Welcome to Rumble Strip, Vermont. I'm Erica Heilman. Today's show is called Mortality Tales, stories about death and dying.

Most of us don't like to think about or talk about death very much.

And even though we know death will come, it's still

possible to believe that death only happens to unlucky people. If we stay busy

enough, caught up enough in the momentum of our own lives, maybe death can be denied.

Certainly the whole unpleasant topic can be ignored.

And then something happens.

Someone is sick, someone is dying, or someone is dead, and suddenly there it is.

For the last year I've been doing interviews for the Wake Up to Dying Project,

a project that encourages people to think and talk about death and dying.

The goal is to help people be a little more prepared, both practically and emotionally,

for our own deaths and the deaths of loved ones.

Today's show features an interview I did a year ago with Tim Kasten of Middlesex, Vermont.

Tim has experienced more death in his family than many of us,

and he has significant medical conditions of his own.

Death has become a pressing consideration, and as both a Buddhist and a scientist, he approaches

the subject with intense curiosity. Here are some of his stories. We were on a camping trip when I was eight years old down on the outer banks in North Carolina.

And my brothers and I were all sleeping

in a big army tent on a tent platform right on the beach.

And it was a hot night with lots of mosquitoes.

And for whatever reason, I was awake in the middle of the night,

thinking that I might live a hundred years,

...