NEW Death in the Afternoon, Season 2 Episode 2: The Least Worst Death

Hello Again Deathlings,

We're back with another episode of Death in the Afternoon, Season 2. This week's episode: The Least Worst Death. 

Two Manhattan tragedies, two miles and ninety years apart, that changed government policy forever.  But the victims couldn't afford to step back and take this long historical view. They were caught in a horrific struggle between two paths, both leading to unimaginable death.

Warning: Discussion of suicide.

As you can imagine, this was not the CHEERIEST episode for Sarah, Louise, and me to work on, but we've been wanting to discuss the tragedies of 9/11 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire for a long time. 

Everybody around our age or older remembers where we were, what we were doing on September 11, 2001. Death appeared on our TVs, in our newspapers, in photographs that are burned in our memory. For many of us it was our first real exposure to death on a grand scale, as well as collective mourning. 

This week also marks the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, a horrific event that needlessly claimed the lives of 146 workers, immigrants, women and led to desperately needed labor reform. 

And since this episode does touch on suicide we want to offer you some resources
on approaching death positive discussions of suicide. 

Death Positivity and Suicide: Death-education and preparedness stands to help everyone in your community. But what if you’re worried that your desire to talk about death will send a suicidal friend or relative over the edge? Megan Devine, licensed clinical counselor, weighs in.

Megan Devine also put together this list of articles and essays that might help shed light on how we talk about suicide, helping yourself, helping others, access to resources, and a few other things.

And as always, on Twitter and FB we’re sharing content that ties into both of these stories, with a special focus on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Each year victims are remembered in various ways, including these chalk memorials that can be seen throughout NYC.

Death in the Afternoon is a podcast written, researched, and developed by Caitlin Doughty, Sarah Chavez, and Louise Hung of The Order of the Good Death. 

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and funeral home owner in Los Angeles, CA. Along with Sarah and Louise she runs The Order of the Good Death and the Good Death Foundation, orgs that spread the death positive gospel around the world through video series like Ask a Mortician, blogs, bestselling books, and now, a gosh darn podcast!

Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Her work has been influenced by her unique life and weaves together the relationship between death and food, feminism, Mexican-American death rituals, and the strange and wondrous history surrounding the culture of death itself.

Louise Hung is writer/producer for "Ask a Mortician" and a community manager for The Order of the Good Death. While she can usually be found hunched over her computer working scripts, Louise has also been known to tap out a few words about death in folklore, history, pop culture, and Asian or Asian American communities.

Death in the Afternoon Theme Music: Dory Bavarsky

Editing: Landis Blair 

Engineering: Paul Tavenner at Big City Recording Studios and Josh Wilcox at Brooklyn Podcasting Studio