Be The Death of Me Series. These interviews are part of an ongoing investigation about death, dying and whatever comes after that. We talked to more than a hundred people so far, and many of these conversations centered on how we remember and how we memorialize those that we’ve lost. Maybe you’ve passed an entirely white bike chained up somewhere and wondered what it was. And maybe you guessed that it’s a memorial for a cyclist killed in that location. We talked to Jessie, one of the people who makes these public memorials. She’s one of the co-founders of the New York City Ghost Bike Project, performed here by actor Megan Stern. Jessie connected us to Lizi, a mother whose son was killed on his bike in Queens, performed by Indika Senanayake. And as our final piece in this series about endings, we have an actor performing an interview we did with another actor. To close, Brad Heberlee plays Everett. Interviews for this podcast were conducted by Elsa Carrette, Ian Daniel, and Leonie Ettinger. To get the latest about our next topic, be sure to subscribe!

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Be The Death of Me, Part III

Here’s episode three in our new podcast series Let Me Ascertain You: Be The Death of Me. What you’ll hear are excerpts from a larger ongoing project about life, death, and whatever happens after that. As part of this investigation, our team spoke to those who work every day in matters of life and death — people who spend their days in the places that witness the demise of our bodies. We’ve put three of those stories together for this episode. To kick things off, here’s actor Peter Friedman performing a man named Leonard: he’s a doctor of internal medicine. Then Danielle Davenport performs an interview we did with Sara, a child life specialist in the general pediatric unit at NYU Hospital. Keith Randolph Smith closes out this episode with his performance of Rocky, who is the co-founder of The Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, which it turns out is the nation’s first minority-run volunteer ambulance corps. Since 1988 the Bed-Stuy ambulance corps greatly improved emergency care in the Bed-Stuy community and to this day it continues to train young people and adults in life-saving skills. The interviews for this podcast were conducted by Micharne Cloughley, Dan Domingues and Meridith Friedman.

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Be The Death of Me, Part II

We’re back with the second episode of Let Me Ascertain You: Be The Death of Me. For this Civilians' project we took a prismatic look into the end of life and talked with a cross-section of New Yorkers - ER nurses, priests, funeral directors, vampires, shamans, crime-scene cleaners, and many ordinary people dealing with the extraordinary experience of loss. In this episode we share three of those stories. Actors Gardiner Comfort, Jennifer Morris, and Jeremy Shamos perform.

The interviews for this podcast episode were conducted by Matt Dellapina, Meridith Friedman, and Donnetta Lavinia Grays. We encourage you to subscribe if you haven’t already, and if you’re feeling extra generous write us a review. It makes a big difference! Until next time.

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Be The Death of Me, Part I

We’re starting up a new series here at Let Me Ascertain You taken from a couple of live events we did recently about death. The show called Be The Death of Me is about facing that final curtain and maybe what lies on the other side. A small army of artists spent six months interviewing all sorts of people here in New York City. A cast of 33 brilliant actors performed these pieces at the Irondale Center in our home neighborhood of Fort Greene Brooklyn. And over the next few episodes, we’re going to share some of these stories with you.

Most people, it stands to reason, have some fear of dying - but not everyone does. As you’ll hear in this episode, some are planning on doing what no man or woman has done before: escape it altogether. Stephen Plunkett performs Father Sebastiaan, a local vampyre and fangsmith. Mia Katigbak performs an interview we did with a medium named Therese. Matt Dellapina performs our interview with Futurist/Techno-Philospher Gray Scott.

Interviews for this podcast were conducted by EllaRose Chary, Ian Daniel, and Leonie Ettinger. If you haven’t yet, please make sure you've subscribed so you can hear upcoming episodes in this Be The Death of Me series.

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INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Futurist Gray Scott

Our Project Director Ian Daniel interviewed Gray Scott, a futurist/neuro-technology-philosopher, as part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale Center in Ft. Greene Brooklyn.  Details HERE.

