Podcast #149 Judith Letting Go: Six Months in the World’s Smallest Death Cafe – Mark Dowie, Award-winning Journalist and AuthorPodcast

I think it is fair to say that Mark Dowie’s latest book is unlike any other he’s written. Brief and intensely personal, Mark writes about his experience with Judith Tannenbaum, poet and friend-of-a-friend who suffers from a debilitating yet often invisible illness with severe pain. Mark becomes a guide, dear friend and “amateur doula” for her as they share conversations and thoughts as she lives her final months. In this episode, he and I discuss Death Cafes, the Final Exit Network, Compassion and Choices, and of course the book, Judith Letting Go: Six Months in the World’s Smallest Death Cafe.

Transcript

Diane Hullet: Hi, I’m Diane Hullet and welcome to the Best Life, Best Death podcast. Today, my guest is an investigative historian and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism professor. Welcome to Mark Dowie. Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited because Mark’s publicist reached out because he’s written, well, you’ve written a number of books and you may want to, you know, introduce yourself and describe some of those, but the one that really caught my eye and that y’all reached out to me about was your most recent book called Judith Letting Go, six months in the world’s smallest death cafe.

And it’s really this intimate look at Mark’s experience with a friend who was dying. So We’re going to talk about that experience and about this book and kind of digress. However, we digress. 

Mark Dowie: I have to stop you now and tell you that she is. And she instructed me all through this process, never to describe her as dying.

She was going to die, but she was. She, if you saw her, you would never think she had an affliction of any kind unless she dove on the floor in pain, which she did frequently. But, but she was not dying. I 

Diane Hullet: love that. 

Mark Dowie: Yeah, she had to end her life. 

Diane Hullet: We’re living until we die, right? Until we’re dead, basically. And so that was really her approach.

Part of what was kind of. Radical and moving about her approach was I love that. Mark was never to use the word dying. Yeah. So tell us, you know, what, how, what do you want to say to introduce yourself in reference to this book? 

Mark Dowie: So the other semantic instruction I had with from Judith was never to describe what she was doing a suicide.

Now we can get in that later into that later, but it’s very, very important that that people understand. Well, she had planned her death. She, she was not committing suicide. All right. Okay. We can go back to that. 

Diane Hullet: Yep. 

Mark Dowie: Now, yeah, this, this book is a departure for me Diane, a big departure. I’m, as you said, an investigative historian.

All my previous books have been serious nonfiction histories, mostly and investigative histories are, revisionist histories that use classic and journalistic investigative skills to revise history. So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve done four of those and a bunch of other books, but so that that’s my background. 

I I’ve been a reporter, an editor, a publisher. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve wallowed in media for over 50 years and done a little bit of everything. 

Diane Hullet: Did you say wallowed? Was that the word you use? I like that wallowed in media. Yeah. I mean, you’re, you know, your name came up with mother Jones magazine, which is like out of the seventies or sixties, or I don’t even know it’s old.

Mark Dowie: 75. I love it. We started it. And I I left in 85. So yeah, mother Jones is definitely, and I did everything there. I was general manager, publisher, editor had just about every job you could have at mother Jones. Incredible, 

Diane Hullet: incredible. And then, so after these bigger works, these more in depth works, as you said, these kind of more investigative works, how did your relationship with, with this woman, Judith come into being?

Mark Dowie: Yeah a mutual friend of ours called me. I didn’t know Judith, and a friend of mine who knew Judith called me and said that she thought that Judith was she knew that Judith was about to end her life, and that didn’t bother her that much. It was the way she was going to do it that bothered her, and she asked me to try to First of all, talk her out of doing it that way and steer her toward a better, more sensible, and more appropriate given her condition, a more appropriate way to end her life.

