Death Virgin

Dispatches from Temple Heights: Clean Sheets and Birthday Cake

Seth turns fifty in the middle of hospice care, and somehow the day becomes both heartbreaking and strangely joyful. In this installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen recounts a sleepless night, hospice workers who bring humor and humanity into the house, the surreal intimacy of caring for a dying parent, and a birthday celebration filled with Guinness, grocery store cake, party hats, inappropriate death jokes, and moments of real tenderness. It’s an episode about exhaustion, friendship, family, ritual, and the strange beauty of continuing to celebrate life while death sits in the next room.

Dispatches from Temple Heights: Birthday Balloons and Morphine

In the third installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, the vigil continues. Kristen and her brother Seth make it through another night beside their father’s bed, surviving on raisin toast, gallows humor, ice cream, and adrenaline while waiting for the inevitable. As neighbors stop by, hospice nurses arrive, morphine enters the picture, and Seth’s fiftieth birthday approaches, the episode drifts between absurdity and heartbreak with startling intimacy. There are conversations about gatekeeping death, family roles, sea glass, Costco sweatshirts, NPR, birthday piñatas, and what it means to love someone while slowly letting them go. Through exhaustion and tenderness, Kristen reflects on the strange in-between space of vigil keeping — where ordinary life continues even as death waits quietly in the next room.

Dispatches from Temple Heights: The Day He Was Supposed to Die

In the second installment of Dispatches from Temple Heights, Kristen’s father finally comes home from the hospital to die overlooking the ocean in Belfast, Maine. What follows is a surreal and deeply human twelve hours of oxygen tubes, ice cream runs, commode disasters, family tension, dark humor, and quiet tenderness as everyone adjusts to the strange rhythm of waiting for someone to die. Blending real-time recordings with reflections on caregiving, control, inherited trauma, and the absurdity of end-of-life logistics, this episode captures the suspended feeling of a family gathered at the threshold—where exhaustion, love, resentment, laughter, and fear all exist in the same room.

Dispatches from Temple Heights, Vol. 1

Dispatches from Temple Heights: Notes From My Father's Dying The first episode of a new mini-series within Death Virgin. Kristen records from her childhood home on the coast of Maine as her father lies dying on hospice care in the next room. Over the course of one sleepless night, she reflects on what it means to accompany someone through death for the very first time — while also navigating hospital logistics, oxygen tanks, weed gummies, family dynamics, spiders, ocean sounds, assisted living rituals, and the strange absurdity that continues alongside dying. Part vigil diary, part field recording, part dark comedy, this first dispatch captures the liminal hours before bringing her father home from the hospital to die overlooking Penobscot Bay. A series about grief in real time. About becoming “no longer a death virgin.” About how death is both sacred and deeply, relentlessly human.

Becky with the New Hip

In this episode of Death Virgin, Kristen gets a new hip — and loses a bone. What begins as a routine surgery (everyone says it’s routine) becomes something stranger: a meditation on ownership, body parts, family legacy, and what it means when a piece of you that grew with you is suddenly removed. Before going under anesthesia, Kristen asks the question most surgeons are not prepared for: Can I keep the bone? From there, she wanders — lovingly and irreverently — through medical authority, arrogant surgeons, grandmother pranks, Harvard Medical School cadavers, the mysterious Jewish “Luz bone” of resurrection, and the strange grief of losing a tooth in your twenties. This episode explores: 1. Why “common” surgery doesn’t mean minor 2. What belongs to us once it’s cut out of us 3. The power dynamics between doctors and patients 4. Why second opinions should be normalized 5. The family story of Grandma Mary, told she would never walk again — and walking anyway 6. Donating bodies to science (and what happens after) 7. The religious argument against cremation and the almond-shaped “Luz bone” 8. Why birth and death are both messier than we like to admit 9. Mourning body parts — teeth, breasts, bones — as small rehearsals for larger loss 10. Whether cremation tidies death… or just disguises it Kristen also confronts the hypocrisy of creating end-of-life workbooks for others while having no will herself — realizing, the night before surgery, that she has not practiced what she preaches. Because maybe death practice doesn’t only happen at funerals. Maybe it happens in operating rooms. Maybe it happens when your body changes. Maybe it happens when you realize you are not, in fact, twenty anymore. There is pumpkin pie. There is Beyoncé. There is The Big Lebowski. There are bones — some kept, some donated, some pulverized. And there is humor. Always humor. Because sometimes the only way to talk about taboo things is to talk about them sideways. REFERENCED & RECOMMENDED: Harvard Medical School Body Donation Program Rabbinic literature on the “Luz” bone Ecclesiastes (interpretations of resurrection texts) The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris The Big Lebowski (the Folgers canister scene) Pretty Woman (big mistake. Big. Huge.) The Little Engine That Could Beyoncé — “Sorry” (Becky with the good hair)