S3 E10: We Die The Way We Lived

Hey dream listeners, there's now an ad-free version of the dream that you can subscribe to, the dream plus at thedream.supercast.com.

Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of this show with zero ads, which you love and I love.

And we're hoping that this will help us pay the bills and the main goal being that we can keep making this show.

Go to thedream.supercast.com and subscribe.

To make it easy, we have put the link in the show description.

Just look down underneath this episode.

It says thedream.supercast.com and just click on that easy peasy you're gonna get a lot of extra stuff too we're working on all that another thing you need to do please subscribe to our instagram it's the dream x the letter x jane marie see you over there

from mindless tasks to industrial grade ai to ease of mind Supercharge your transformation with industrial AI.

Transform the everyday with Siemens.

Pushkin.

Hey, dream listeners.

If you like this podcast, you're going to love the book.

Yeah, I wrote a book.

It's called Selling the Dream, and it's coming out March 12th, 2024.

on Atria.

It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and some that you've never even heard of, I hope.

Check it out.

Previously on The Dream.

So can I ask about your style of coaching?

I've watched a lot of your videos and I feel like your style is, I don't want to say aggro, but you're very boisterous.

You're very, you're kind of tough.

Was that a choice or is that just like how you naturally are?

Can I ask you a question?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you pay for my coaching?

Do I pay for your coaching?

Yeah, like are you in the accelerator program?

No.

My coaching's not boisterous.

Oh, it isn't.

Yeah.

No.

That's so funny.

Do you tell people that when they sign up?

Like, you're not going to get the same thing that you see online?

No, because that wouldn't be accurate either.

I think that it's important to realize that what you see on social media tends to be a snippet of somebody's personality or like a little glimpse into their life.

But inside of my coaching, it it is very tactical.

It is super, super kind, loving, open, empathetic, listening.

It is responsive into what people need, especially in my platinum coaching.

It's super conversational.

But I think I'm really different than people assume I am from the internet anyhow.

So.

Two months after the conversation you just heard and days after this season launched, Jesse Lee died.

There are very few details.

I heard the same way I heard that she was broadcasting our chat through texts from former friends like Erin Bees who we spoke to in episode one.

I guess it was only

maybe six weeks after or when did she pass?

September 16th.

Okay.

Yeah, it was about then six weeks after I spoke to her.

She was gone.

Yeah.

And I found out from you

first

that she wasn't doing well.

Why don't you talk me through that?

Yeah.

So actually, I didn't,

I didn't realize

how quickly the decline would be.

On my YouTube channel, I have members that

we have a Discord and we talk pretty candidly in there.

What's a Discord?

I don't think my audio is.

A Discord is just kind of like a

chat.

There's different channels, different companies, topics that we talk about within multi-level marketing.

There's an empathy chat, and there's just different areas where we discuss specific things within multi-level marketing.

I feel like a lot of her followers are experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance.

And when I heard that she passed, I immediately obviously thought of her family and the people closest to her and how this has to be such a shock for them, but also for Jesse Lee's audience, you know, these these people that have followed her for many, many years.

And now, all of a sudden, she's just gone.

And the only thing that they

can see is the last live that she did, where she told them that the cancer was regressing and that her lymph nodes were going back to normal.

Well, hello, hello, everybody.

What's going on?

It's Jesse Lee.

You can call me boss Lee if you'd like to, how?

Or the people's mentor.

I haven't done a live like in a minute.

So, well, that's not really true.

I did a coffee on the floor two days ago.

Okay.

I did just get a phone call.

I guess it's been like

four or five hours now.

I've tried to make the rounds of people that I'm super close with.

And if I look like I'm exhausted, if you're like, she looks really tired, like, I don't know, that is because, first of all, I am.

Okay.

I have not been sleeping well, which has been freaking me out, if we're being very honest with each other, because I can't sleep.

I'm really bloated from just this extra liquid that's in my abdomen.

I feel like I am, I'm scared all the time because the lymph nodes and the neck, like it is the biggest mind F ever.

And I have the strongest mindset of anybody I've ever met.