So, and I’ve done this before, and my, our, Kate, our mutual friend, knew that I had done, End of life guidance just as a volunteer not I wasn’t working for a final exit network or anybody Although I have worked with them. i’ve never worked for them. So and i’d done it and kate knew that so she said, please try to steer judith in a more sensible direction And I agreed to do that and I called judith told her that kate had called me judith said come on over Let’s talk and she lives in el cerrito You know where that is a few miles from here across the richmond san rafael bridge and I went over and You you know, I didn’t see her every day, but I communicated with her every day for the next six months one way or another, long phone calls tea at her place and a lot of emails back and forth.

Diane Hullet: Was there anyone else, you know, was she able to talk to other family or friends in the same kind of way? Or were, were you kind of her real connection to exploring the end of life really directly? 

Mark Dowie: Her mother was still alive at the time, and she did not tell her mother what she was going to do. Her daughter was, is still alive, and her daughter definitely knew what she was going to do, as did her niece and her sister.

But that’s about it. Family. I think outside of family, Kate and I and maybe one or two other people later knew what she was about to do. She did not want to make a big public thing out of this. She, she definitely wanted to communicate with people about it, but not while she was still alive.

Diane Hullet: Right. And that was part of the book. I mean, you talked to her about, hey, I think I’m going to write this up. And she was like, okay. 

Mark Dowie: Well, I didn’t say it quite that way. Then I said, I asked for her permission the last day we were together. That was the day before she left. I asked her if I could you know, ever write about our friendship or publication.

She said yes. And I then asked her if there was anything we had said or exchanged in writing or that she would want me to leave out. And she surprised me because we had some pretty tough conversations. She surprised me and said, no. So it’s all here. You know, except for what I forgotten.

Diane Hullet: Except for what escapes you. 

Mark Dowie: Which at my age, a lot escapes me. 

Diane Hullet: A lot escapes you. So I, I love this cause you, you call yourself an amateur doula. Can you say more about that? 

Mark Dowie: Well, yeah, I, you know, during this time I watched the, I’m going to call it the doula industry making a transition that I wasn’t completely comfortable with because doulas go way, way back, but both birth and death doulas go way back in history.

And they’ve always been like midwives. They were always, you know, they came, they helped, they left. They didn’t take any money. They didn’t need to be trained. They just had a sense of how to help somebody make an exit or make an entry. And I love that whole history of the doulas, both the birth and death doulas.

 And then. It that still has became like a profession. Where I think I don’t think you need a license, but almost, I mean, you’ve got to go to school. You’re supposed to charge for it. I can’t imagine charging anyone who’s about to die to help them die. I mean, I just. It’s not in my wheelhouse. I couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t conceive of it.

So so, but I still, I mean, I’m, I’m doing what doulas do and, and what you do and when you have done but I, I don’t, I can’t call myself a doula because I don’t have a license. 

Diane Hullet: I was like, my, my thing is always like, shouldn’t there be a doula in every family? Like, isn’t this the aunt cousin or the, the person who just is not afraid to walk this, whether it’s, whether it’s birth or death.

Right. 

Mark Dowie: I think there are actually in large families. I had a dual in my family, my stepmother, my mother died when she was, when we were very young, when she was very young and my father remarried and a nurse. And she was a nurse on a cancer ward and she was the death talker on the ward because she was the only person, doctors, nurses, and everybody who was comfortable talking death with patients and their families.

She was a living death doula, right? And a working nurse in a cancer ward. What a, what better place for a death doula, right? Yeah. 

Diane Hullet: Did you, did you, did you talk to her about that? Remember having those conversations? Yeah. 

Mark Dowie: I adored her and, and, and admired her tremendously for that reason and others, but oh yeah, we talked about that a lot.

Yeah, 

Diane Hullet: you know, it’s interesting. I totally get the tension of service and payment. I do think it’s a really interesting question. And at the same time, I have this frustration that I feel like our medical system relies on a huge unpaid network of caregivers, right? Family caregivers are the backbone of the medical system for the elderly.

