Welcome back to the peripheral. The last couple weeks have been a little hard trying to get this episode out, so I apologize for the delay. I had some of the worst audio issues ever, and I did my best to clean it up. Today's topic is death. On this

episode I speak with two guests, Hannah, a lady who has suffered loss and death most

of her life. The second guest, Courtney, is a Victorian hair artist who has a background in death, mourning, in ways we dispose of ourselves once we pass away.

I'm Hannah and when people hear my story, like they kind of get surprised.

They don't know how to react.

When people ask me about, they say like, oh, where's your mom or where's your dad?

When you have someone that's died in your family and someone asks you that,

your immediate thought is, oh, I wish you hadn't have asked that.

And it's not because we don't want to talk about it.

It's because we know that we're about to make you feel like an asshole.

We're asking.

But people who have lost others don't want people to feel like an asshole.

So I kind of explained, you know, when I was five, my uncle passed away.

And that kind of started my mom's downward spiral a little bit.

But it definitely ramped up her alcohol use. I was a child,

so I didn't really recognize the correlation between what had happened and her changing.

And she was fairly close with her brother, I'm assuming, right? Yeah, it was her younger brother.

It was her only sibling. And then when I was 10, my dad passed away. And my parents

weren't married since I was very young. They got divorced probably before I was even one. But they

were very close. They were very good friends. And she definitely took that really hard for herself,

and I think for me also. And when I was young, I always had a fear of my parents

passing away. My parents were older when they had me. They both weren't in the best of health.

...