When We Die Talks
When We Die Talks is a collection of real conversations with real people about death, meaning, and what it’s like to be human.
Each week, host Zach Ancell speaks with an anonymous caller. It begins with one question: What do you think happens when we die? From there, the conversation goes wherever it goes. Belief. Doubt. Loss. Relief. Fear. Sometimes even laughter.
These aren’t experts or public figures. Just everyday people saying the quiet parts out loud. The result is raw, unpredictable, and deeply human.
New anonymous calls every Wednesday.
Want to add your voice? Apply to be a caller at whenwedietalks.com. Leave a voicemail and share a belief, a question, or a moment you can’t shake about death: 971-328-0864.
Episodes
82 episodes
Anonymous #45 — How Would You Know If a Message From the Dead Was Real?
Our caller was sitting in a college class when a professor, mid-lecture, turned and looked directly at them and asked what it might have been like to be sheltered with your partner under a mantle in Pompeii, watching ash come down. The caller s...
Anonymous #44 — What Do You Lose When You Carry Other People's Pain?
Content note: this episode centers on suicide loss, discussed directly. If that's not something you're in a place for today, it's okay to sit this one out.Our caller found their housemate in the home they shared, staged in a way...
Anonymous #43 — Is Being Forgotten Worse Than Dying?
This week's caller calls themself a radical death advocate. Not because they think dying is good, but because they see it as a part of the life cycle we're better off accepting than fighting. They're mostly at peace with the first death, the ph...
Anonymous #42 — Who Takes Care of the Person Who Is Living for Everyone Else?
This week's caller was diagnosed as a type one diabetic when they were 22 months old. They've spent their entire life managing something that can genuinely kill them in either direction, and death has been a fact of daily life rather than a dis...
Anonymous #41 — If Life Comes from Death, What if Nothing Ever Really Ends?
This caller was born into death. Their mother survived a rare, near-fatal condition as an infant only because a doctor happened to be at the house that day, checking on a dying sister. That's the reason this caller exists at all and it sets the...
Anonymous #40 — Does It Matter What You Believe About Death, As Long As You Actually Believe It?
This caller doesn't come from a place of loss. They come from a place of curiosity, and a theory they've spent years quietly assembling.It starts with reincarnation. But not the straightforward kind. Not a linear return to another body i...
Anonymous #39 — Can You Stop Needing to Know What Happens When We Die?
This episode includes an open and personal conversation about suicide, suicidal ideation, and suicidality, including experiences from childhood. If you're in a tender place with any of these themes, please take care of yourself first. If yo...
Anonymous #38 — What Happens to Your Own Life While You're Busy Caregiving Someone Else's?
This week's caller grew up in a Roman Catholic household where death was treated as simply another part of life. Something to be at peace with rather than afraid of. But the conversation quickly turns to something that's shaped most of their ad...
Anonymous #37 — Can Faith Change What It's Like to Be With Someone Who Is Dying?
This week's caller is a retired physician who spent decades at the bedside of dying patients and now works at a funeral home. They have been present for death on both sides: as the person trying to slow it down, and as the person who shows up a...
Anonymous #36 — Does the Fear of Death Go Away, or Do You Just Get Better at Living With It?
This week's caller is 79 years old and has spent the last three years going down every rabbit hole death has to offer. All in service of a book that's about to come out.They have lost a husband and a mother. They have survived breast can...
Anonymous #35 — How Do You Keep Loving People When You're the One They're Going to Lose?
This week's caller was diagnosed with a terminal illness at eight years old. They have never not known that death was part of their life.They are an actor, a writer, a reader, a person who rescues snails and keeps a pet millipede and lov...
Anonymous #34 — Can The Losses That Broke You As A Teenager Also Be The Things That Made You?
This week's caller is a pediatric nurse who has been around death long enough to stop fearing it and start getting curious about it.They lost their father to suicide as a teenager. A few months later, they were the one doing CPR on their...
Bonus — Don Sires: Exit Interview
This one is different.When We Die Talks is built around anonymous conversations — people calling in to talk about death, dying, and what they think comes next. No names, no faces, just honest conversation. This episode breaks that format...
Anonymous #33 — Why Does Some Grief Get to Be Spoken Out Loud and Some Doesn't?
This week's caller has been living with grief long enough to become a student of it. They lost their mom at twenty-two. Then their cat. Then their soul dog thirteen months ago. This is a conversation about grief that doesn't rank it...
Anonymous #32 — What Do You Do With a Faith That Can't Explain the Worst Thing That Happened to You?
Note: This episode includes an open discussion of suicide and suicide loss. Please listen when you're in a good place to do so.This week's caller has lived through a concentrated stretch of loss that would bring most people to t...
Anonymous #31 — What Happens If There's No 'You' Left to Be Afraid of Death?
This week's caller has been sitting with death since childhood. They grew up deep inside Pentecostal religion, the shouting, the standards, the constant weight of what comes next, and instead of finding comfort there, they left with more questi...
Anonymous #30 — What Happens to a Family That Grief Breaks?
This weeks caller lost their baby brother on Thanksgiving Day when they were five, and has spent their whole life with what they call "a little bird called death" on their shoulder. They're a death doula, a trauma-informed yoga instructor, a Re...
Anonymous #29 — Can Having Parkinson's Teach You How to Live?
This caller grew up without religion, lost their mom to suicide at 13, and spent years in a fear of death so overwhelming they couldn't be around skeletons or eat meat. Then they were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.But somehow, this ...
Anonymous #28 — Do the People Who Sit With Death Every Day Know Something the Rest of Us Don't?
What would change if we treated death as a human event, not just a medical one?This week’s anonymous caller is a death doula. And instead of going abstract, they get surprisingly specific about what the end can look like and what ...
Anonymous #27 — Is the Fear of Death Worse Than Death Itself?
What if death isn’t peaceful, or blank, or anything you can make sense of, but something you’re trapped inside?This week’s anonymous caller doesn’t come in with a comforting belief or a story about loss. They come in with death an...
Anonymous #26 — Are We Making Death Harder by Refusing to Accept It?
What does death look like when it’s part of your job?This week’s anonymous caller is an EMT who’s around emergencies and dying on a regular basis. And because of that, this conversation doesn’t stay in the abstract for long.
Anonymous #25 — How Do You Love Someone You Know You're Going to Lose?
What happens when you’re 19 and you’re loving someone with a terminal illness?This week’s anonymous caller is an anthropology student who’s been studying death, grief, and ritual. But that interest isn’t abstract. Their partner ha...
Anonymous #24 — What Happens to Your Beliefs About Death When You Can't Trust Your Own Mind?
What happens when your mind stops feeling like a safe place to live?This week’s anonymous caller shares about experiencing a psychotic break in 2020, and what it changed about how they relate to death, reality, and their own sense...
Anonymous #23 — Does Surviving Two Heart Attacks Change the Way You See Death?
What if something big happens… and your life still mostly goes back to normal?This week’s caller has had two heart attacks, starting when they were sixteen. On paper that sounds intense. But this conversation isn’t heavy. The call...
Anonymous #22 — What Do You Tell a Child Who Asks If They're Going to Die?
What do you say to a child who asks, “Am I going to die?”This week's caller is a physician who works with children who have cancer and has training in pediatric palliative and hospice care. In this conversation, she shares what it...
