30. Beyond the Veil & Death with Dignity with Britna Savarese

Flipping Tables

Monte Mader

Society & Culture

5 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Death is the one experience we all share, yet it remains the conversation we avoid most. In this episode, I sit down with death doula Britna Savarese to explore what it truly means to accompany someone at the end of life. We talk about why our culture struggles to face grief, how silence around death isolates the dying and their loved ones, and how reclaiming these conversations can bring healing, connection, and even beauty.

Britna I was raised Southern Baptist in a small town best known for its rodeo. As a skateboarding punk, she pushed against the system and questioned the rigid religion I was handed. That same spirit of questioning and reimagining guides her work as a death doula today. Just as Flipping Tables dismantles harmful narratives, she dismantles fear and silence around death—offering space for authentic reflection and intentional closure.

Britna shares powerful stories of walking alongside families in their most vulnerable moments and offers insight into how death work isn’t just about endings—it’s about presence, love, and honoring the whole of a life. Together, we explore the hesitancy many of us feel when confronting mortality, the lessons death has to teach us about living, and the hope that can be found in embracing this natural transition. And these conversations can help us prepare for ourselves and our loved ones for our next great adventure.

This is a tender, vulnerable, and deeply human conversation. If you’ve ever felt uncertain about how to grieve, how to support a loved one, or how to face your own mortality with more grace and peace, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we discuss:

The role of a death doula and what it means to provide compassionate presence at the end of life
Why our culture avoids talking about grief and how that avoidance impacts us
The sacredness and beauty found in the transition from life to death
How opening ourselves to conversations about death can actually deepen our appreciation for living

This episode is not about fear—it’s about finding courage, tenderness, and even hope in the face of the universal journey we all share.

Please consider supporting my work at patreon.com/montemader

Transcript

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0:00.0	Death is one journey that we all have to take. And throughout history, every culture has honored
0:05.9	and imagined it just a little bit differently. For some, death was a doorway to a new paradise.
0:11.6	For others, it was a descent into shadow. And for every civilization, there were people whose
0:17.6	job it was to guide you through it. There was community celebration.
0:21.2	There was ways to honor the ancestors or to ensure that your loved one had safe passage into the afterlife.
0:28.7	Today we're going to talk about death. And for many of us who grew up in fundamentalism,
0:32.5	our early years or even our early conversions, if we were very young, was rooted deeply in the fear of hell
0:38.6	and eternal punishment after death. I know for me I prayed the first sinner's prayer,
0:43.3	because I prayed several, of course, trying to make sure I wouldn't go to hell. I prayed it
0:47.2	when I was five. Really motivated by fear of what might happen to me in the afterlife. I had hell
0:53.6	nightmares. And today, we live in a
0:57.0	culture that is really opposed to talking about death, sitting in grief. We don't know how to
1:01.9	sit with people or help them. We're usually so unprepared, not just for end of life, but how to
1:08.2	even have those conversations. Today Today we're going to remove the
1:11.4	stigma and lean into a journey that we all have to take. And we're going to start by diving
1:16.6	into ancient death traditions from ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia, some of the early Israelites,
1:22.9	solemn burials, and we're going to even go down into Africa with some of the mass dances to celebrate
1:28.9	those tribes. And then we're going to speak with Britna Savarice, who is a death dula. She works
1:34.3	professionally helping people prepare for the end of life and to make that final transition.
1:38.9	She's a Dallas death dula offering end of life planning and preparation, grief support,
1:44.1	visual sitting, ritual
1:45.1	guidance, and she focuses on the deconstruction of fear around death.
	...

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