And I still am over here on a daily basis.

Like,

it hurts.

It hurts.

It hurts my kidneys.

Is it my kidneys?

Is it my liver?

Anyway, yeah, the cough.

Scary.

Scary.

Why am I coughing?

Okay, so

excuse me.

I got a call today, and

this made my stomach turn over even thinking about it.

And as soon as I saw my oncologist's number flash on the screen, I had like a little minor panic attack.

Like, do I let it go to voicemail?

Or do I not?

So I was nervous.

And then my doctor called today.

And

he said,

and he read my PET scan from last Monday, and it's very good news.

So, for those of you who don't know, it's very good news.

Not a drop of chemo, not a blast of radiation, not anything from a single traditional oncologist, except for to read my scans.

And he said that the cancer is decreasing in my body.

Many of my lymph nodes have gone back to normal.

There's a few hot spots that were always there.

Nothing has increased.

And he said,

He said, Oh,

he's like, just get another scan in six months and we'll see how it's going.

And for those of you who don't know,

when I was diagnosed and went to MD Understand in March, they told me I wouldn't live to see November.

And now they're asking me to not get scanned for another six months because the disease is regressing so dramatically.

So

thank you for all your prayers.

Thank you for you guys who have sent really encouraging messages.

I know I've had weird pains and my kidneys hurt or my liver or something hurts.

I don't know what hurts.

But wow.

I love y'all so much.

I appreciate you so much.

Keep the prayers coming.

We got a long road to go.

Pray for this back pain to go away, the stomach pains to go away,

because, and keep praying for the cancer to go away because your prayers are definitely working.

So God bless all y'all.

Thank you for being on this journey with me.

And let's keep this thing going.

God bless y'all.

Ciao.

And And so how do you go from September 5th saying, hey, I don't have to get another PET scan for six months, you know, essentially the oncology from the sounds of

from her video.

Essentially, it sounded like the oncologist was giving her a thumbs up and it's kind of like, then on the 16th, she's passed.

And I feel like that was such a shock to her followers.

And that's why I say I feel like they're experiencing cognitive dissonance because they know she's gone, but it doesn't make sense.

They don't understand because of that narrative that she created around her cancer journey.

The way that I found out was from a post by Eric Wurry, who's a multi-level marketing quote-unquote coach.

So he was one of Jesse Lee's mentors and he posted, I think it was on Instagram and I believe on Facebook, somewhere around late February, where she was going in for surgery to have part of her colon removed.

And he at that point said that she had been diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.

So that was how the world found out about this.

It wasn't from Jesse Lee.

It wasn't from anybody in her inner circle.

It was from Eric Wurry, which is interesting to me because that's how the world found out that Jesse Lee,

her health was declining, was because he also posted on Facebook and Instagram and everywhere, which I find really odd.

I mean, is that his place?

I don't think so.

Yeah.

So maybe she asked him to, who knows?

I don't know.

I, I don't, I don't know.

I just, it's uncomfortable that he did that, you know, because at the end of the day, this is her story.

And I may not agree with the

painting of the narrative and the lack of truthfulness and the straight up misinformation, but it was still her story to tell.

Right.

You know, right.

So that was February.

And

I saw her kind of go back and forth based on what she was putting out on social media on whether she was going to do chemo or not.

And there was speculation, not even speculation.

She said that she was considering doing chemo in May.

And she went to an acupuncturist and that acupuncturist said, I don't think you need chemo.

You need to go plant-based.

And so that was when she switched to vegetables and all of that stuff.

And I watched her go back and forth between going to, I think she was in Germany and she was seeing a biohacking doctor overseas.

And then she was going to different treatments, which

from what she has said, some of those treatments included ozone, both intravenously and also rectally,

and coffee enemas

and

high vitamin C drips and all kinds of

other holistic type treatments.

I don't even know if I want to call them treatments, to be honest.

And

I feel like we all just watched her decline on social media while she was smiling and telling everybody, you know, no, I'm beating cancer.

And

it created cognitive dissonance within her community and her followers because they're like, oh yeah, she's saying she's great.