Gray is also the editorial director of SERIOUS WONDER.com the online futurist philosophy, technology and consciousness magazine produced by his media company SERIOUS WONDER MEDIA™ based in NYC.

Learn more about Gray's work HERE.

Check out some excerpts from Gray's interview:

Uploading your consciousness is going to happen.  Everyone is uploading every single moment of their life, like what they had for breakfast, on social networks. That's the first stage of uploading consciousness.

I do think there will be consciousness factories so that just like on your cloud server you will back up your consciousness, however, we will do it more like a brain to computer interface--like a headband you wear.  And every day you download everything that happened to you in your computer and it all just goes into this cloud, and if you’re in a car accident or die of old age, they can replicate that consciousness into a machine.  You literally just jump from body to a machine without a separation.

I think what we are going to see in the future is an organism that is part machine and part organic.  So you could take your stems cells and literally grow a brain.  And if we could learn how to upload our consciousness into the substrate of an organic brain then we have a whole other scenario--even if our physical body dies, that consciousness goes on forever as long as the machine works.  You still have to maintain the machine but if we can capture that essence of who you are, who I am, then we potentially could live forever, and we could go anywhere in the universe.  We don’t need to breathe, a machine doesn’t need to breathe.  As long as you have a power source and we can do that with solar, as long as you’re plugged into a star, we’re talking. You could choose to leave earth and go explore deep space for eternity as long as you’re close enough to a star for energy.

Isn't the drive to create artificial intelligence, isn't it a cry against death?  I don't want to die so I'm going to create an artificial representation of myself in case I do.  I mean it's a very deep psychological process.  

Personally, I'm greedy and I want to live forever. I do. Because it's heartbreaking and inefficient to only live 80 years.  It’s such a short time, I feel cheated.  All of the work that you do throughout your life, all the preparation that you do for your intelligence, for your body. Think about how many times you go to the gym or think about how many meals you've cooked for yourself and just to have that swept away in one moment.  That bothers me.

Thanks so much to Gray and Ian for sharing. To hear more of Gray's interview come to "Be The Death of Me" June 28/29.

To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE.

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Psychic Medium

Our R&D Group Coordinator, EllaRose Chary, interviewed Therese Relucio, a New York based Certified Psychic Medium (Intuitive Consultant).  Learn more about Therese's work HERE, and also be sure to check out her development group HERE.  
This interview is part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale in Ft. Greene Brooklyn. Details HERE!

Therese Relucio

Check out some excerpts of Therese's interview below:

I remember seeing my first spirit when I was three years old. I was actually born in the Philippines, but I remember seeing it - I was still in the Philippines at the time and I remember seeing a male spirit outside of my window on my second floor so I know that it was definitely a spirit. And I pointed it out and I remember nobody else being able to see the same spirit, so from then, from that first memory, I remember seeing a lot of other spirits coming through. 

I was not scared until probably about 9 or 10 when I started seeing, um, a spirit that was laying in bed with me, a male spirit that was laying in bed with me, smiling at me all the time and I would see him for probably a year, two years straight no matter what house I lived in. Um, yeah, and it was scary only because he was smiling at me and not saying anything. It was a little bit creepy, but um, as it turns out, as I got older, I realized that that was my spirit guide.

Yeah, so a spirit guide, I say spirit because you know, uh, depending on what you want to call it—you could call it ghost if you want—but a spirit is just basically a soul that is not in, that is discarded, meaning not in—not in a physical body.  So they're not human, they're not in a physical form. But a spirit guide, you can relate it to something, some people say a guardian angel, you know, someone that is there to protect you to guide you. That's what a spirit guide is. They guide you towards your direction, towards your life's purpose.

I mean really I've always believed that we're on earth to learn things. So earth is like a boarding school for our souls. When we die and when we pass, we're just going back to where we came from. That's it. There’s nothing unnatural about it, it's just a euphoric process and we go back to where we came from. 

