Last year before lockdown, I had an experience we probably all had, as more and more people were falling ill with this mysterious virus, a COVID scare.

Mine came with a celebrity element in that the person who may have transmitted the virus to me was Ira Glass, the big radio star.

It was that last day of going about our normal lives in March of

2020 and everything was starting to shut down and my office was closing. So I packed up my laptop

and my keyboard and some notebooks into a few bags to head home. But my last stop was this one

final interview we had scheduled in the studios of This American Life.

Ira and I sat together in a very small audio booth for an hour, talking about the art of

storytelling. And then I left. The next day, his assistant emailed me to say that I might have

coronavirus because Ira Glass might have coronavirus coronavirus because he had shaken hands with someone

who had come down with coronavirus. And I remember thinking, this cannot be how I go. And that was my first

brush with mortality during the pandemic. And the first of many. For the next few months, mortality

checked in with all of us very regularly.

At the grocery store, on the train,

passing a neighbor on the stairs.

All of us, at the same time,

had to come up against this harsh reality

that we're not invincible.

This is FT Weekend, the podcast. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. This weekend we're thinking about

mortality. We're going to the extremes, looking death in the face with one of the world's top

climbers who scales these treacherous mountains with his kids, and avoiding it all together

with FT science writer Anjana Ahuja, who takes us through the

science of living for hundreds of years.

...