But you look at her and you're like, but your eye sockets look like they're, you know, drawn in or whatnot.

And you could see in my audio.

I was a lot of weight loss, right?

A lot of weight loss.

That temporal wasting look

was really alarming to me.

And I'm like, how can you say that you're getting better when you are, you're physically, you are starting to change because of the weight loss?

And it didn't make sense to me.

So I can't imagine how her followers must have.

Well, she was selling a weight loss product, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Even though they say it's not weight loss, but all of them do before and after pictures.

Right.

So then I found out she was in the hospital the

September 11th, I want to say, or 12th, somewhere in there.

And, you know, the next thing we know, I'm hearing all this chatter about Jesse Leah has passed.

And then

people started to post and to speculate because, again, I feel like people didn't understand what was really going on because they believed what she was telling them.

After I

interviewed her, I was following along a little bit more closely.

The symptoms she was experiencing during that time are end stage

cancer symptoms, right?

Like

the fluid in her abdomen from liver failure,

the

back having difficulty breathing, the back pain, the cough.

Even in that, yeah, the cough in that final video, she can't fully catch her breath.

And again, the

continued weight loss.

All of those things are very in line with like multi-organ

failure.

Yeah.

A metastasized cancer, which she did acknowledge that it had metastasized, right?

She did, yeah.

Yeah.

In one of her videos that she did

sometime this past summer, early summer, she was talking about how

she mentioned that it was in her esophagus.

She mentioned it was in, I believe, 26 lymph nodes or something like that, of the 30 that they removed during her surgery.

She mentioned

areas being lit up on a scan,

you know, and this was all after she had had the surgery.

So she was very aware that it had metastasized.

Yeah.

I don't know when she started saying this, but she would introduce herself on almost every video as, Welcome to Jesse Lee Beats Cancer holistically.

Is that

okay?

Yep.

So it was kind of a branded

experience, sort of.

Yeah.

And I do think that there's a place for holistic type treatments, but I think that we also have to depend on,

you know, what we know works best against the scenario that people are facing.

And,

you know, that would be for cancer, it's it's chemotherapy.

And I also.

But you do all of that and then you go, okay, maybe I'll just like pound the turmeric juice or whatever.

Yeah.

But you or things that can help with the symptoms from, you know, traditional treatments, things that can help with nausea and, you know, different things like that.

So I do think that there's a place for that.

So she had, had she been anti-chemo, those kinds of things prior to this?

I think.

Do you know?

I know I saw one video where she was telling people not to get

mammograms.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She was definitely telling people not to get mammograms.

She was telling people they didn't need ultrasounds.

She was telling people, you know, just trust your body and know your body.

And you can know your body and know how you typically feel

and miss a

life-altering thing, diagnosis or whatnot.

I don't know how I want to word that.

And

that's why they do a lot of screening things.

So if anything, out of all of this, I really hope that people

get screened.

when they have risk factors for anything like this.

Just go to the doctor and get those things checked out, get the screening done, and just, you know,

I guess be vigilant about that.

I hope that that's the message out of all of this.

At the end of the day, Jesse Lee is, she was still a human being.

And to think about her being in as much pain as she was,

knowing that there could have been, you know, palliative care to to prevent some of this, to slow down her body's response to the pain and the spreading of the cancer.

I didn't know that that was a thing.

I didn't know

I mean, obviously, nobody should be in that kind of pain,

you know.

I, and we don't want other humans to experience that.

But to understand like the physiological aspect of what happens when somebody is in late-stage cancer and then they're in pain and they have a fever and their blood pressure is up and how that just basically accelerates them passing is heartbreaking to me.

Yeah, yeah, that you can't

catch your breath, essentially.

And

yeah, it must have been brutal.

I think that the spreading of misinformation in these last six and a half, seven months that she has

has given on her platform is extremely alarming.

I know how commercial cults operate and how they look at their leader and believe everything that their leader is saying.

And unfortunately, you know, there's probably people out there that are going to listen to her advice.