And is that right? You know, and, and I think we’re being asked as family caregivers, To do more and more, even more kind of in a medical sense, like, you know, you’re going to need to go home and know how to do these medical procedures for your person who just had a bone marrow transplant. So it’s very, I, I, I agree with you that there is this kind of interesting tension between what’s just service and showing up for each other as humans and what’s a career and legitimate work.

I don’t know the answer. Yeah. 

Mark Dowie: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with. The industry that is saying you can’t call yourself a doula unless you go to school, get a license, pay a fee, and charge for your service. 

Diane Hullet: Right, right, right, right. But the, yeah, the, it, so we’ve got some industries that are kind of complicated right now, don’t we?

So, so back to Judith. I mean, is it worth, is it, is it relevant to tell people what she was suffering with? 

Mark Dowie: She had a very rare medical condition called severe foraminal stenosis. And severe is the operative word because a lot of people have foraminal stenosis, and I’ll just give you a quick description of that.

 The foramina are the, are the little passages in your spine through which all your nerves pass into your body, right? And they’re just, they’re really just holes in the spine. And, and when they seize up, That’s, that’s when you, one of the ways you can have a pinched nerve is when you get stenosis in a foramina.

If you get severe foraminal stenosis, that means they’re all seizing up, right? And so if you’ve ever had a pinched nerve, multiply it times 20. For 30, right? And that’s that’s what framily stenosis feels like when you have an attack. And I was, I was unaware of it. And I was, when I met Judas, she just seemed like you look, you seem right now and all of a sudden, one day she dove on the floor, gritting her teeth, kicking the floor and apologizing because she’d had an attack.

 And she said, I have to stay flat on my back on the floor for the rest of this, our, our meeting today. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’ve said it’s the only way I can endure this suffering and it was, it was agony. I was watching agony that I’d never seen before. So I immediately understood why she wanted out.

Right. When I saw 

Diane Hullet: when I 

Mark Dowie: saw many of those attacks over the next six months. So, and I understood immediately why she wanted that because it was horrible to watch. 

Diane Hullet: And when she was in the pain, she was in it, but, but then it would subside and she could move around and, and do things. 

Mark Dowie: Well, yes and no. I mean, it would subside while I was there.

She’d pretty much stay on the floor if she was having an attack a couple of times and these both these times are in the book. Actually, the phone rang while she was on the floor and she got up and staggered to the phone because she, you know, she wanted to talk to people. They were calling her. So, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t easy for her.

I could see it was, it was, she had to cross the room to get to the phone and it was she was in real pain. So yeah. Wow. For aminal stenosis is, is there’s not a lot of literature about it because it’s a rare condition, but it is in one medical journal, I found it was described as potentially terminal, which is interesting because a lot of states that it now have assistance laws require you to be terminal according to three doctors, right?

You know, those rules. And so that, That would have qualified her, but in California, it didn’t it wasn’t enough. And it, at first it didn’t qualify her with Final Exit Network, but when they saw, came and saw her and saw her medical record, they changed their mind. 

Diane Hullet: Interesting. So in a way, it’s like it was one of those gray areas that are still being figured out with some of these services and help from people.

Judith was a poet. Tell us about that. 

Mark Dowie: Yeah. Wonderful poet. And she taught poetry in elementary school in Mendocino off the coast from here. And then Laterally taught poetry in the California prison system. And I talk frequently with one of her poets in the California prison system and read works of her others.

He’s, he’s, was nominated for Poet Laureate of California. Brilliant poet, Scoop Spoon Jackson. And she She and Spoon wrote a sort of mutual biography of themselves and each other and their relationship. It’s a wonderful book called By Heart. By Judith Ann Spoon Jackson but so she, she taught, and the, the poets that learned from her are still in love with her, really in, in prison and out.

She was a good teacher and a really good poet and I’m a amateur poet, but she encouraged me to write poetry, which I did, and she helped me a lot improve my poetry. 

