Emily Bingham sits down with Lauren Carroll, a death educator, former funeral director, and co-founder of La Mort and the Death Wives, whose work weaves community and family back into the death space. What begins as one woman’s terror of cemeteries becomes a lifelong devotion after a single, shattering assignment: at 21, working a typewriter in the back corner of a funeral home, Lauren was sent to collect a stillborn baby from a hospital. Shaking, nauseous, certain she could not do it, she instead felt an overwhelming wave of calm and love pour out of the child she cradled. In that moment her fear of death dissolved into a truth she has carried ever since: it’s just love. This continuation of love.

From that origin story, Emily and Lauren move into the heart of the conversation. They talk about why grief so often buries the love underneath it, why our culture’s refusal to sit with the dead leaves us with what Lauren calls lingering, ghosty grief, and why community, not avoidance, is the thing that actually heals. Lauren makes the case that loneliness is an unspoken epidemic, that unprocessed grief curdles into the violence and division we see everywhere, and that our ancestors already knew how to tend their own dead, make bread for neighbors, and mark death with ritual. Along the way she introduces legacy work and the Jewish tradition of the ethical will, reframing the deathbed fear that our lives didn’t matter.

In the second half, Lauren shares her own diagnosis with a rare terminal disease and the ceremonial psilocybin journey that changed her, crying for six hours and emerging, as those around her put it, a different person. She and Emily explore psilocybin as a way to lower the defenses around dying, the deep prep and integration the medicine requires, and mushrooms as decomposers and ancestral communicators. They close with the ecological cost of our death practices, the greener options of water cremation and human composting, and a shared conviction that giving our bodies back to the earth is the last, most beautiful gift we have to offer.

Key Takeaways

● Fear of death often masks love. Lauren’s transformation came the moment she felt the love a stillborn baby carried, realizing death is a continuation of love, not its end.

● Grief is not low vibration to be avoided. Your body is built to grieve, and surrendering into it, even sobbing for hours, is what actually brings relief and integration.

● We are meant to grieve in community. Direct cremation and avoidance rob us of the funerals, vigils, and rituals that let people reconnect and heal loneliness.

● Small rituals matter. A blessing over the body, a gong or candle at the threshold, an ethical will passing down your beliefs, these bookmarks help the heart and mind catch up with each other.

● Psilocybin can lower the defenses around dying. Done with intention, prep, and integration (never heroic doses), it opens the heart and helps end-of-life workers process their own grief before holding space for others.

● Our death practices can heal or harm the planet. Fire cremation and conventional burial damage the earth, while water cremation and human composting let the body return as fertilizer and continued life.

Resources Mentioned

● Terror management theory / Sheldon Solomon (previous Death and Disco guest)

● The Death Cafe

● The ethical will (Jewish legacy tradition)

● A blessing by Starhawk for tending the body after death

● Sage Warrior (book referenced in Lauren’s classes)

● Hope Edelman on how the facts stay the same but the story changes

● The Mushroom and the Cross and The Secret Religion (on mushrooms and the origins of religion)

Connect

Host, Emily Bingham

● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/

● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/

● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist

● Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/i-am-emily-bingham/

Guest, Lauren Carroll (La Mort and the Death Wives)

● Website: https://lamort.org

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deathwives/ , https://www.instagram.com/lamortcollective/

● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lauren.harrisoncarroll/

● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-carroll-deathwives/

#DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief

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