You know, because we could get into a whole conversation about, well, if I am only going to be given nine months, or if I do chemotherapy, I'm going to be given 10 months.

There is a very distinct difference in someone saying, I'm choosing to live my life the way that I want to live for these next nine months or however many months I'm given.

That's not what she was doing.

Her whole brand was,

in my opinion, villainizing the medical community, villainizing the oncologists.

At one point, she was calling them chemo pimps.

And,

you know, I understand that that is probably a very personal journey for people, a very personal decision on whether they want to fight this with chemotherapy and all of the symptoms that may come with that, or whether they want to live their life on their terms for however many months they have.

But what she was doing was, in my opinion, medical fear-mongering.

And she was telling people prior to this, you don't need to have ultrasounds.

You don't need to, you know, get MRIs.

And these are all very much what she was doing to monitor her cancer journey.

We have medicine for a reason.

And if she had, if the way that she had presented herself would have been like, I'm choosing to do what I want with the rest of the time that I have here.

I don't think any of the creators in the anti-MLM movement would have said a word.

I think they would have sent her well wishes and we would have continued to cover MLM leaders and companies.

But because she was doing it in a way where she was spreading misinformation and doing what I feel like I call it shock marketing, where she says or said things that were really offensive.

And then right after she would pitch her coaching or she would pitch ketones or she would be packing up ketones at the same time, which is representing the MLM company at the same time that she's saying these really atrocious things.

And the fact that some of her followers might listen to her advice, even though she passed from it, and then seeing some of them saying, oh, she cured cancer.

She didn't cure cancer.

She had

people are saying she cured it.

People are saying that she didn't pass from cancer, that

she passed from some sort of a

from sepsis.

They're saying she had a kidney infection and this and that.

And maybe she had some underlying things going on.

But when you have a sites, which is the fluid,

there's organs involved.

That's a late-stage cancer sign.

The pain was a late-stage cancer sign, meaning that it was spreading.

So they just, because of what she said and how she presented this cancer journey and the things that she said about modern medicine and screening and different things like that,

these people cannot fathom that she actually passed from cancer.

I am talking to my friend Megan Carmichael, who is a death doula,

who I've interviewed for the show before, but she hasn't made it on.

We've been internet friends for 10 years.

Oh, that's amazing.

I interviewed her for the first season, but we didn't use it, but it was about she got tricked into going to a doTERRA meeting.

Oh my God.

Because the person was like, end of life and essential oils can be very helpful.

And she was like, that sounds great.

Yeah.

Like anything to make your environment a little more comfy.

And then she gets there and it's like a doTERRA pitch.

Oh my God.

But she emailed me the minute she found out and said, you know, I'm thinking about all of you and how this must feel really weird.

And I'm here to talk.

So I'm going to talk to her also for this episode.

Oh, that's going to be, I can't wait for that.

I would love to hear what she has to say just about all of it.

She's a wonderful, wonderful person.

Back to school is a time when routines reset, and so does screen time.

With all the pickups, practices, and after-school logistics, kids need a way to stay connected.

But handing them a phone designed for adults with internet access and social media, that's where the real concern begins.

Teens already spend an average of nine hours a day on screens outside of school.

That's basically a full-time job just scrolling.

The U.S.

Surgeon General says that kids who spend more than three hours online daily are twice as likely to experience depression and anxiety, and most of that time is spent on social media.

It's staggering.

Nearly half of teen girls and a third of boys say social media causes overwhelming stress.

A quarter of teens say it makes them feel worse about their own lives.

Here's the good news.

Gab is doing something no one else is doing.

Their approach, called Tech in Steps, offers safe, age-appropriate phones and watches with no social media, no internet browsers, and GPS tracking built in.

From young kids to teens, each device grows with the child and helps build healthy tech habits.

Bottom line, you don't have to give a kid an adult device.

This school year, give them Gab.

Safe connection, no distractions.

I can't recommend Gab enough.

Use our code to get the best deal on something that gives peace of mind, whether you're a parent, a guardian, or just someone who cares.

Visit gab.com slash the dream and use the code the dream for a special back-to-school offer.