Diane Hullet: Wow. That’s, that’s incredible. She, she touched a lot of people in her writing work and her poetry work and her teaching work. And then I think she’s touching a lot of people in her death through the shared story of what you brought forward.

Mark Dowie: Absolutely. And there were, and there was a book that was published before she died called The Book of Judith, which was about her and her poetry and her work and her friends. And it’s a wonderful book. Oh, you have it there? 

Diane Hullet: I don’t have it there. I’m going to have to look for that one. I was remembering the part.

You know, the subtitle of the book is six months in the world’s smallest death cafe. Can you just kind of give a blurb of what a death cafe is and how it came up that you came up with that kind of tongue in cheek title for the two of you 

Mark Dowie: death cafes exist. They were started. There’s actually two complete competing competing histories of death cafes.

I’ll just give you the one that I think is probably true is they started early in the millennia. Okay. In the UK. And what a deaf cafe is, is just a small group of people, six seven, eight, ten max, I think. They’d get together periodically, like once a month, briefly, usually an hour or two they drink tea, eat cookies, and talk about deaf. 

And they’re As I say, one started in England, there are now 17, 000 known death cafes in the world, operating in 83 different countries. So I’m heartened by that. That means people are talking about death, and we need to talk about that. We need to think about it. We need to read about it. We need to consider it because it’s important.

The only thing that’s inevitable really, even you can even get away with taxes, but you can’t get away with that. 

Diane Hullet: I think you and I were talking before I hit record too. We were saying really anyone over 50, if you’re not dead yet, you better be interested in this conversation. 

Mark Dowie: Exactly. And death cafes are a wonderful way to do that. 

Just agree to get together with a half a dozen other people and agree to just once a month. Talk, think converse, laugh, joke about death, whatever, right? But do it, right? So I, I had early in my relationship with Judith, I suggested that we join a death cafe or create one. And there were three within walking distance of her house.

So we could have walked to one. And she thought about it for a few seconds and said, look I think we have one and this is as big as I want it to get. So that’s why the subtitle for the book is Six Months in the Small And we’d laugh every now and then about being members of the world’s smallest staff cafe.

Diane Hullet: It’s great. It’s great. I think, you know, there’s death cafes. There’s death over dinner is kind of another movement that I think maybe has a website and you can get ideas for questions and then death over drafts. So got meeting at brew pubs and having these conversations. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of roads in for people.

And, and for a lot of people who attend those kinds of things, it’s probably still somewhat arms length. Right. And for Judith with her. I don’t even want to call it chronic pain. It’s like chronic severe pain. It, it was far closer than arm’s length. 

Mark Dowie: Yeah. It was, well, the, you know, the primal stenosis comes, goes from mild to severe.

 And hers was severe and I, I read her, her medical stack was this high and I read through the whole thing and they all said, you know, there’s nothing we can do. There, opioids do not work with framily stenosis. Nothing works. There was no painkiller for it. Which is why she, she decided she just couldn’t live with it anymore.

Do you think, 

Diane Hullet: did she decide like as the pain continued, I mean, when you met her, she had decided she would end her life. She, that was, that was where my job 

Mark Dowie: was to, to, to encourage her to do it a different way, but she’d already decided to do it. Yes. 

Diane Hullet: Do you think, did she, you know, I know some people feel like they want certain things in order, or maybe they’re waiting for certain things to fall apart before they have chosen their date.

And some people just choose a date. What was her. Kind of approach to knowing when it would be time. 

Mark Dowie: She actually originally chose her birthday the following year and the pain just got to be too much. And she abbreviated it by two months. That was a blow to me and a blow to other people who were expecting her to live for another two months.

But so it just, but that said to me that. You know, this pain is too much. She’s got to do it. And I honored her decision. I suffered a bit for it because I wanted to spend another two months with her. But anyway, there it was. And I understood completely your decision. 

Diane Hullet: Is it easy to like if I ask you, what were some of the gems that fell out of that time together?

Is that easy to pull a couple of gems forward? 

