Cooper began the show in 2022 while going through his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt's boxed possessions. He records his own grief in his childhood apartment and then, in each episode, speaks with someone else — Stephen Colbert, Andrew Garfield, a therapist, a stranger — about the deaths they carry. Careful, unshowy, sometimes very hard to listen to. Focused on grief after the death, not preparation before it. Start with season one.
The podcast arm of the End Well project, founded by internist Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider (also a producer on the Netflix documentary End Game). Interviews with clinicians, designers, artists, and dying people about reclaiming the end of life as a human experience — the medical system, cultural design, art, and policy. Leans toward the practitioner audience; consumer listeners may want to skim episode descriptions to find the ones that land for them.
Long-running interview podcast — over four hundred episodes — hosted by hospice physician Karen Wyatt. Guests include hospice workers, doulas, funeral directors, researchers, chaplains, and grief teachers, most of them not otherwise available in podcast form. Production is homespun; the substance is the draw. If you want breadth across the field rather than a single voice, this is where to spend twenty hours.
Dr. Bruce Greyson has been studying near-death experiences at the University of Virginia for over four decades — he is one of the very small number of psychiatric researchers who have published this material through mainstream academic channels rather than the afterlife-book industry. In this Oprah episode he walks through the data, then the conversation opens up to Jeremy Renner and others describing their own experiences. Included here because Greyson is the real thing and readers curious about the science will otherwise find only the pop-spirituality shelf. The register of the episode itself is mainstream talk; if that puts you off, go directly to Greyson's book After.
British comedian Cariad Lloyd — whose father died when she was fifteen — interviews other comedians and writers about the deaths in their lives. It sounds unpromising as a description and is much better than that in practice. If you cannot bear the reverent register right now, Griefcast is where the reverent register goes to be gently taken apart by people who have lived on the other side of a death and made jokes about it. UK-heavy references. Comedy tone is the entry point, not the point.