‘Save a seat at the table for death’

A new SBS podcast that explores grief, death care and how to deal with what happens ‘at the end of the road’.

When Anthony Levin’s mother became terminally ill in 2014, he reached out to his friend Nadine Cohen, whose parents had died years earlier. “Because Nadine had already been through it, she was immensely supportive when I was going through it,” says Levin. "No one else really could hold space for what I was going through among my friends.”

“I lost my parents when I was in my early twenties and I wasn't necessarily emotionally equipped to deal with that,” says Cohen. “I realised how Jewish I was in death. It was ingrained in me more than I thought it was, being secular and non-practicing since my teens.”

Fast forward to late 2022 and Cohen, a writer and refugee advocate, has been working on a podcast since 2020 about death and dying for SBS. Her initial focus was to interview people from different cultures, ethnicities, religions, or any kind of tradition, about their death rituals and their beliefs about death. But as the Covid years endured and the world changed, Cohen’s interest in death evolved and she reached out to Levin, a human rights lawyer and writer, to host, produce and write a different kind of show together.

The result is Grave Matters, “an SBS podcast about grief, death care and the people helping us better understand what happens at the end of the road”.

Cohen and Levin decided to take a broader view of death and dying, exploring death thematically with themes including climate change, Covid, how we dispose of bodies after we die, intergenerational trauma, and war.