Mark Dowie: Well, We laughed a lot. I mean, and I think that people who talk about death that we probably don’t laugh as much as we did. She loved to laugh and she was very funny. So we laughed a lot and we, we exchanged funny stories about our lives and funny stories about other people’s deaths and people who she knew who are now dead and who would come and have, her father was a professor at UCLA and, and Abe Maslow and very famous people used to have dinner at their table and she would tell me those stories and they were always funny.

 About how they would kid these super intellectuals and she would at the dinner table and but she I can’t think of, well, she once asked me how I wanted to be remembered and I’d written a poem about that and it’s in the book and I, I cited the poem to her, recited the book, thinking she’d be horrified because it is kind of a gruesome poem. 

And to my surprise and my pleasure, she laughed out loud, but that’s Judith, right? She was pretty easy, pretty quick to laugh and, and, and very, very easily saw the absurdity and everything that was absurd. And so that was a moment I remember, and I, I, I, I wish I’d known you were going to ask me.

I would have gone through my notes and come up with a few more. 

Diane Hullet: We can pause and think. Oh, I love this quote. I’ll read this quote. 

Mark Dowie: Okay, 

Diane Hullet: early on. I love it. You talk about how you kind of sought a vocabulary to help you make sense of mortality. And I love that idea. And just like you said at the beginning that Judith.

Didn’t talk about dying. She wasn’t dying. She was living and then she was going to end her life and she would be dead. So you, you talked about a lot of different famous people who’ve, who’ve covered the topic, you know, Carlos Castaneda, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Philip. Ooh, I don’t know how to say his last name.

Aris. 

Mark Dowie: Aris. 

Diane Hullet: Aris. Frank Ostaseski, Sarah Davidson, B. J. Miller, Katie Butler. Then you write, But ultimately, we agreed to favor the counsel of a Yale University professor of medicine named David Katz. Dr. Katz reminds us that, quote, We do not own life. We wear it for a while. It doesn’t belong to us. It flows through us.

Death is no more enemy to us than autumn is to summer. It’s what happens next, the common end to every story. And you say, of course, Judith, Judith loved that. 

Mark Dowie: She did. Yeah. And he also said that ultimately pain and suffering are a good excuse to die and, and Judith loved that too. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah, because that was, that was her reality in her physical body that was so, so difficult.

Did she have a story that she told herself or understood, you know, in terms of the body and soul separating at death? Did she have a belief that she shared about that? 

Mark Dowie: She was a Buddhist. So you know, she believed in some degree in reincarnation. Yes and she’s she’d been practicing Buddhist Buddhism for a lot of her life.

It is and Buddhist. So yeah, she did have a sense of of their being an afterlife of some kind. Although Buddhists don’t like the word afterlife, they, you know, they, they like reincarnation. I mean, your soul moves into new, which literally means into new meat. Right, 

Diane Hullet: right, right. Inn into a new, into a new body suit, right?

Yeah, exactly. Whatever meat suit. 

Mark Dowie: Right. 

Diane Hullet: I love it. At the end of the book, you come up with, you know, this list of questions, right? And I don’t know if these are. I’ll just read a couple of them because I think they’re interesting. Can one be completely happy while fearing death? Can life or death be understood alone, absent the other?

Is fearing death simply fearing non existence? Does death give life a sense of urgency it would otherwise lack? And there’s a few more. I mean, I think these are such beautiful, big, philosophical questions. And I don’t think you and Judith were really, you know, it isn’t like you were trying to answer them precisely.

You were more interested in what were the questions. 

Mark Dowie: We were exploring the questions and I put that list there Diane, because the best death cafes usually begin with a question. So when they end it, when you end a death cafe, you say, all right, Diane, you’re bringing the question to the next cafe.

 Any question you want, or you can even give us a forewarning and plant the question a few days so we can think about it. And those are the kind of questions that I think would open an exciting death cafe. Any of those questions 

Diane Hullet: for sure, because they’re more philosophic. There isn’t a right answer.