Thanks so much to Therese and Ella for sharing. 

To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE

Announcing "Be The Death Of Me" at the Irondale Center June 28th and 29th

If you've been following our blog, you already know that our awesome team of interviewers and researchers have been exploring every pocket of NY to uncover some of the most unusual, beautiful, and powerful stories about death, dying, and the afterlife. Over the past 5 months we've conducted over a hundred interviews! For excerpts from some of those interviews, click HERE!

Make sure to catch "Be The Death of Me" June 28th and 29th at 8pm at the Irondale! Details HERE 

We're super excited to officially announce the launch of Be the Death of Me, an installation performance piece that offers the audience intimate encounters with matters of life and death in New York City. The audience will navigate their experience inside the atmospheric Irondale Center, housed in a historic church in Fort Greene Brooklyn.

Through a dynamic variety of settings and formats, the audience encounters real stories gathered from a wide cross-section of New Yorkers - everyone from ER nurses to priests, funeral directors to vampires, shamans to crime-scene cleaners. Through this myriad of perspectives, Be the Death of Me uncovers hidden worlds inside New York - places inhabited by those that witness the demise of our bodies as well as those that imagine what may or may not happen to our souls on the other side of life

Here are a few more excerpts from some of our interviews:

"And one thing with arterial embalming, you have an artery right here and they cut open and make an incision and then they get these tongs and they pry out your artery, which is like a big, thick red licorice rope."

-Brandon, Former Embalmer

"The reason people deep down, I think would spend a million dollars on a mausoleum is a real need to be remembered, and to be remembered for, like, as powerful a person as you were."

-Allison, Cemetery Tour Guide/Historian

"Some people just lose their minds and they’re not there anymore, y’know. How do you stab two little kids? It’s almost like writing the prequel to Hannibal Lecter. Who was this guy before he was this animal? That’s what makes it interesting too, you gotta be a little bit morbid. Morbid and compassionate". 

-Crime Scene reporter

We get to the intersection. Cops were already there. There were a lot of empty cop cars there, with their headlights on, their light bars, the blue and the white lights lit up. And I see one officer and he has his flashlight on his shoulder and he’s like waving me this way and he’s like, “You wanna run.” And I started to explain to him, “EMTs never run, that’s just something on TV. What if I get hurt, what if I trip, then you got no EMT.”

-Part-time EMT

Here's our creative team. A special shout-out to our AMAZING team of interviewers and researchers!

Directed by:
Steven Cosson

Cast Includes: Aysan Celik, Donnetta Grays, Daoud Heidami, Nina Hellman, Daniel Jenkins, Trey Lyford, Caitlin Miller, Garrett Neergaard, Stephen Plunkett, Brian Sgambati, and Colleen Werthmann.

Project Director:
Ian Daniel

Project Manager:
Meridith Friedman

Dramaturg:
Micharne Cloughley

Artistic Assistant:
Leonie Ettinger

Set Design:
Mimi Lien

Lighting Design:
Lucrecia Briceño

Sound Design:
Ken Travis

Costume Design:
Chloe Chapin

Projection Designer:
Jeanette Yew

Associate Director:
Mia Rovegno

Associate Dramaturg:
Deepali Gupta

Interviews and research by: Leila Buck, Elsa Carette, Isabel Carey, EllaRose Chary, Chris Cragin Day, Matt Dellapina, Dan Domingues, Jesse Goldman, Donnetta Grays, Ben Gullard, Nina Hellman, Kevin Hourigan, Rachel Karpf, Alex Kveton, David Trevor Lawson, Rachel Lerner-Ley, Carly Mensch, Stephen Plunkett, Victoria Pollack, Alex Rosenthal, Joey Sims, Jay Stull, and Piper Werle.

"Be The Death of Me" June 28th and 29th at the Irondale!  Details HERE