‘I've never not known death’ - John Troyer
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What happens when a lifetime spent studying death collides with personal loss?
Death scholar, writer, and educator John Troyer joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about mortality, grief, funeral culture, and the sometimes uneasy relationship between intellectual understanding and lived experience.
Best known for his book Technologies of the Human Corpse and his work with the Centre for Death and Society, Troyer reflects on growing up around the American funeral industry, where encounters with death were part of everyday life from an early age. Together, he and Joanna explore the cultural history of deathcare, and the strange ways modern societies simultaneously hide from and obsess over death.
The conversation moves through death studies as an academic discipline, the enduring influence of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, and how conversations about mortality can offer clarity, intimacy, and meaning in everyday life. Troyer also speaks candidly about the deaths of his sister and parents, and the profound realization that even decades spent thinking and writing about death cannot truly prepare us for grief when it arrives personally.
Joanna and John reflect on why people are instinctively drawn to conversations about mortality, how pre-death planning can become an act of care, and what it means to live fully while knowing life is finite.
📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468
💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.
Host: Joanna Ebenstein
Series Producer: Jess Gunasekara
Studio Engineer: Fernando Velazco Vargas
Additional Production and Sound Design: Katie Hill
Production Coordinator: Janice Jardine
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam
Artwork: Lauren Seeley