That's Gab, G-A-B-B.

And I'm excited to talk to her.

Hi, my name is Megan Carmichael.

I live in Vermont, but I'm originally from California.

And my mom died about six and a half years ago when I was five weeks out from my second child.

And so I was really thrown into the world of what it means to die, especially in our society today.

And so since then, I quit my banking job and have really poured myself into this full-time.

I've had some work in hospice and with families that are preparing for a death.

I've worked with individuals that are training to become death doulas

and

all sorts of things along the spectrum.

So that's kind of what I do.

Do you get this question a lot?

Like, do you have like a morbid fascination or what is the vibe?

Like, what draws you to this work?

Yeah.

So I would never have called myself morbid.

I'm Irish, so I've always had sort of a healthy relationship with death through my family.

It's not something that we've shied away from.

And our wakes have always been the funnest parties that we ever threw.

So growing up, I just sort of had that take on death.

But then seeing it up close firsthand and being in such a vulnerable place, just, you know, with a newborn and a toddler,

it was gnarly.

And it really made me realize that I'm not the only one that's about to face this.

I kind of looked around at all of my friends and was like, oh my God, this is going to happen to all of them.

and so the fascination is as much social and economic as it is about the spiritual or um the kind of woo-woo yeah can you tell me a little bit about your mom's passing i i just like um yeah because i would imagine a lot of people especially if you are in that vulnerable space of like having a newborn and a toddler and you're super stressed out and then your mom is dying.

It's, I don't imagine a lot of people would come out of that experience saying, I'll do that again for a job.

So tell me about it.

Yeah.

Let me let me take that on for fun.

You know, so my mom had been diagnosed right when I was about three months pregnant, like right through the first trimester.

And we pretty much knew it was pretty bad right from the get-go.

My daughter was one and a half at the time.

And,

you know, not everybody's a parent.

So I hesitate to use baby analogies.

But if you know what it's like when you have a newborn, you just do what you have to do.

And I just had three times as much going on.

But there was sort of a sense of clarity around it all.

Like the short-term decisions about what should happen were so much clearer and easier than they were before this truth was sitting on the table in front of us.

Do we, you know, do we go to some other kid's second birthday party or do we go down to my folks' house and hang out for the weekend?

Done.

Easy decision.

I've always been a kind of person that can lean into whatever is easy in the situation.

Obviously, it was like gut-wrenching and heartbreaking,

but it was easy to know that nothing I did or didn't do was going to change things.

That was easy.

It was easy to know what my priorities were on a minute-by-minute level.

That was easy.

What What is a death doula?

And are you a death doula?

I'm not a death doula.

And it's mostly because I don't have the bedside manner needed for the job, quite frankly.

So I would never take on that role with families.

But I have worked to train death doulas with a very good friend of mine named Jill Schock, who's based in Los Angeles.

She's death doula, LA.

What they really do is very similar to what a birth doula does, in the sense that they are going to meet you at a certain point in your journey and you're going to come together and make an agreement about what appropriate support looks like and what appropriate payment looks like and they are going to walk with you and assist you within those within that framework up through a certain point in your journey and then they go away I've always struggled with what to like call my job or whatever or what role I play and community death educator has kind of been one that I've toyed around with.

But after listening to this, this season, I was like, fuck, dude, I'm a death coach.

I was thinking of you when I wrote death coach.

No, when I wrote that line, I was thinking, Megan, in my head, I was like, yeah, that's right.

Like, you can, there's death coaches who can help you have the best death.

Totally.

And like, you know, a couple months ago, somebody called and said, hey, I am in a specific location helping a friend and we need to find a specific type of burial solution.

Can you help?

And I do the legwork, right?

I call around, I make the calls.

And most importantly, what I do in that case is I say, hey, you did the right thing by asking for help.

I'm really proud of you.

And, hey, this is a person who I have vetted and they're going to take good care of you.

You know, I heard about Jesse Lee's passing and I actually hadn't caught through to the very last episode.

So it was a complete shock to me.

I hadn't been aware of her cancer journey at all.

