Journalist Maggie Jones has spent her career exploring the tender, often taboo experiences that define us—from grief and death to sex, aging, and desire. In this deeply personal conversation, we talk about the home funeral my family held for my mother in 2019, which Maggie witnessed and later wrote about in her powerful feature, The Movement to Bring Death Closer.

Together, we explore what it means to stay present with the dying, what we gain from tending to the bodies of our loved ones, and the deeper questions her work continues to raise: How do we reclaim what our culture tells us to turn away from? What does it mean to be fully alive—even in the face of loss?

Maggie Jones is a journalist and longtime writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Mother Jones, and The Guardian. She has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a senior Ochberg Fellow at Columbia’s Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. She currently teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.