Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
Available On Air Stations
Watch Live

Arts & Culture

Into The Night: Portraits Of Life And Death

Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, vlogger and bestselling author, co-founded The Order of the Good Death and is a leading spokesperson for the death positive movement.
Courtesy of Paul Sanderson
Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, vlogger and bestselling author, co-founded The Order of the Good Death and is a leading spokesperson for the death positive movement.

Airs Monday, March 26, 2018 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV + Friday, March 30 at Noon on KPBS 2

Hear intimate stories of nine men and women changed by their encounters with mortality.

How do we live with death in our eye? With defiant rage as Dylan Thomas exhorts us? With gentle acceptance? Or, more commonly, with denial?

What is our story and will it sustain us at the end?

Advertisement

"Into The Night: Portraits Of Life And Death" features nine men and women of uncommon eloquence and intelligence grappling with these questions.

The people featured are Caitlin Doughty, an alternative mortician and bestselling author with her own YouTube following; Adam Frank, an astrophysicist and NPR commentator; Gabriel Byrne, renowned actor of stage and screen; Jim Crace, award-winning novelist and environmentalist; Max More, a cryonicist and futurist; Stephen Cave, a British philosopher; Phyllis Tickle, a near-death experience spokesperson and religious historian; Pastor Vernal Harris, a Baptist minister and advocate for hospice care in African-American communities; Jeffrey Piehler, a Mayo Clinic heart surgeon.

For them, death is no longer an abstraction, far off into the future.

They come from all walks of life, all ages, the dying and the healthy, believers and skeptics, some recognizable, some obscure.

They have been shocked into mortality and are forever changed.

Advertisement

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

"Into The Night" is on Facebook, Instagram, and you can follow @intothenightdoc on Twitter. #IntotheNight

CREDITS:

Writer, Director, Producer: Helen Whitney. Editor: Kris Liem. Director of Photography: Paul G. Sanderson III. Senior Producer: Katie Taber. Principal Still Photography: Rocky Schenck. Original Music by Ed Bilous and Greg Kalember. Senior Story Consultant and Reporter: Jane Barnes. Senior Reporter: Lesley Karsten. Narrated by Sharon Stone. Archivist and Associate Producer: Emily Calhoun.