And I just saw this thing flip through my FYP on TikTok.

And

I reached out to you because I knew that you had profiled her.

And in grief theory, there's this concept of

ambiguous loss,

which is sort of like when

something

leaves your life.

not as clear-cut as like the loss of a friend or the loss of a coworker, right?

But like something kind of confusing leaves your life.

And I know that that can just draw things up and it's a weird feeling.

And

we as a society, we walk through so much grief blindly.

And I think I just sent like one or two sentences that just said, hey, I'm thinking about you and your team.

That's got to be weird.

Yeah.

Well, I really appreciated the note.

And I'm so glad we're getting to talk now because it came at a time where I was, I was speaking to Erin Bees, who was on that, the first episode, who used to be best friends with Jesse Lee.

We were kind of, she had told me a couple of days before

Jesse Lee passed that it was coming.

And we'd been discussing what to do, like, you know, regarding the show, because it was, the show had just come out.

Like it was three days old or something.

And so there really wasn't any turning back on the first episode, but I knew what was coming in episode nine.

And it really helped to hear from you and to hear from her and helped me feel like, okay, you know, I don't have to make any quick decisions here and I don't have to throw, I don't have to trash it.

But I was feeling very conflicted about the whole thing.

When I find,

when I find myself facing complicated grief, right?

Like somebody that I didn't agree with or I wasn't in alignment with, whether that means they lose their job, right?

When your enemy at work gets fired or when somebody who you're critical of passes away.

Right.

There's this idea

of complicated grief and it can be hard to sort your feelings out.

And so, what I always go to in those situations, it's called ring theory.

And the idea is like right at the center of this circle is the person who's immediately affected.

So, that would be Jesse Lee.

And then, in the next circle around her, are the people, and I put pets there, closest to her.

And then, beyond that, it might be her colleagues, and then her doctors or her support staff.

And then, on the really outside of this concentric circle, I'm going to talk or think of the people that really admire her and who she has become really important to.

And whenever I'm feeling complicated grief, I try to figure out who on that concentric ring circle can

I connect with sort of with my heart.

And I really am thinking a lot about her fans and her followers and the people that

really upheld her in a really special way and what this experience must be like for them.

And then

I'd almost put you and me and the rest of the dream listeners in the circle outside of her fans and followers, right?

Because I think that all of us get affected in some way by the loss of an individual.

And it's also really complicated

when somebody is so public

about their illness

for the conversation to just drop off.

It feels really gross,

right?

We're so trained and we're trained not only to not talk about people's medical privacy stuff, but also to not talk about the dead.

Like there's this idea that people get to choose how they die.

And I will stand by that forever.

Whether that means you want to go for the most aggressive treatments, if you want to get preventative treatment that is wildly aggressive, or if you want to forego everything or go holistic you get to choose how you die and most people die how they live so if you live a life of not telling the truth if you lived a life of manifesting

if you lived a life where you tried to speak things into truth you will die that way.

Right.

And I think that if we were to just stop our careful criticism of this type of behavior that she had in life, if we didn't continue that through, that would be inauthentic.

And one thing that woman was, was authentic.

She was the same through her life and death.

Yeah, I don't want to take that away from her.

I do think where she crossed a line is the the instructing of her

fans to

not take care of their own health

in the same way that she wasn't.

Don't get mammograms and chemo is always bad.

And you should know when you have cancer just intuitively if you know your body.

Those kinds of messages that were coming out over and over again,

I think were really dangerous.

And

so I'm glad we're talking about this because, again, people aren't talking about her death.

Or if they are, they're talking about it.

There's a whole story that's been made up now about how she passed.

I want to say it's dangerous to say that to people.

It is also dangerous to tell people to put a $700 starter kit on a credit card when you don't have money for your light bill.

Right.

Because it's been dangerous.

Right.

So, so if we weren't critical, and we should be critical of the things that she said, point by point and say, not only was what she said dangerous, the way she said it was dangerous, the

framing of the story, right?

The framing of it's just my kidneys.

The number of videos I saw where she was going through dramatic weight loss saying, This is what health looks like.

That's dangerous.

We should talk about it and we have to.

And she never shied away from the quote-unquote haters when she was alive.

It would be inauthentic to not be having this conversation.

Yeah.

Another thing that is really important when people are grieving or when somebody's dying is this concept of anticipatory loss.

It's when you get a chance to

sort of re-grieve and your brain starts to build the neural pathways almost to accept what's about to happen.

And what I saw happening in this case, and I was always looking backwards, right?

I really didn't dive into this until after she had died.

But what I saw was the amount of false hope that she was giving to herself

and to her followers, really didn't allow any anticipatory grief at all.

There was one video that she did where she talked about making a will, and that was pretty powerful, I thought, because it seemed like there was a little

crack into the real interior.

Yeah, but then at the same time,

death is a cognitive dissonance, right?

We are wired as humans to survive.

That's why suicide and suicidal ideation are so fucking scary is because our brain is not working the way it's like supposed to work to keep us alive.

Well, when I got hospitalized during the making of season one, was it season one or two?

It was two, actually.

Sorry, it was right before the pandemic.

I took a medication that gave me this thing called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which can kill you.

It's like a autoimmune reaction to certain medications and it makes your skin fall off essentially.

But when I got admitted to the hospital, I was in the hospital for like three days, four days,

they were, we were having a measles outbreak in LA

and it looks exactly the same.

So they were, I had to go into like one of those isolation wards

at the hospital.

And I remember thinking the first night I was in there because I still felt like horrible, like my body was on fire and I had this crazy rash all over.

And I was, they were really worried, you know, and I had IVs and everything and i remember like just sitting there watching tv and in my room all by myself and um thinking i had a good run and i couldn't believe that i had that thought like me the one who's so scared of death i just

it just flashed into my head like hey my my daughter's awesome i had a cool career Okay.

And then I was like, what am I thinking?

And I didn't die, but I had that peaceful feeling about it.

Yeah.

That's That's your future self coming to you to be like, hey, just so you know, like you're really afraid of this.

This is the closest you've ever been to believing it might happen.

Just so you know, this is the feeling you have.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I'll look forward to that.

Yeah.

Dude, I wish you could have been there for the last six weeks of my dad's life.

It was the fucking funnest party I have ever been to.

It was, it was a bender.

We went on a bender.

It It was ordering every kind of food that he wanted, even though he could only take a few bites.

He was like getting out in the sun every day.

He had this home health aide that helped him set up his full speaker system.

Like he pulled every speaker out of the garage.

He goes, What the fuck do I care what the neighbors think?

Yeah.

I'm dying.

Yeah.

I don't care about volume.

I'm not trying to be polite anymore.

I mean, it was

an absolute joy.

It was hard after he died because it felt like the

fun was was actually over.

I have seen a lot of people die.

I have been present while people were in the dying process and while people actually took their last breaths and I have seen literally more dead bodies that are just like fresh, right?

Very recent.

It's not scary.

There's nothing to be afraid of.

When you see it and you see it on the people's faces and you see it in the room,

the thing I'm afraid of is how everybody else, the scary thing is the relationships and how they're affected, right?

The scary thing is what happens to everybody who's still alive.

But I've seen their faces, I've been there, they are not scared.

You should not be scared.

Okay.

The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Jane Marie.

Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sanford.

Our editor is Peter Clowney.

The Dream is a co-production of Little Everywhere and Pushkin Industries.

Life is unpredictable, but preparing for the unexpected shouldn't be.

Take ownership of your life planning with Policy Genius to help your loved ones have a financial safety net in case something happens to you.

They offer life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage.

Don't wait for life to make other plans.

Protect your family today.

Head to policygenius.com.

That's policygenius.com.

Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

It's the only tier.

No commercials.

Plus, bonus content.

This helps keep us independent, and your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream.

We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us.

We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So, what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there.

And we're just going to talk about what we bought.

It'll be fun.

That's the dream.s-u-p-e-r-c-a-s-t dot com.

Supercast.

Please, please go subscribe.

It's five bucks.

It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles.

See you there.