These are, this is grappling with the biggest mystery, right? And, and it’s, it, it can be daunting, but it can also be exciting. I think, especially done in community. 

Mark Dowie: And the thing I like about cafes, as opposed to the doula practice, which is fine, is that you’re not dealing with advanced directives and wills and what’s to be done with your remains and all of the mundane stuff that everybody who’s coming close to the end has to deal with.

Right. Later for that. This is an opportunity to deal with the real stuff, right? The hard stuff, right? The philosophy. Right. 

Diane Hullet: I think it’s interesting. People, people often think that that’s sort of what I do. And I’m like, that’s the least interesting piece is making sure your paperwork is in order. The much more interesting pieces, you know, what are my loose ends?

What if I, what is incomplete? What would I regret if I didn’t seize and do now? Yeah. Well, ultimately you helped Judith connect with Final Exit Network and ultimately that provided a solution for her that worked and was more favorable to what she wanted to do, to how she wanted to end her life. Is that an excellent resource for people?

Mark Dowie: I think so. You know, it’s interesting. Quick history of finalized the network. It’s a spinoff from the hemlock society, which you and I are both old enough to remember. The gray 

Diane Hullet: hair, the gray hair tells it all. We’ve heard society and mother Jones magazine 

Mark Dowie: and Derrick Humphrey. You know quit, and it, it split into two organizations.

One is Final Exit, which is named after his book, Final Exit, which is an absolutely classic book about it, which he wrote after he helped his wife make her final exit. She was in pain. And the, the and so Final Exit Network was one of the organizations in Compassion and Choices, which is also a counseling organization and, and a lobby.

For death with dignity laws around the country, and I’ve worked with both of them on both of those issues. And final exit is they send guides. So if you contact, anybody can contact them and say I need help. I want to make an exit and they’ll send usually two guides to your house and talk it through.

And they will not take everybody. They, in fact, they wouldn’t take Judith at first. Because they didn’t think pain was, was enough, but then they read her medical record and realized it was intractable and incurable pain, and they reconsidered and did. And they actually wrote up her death in their publication Final Exit Network’s publication which is, and I’m, I, I really like Final Exit Network.

They’re, they’re taking risks in some states, which were doing what they’re doing is illegal, and they have been indicted in three states, George, Arizona, and I think it’s Missouri. You have Missouri. And they, they actually lost one of those cases. And so they’re, they’re pushing the envelope.

Yeah. 

Diane Hullet: They’re on the front line. They’re, they’re pushing and trying for some radical reinvention. 

Mark Dowie: California still has a law against doing what I was doing, doing what we were doing. It’s an ancient, ancient law. And it’s just one sentence long and it, it reads anyone who assists, advises, or encourages a suicide has committed a felony.

That’s it. That’s the law. But, and I don’t, I mean, I know, I do know three people who have served time for violating that law, but they both inherited money. So, which I didn’t. So That’s why that’s why they got in. They were 

Diane Hullet: prosecuted. 

Mark Dowie: Oh, 

Diane Hullet: I see. They inherited money from the person who died and therefore something to gain.

Mark Dowie: Yes. So, but other than that, what they were doing, and well, In one case, it was a family member. And in the other case, it was a lover. So and that was neither of those were true with me either. And I did, did not make any money. So I think I’m okay, although a strict, a strict, a strict interpretation. I, I did not discourage her enough.

Right? So that’s encouragement, isn’t it? 

Diane Hullet: Right, right. Oh, wow. So interesting. Well, I just think with the boomers aging, you know, with that demographic aging, I think all of this is just more on the radar as more states pass medical aid and dying dignity, death kind of laws and as more people age, I think more people are going to be looking for an exit that Feels respectful and has dignity and has choice in it and has autonomy.

I mean, your, your generation, I’m at the tail end of the generation. These are the autonomous, we’ll do it. We’ll figure it out people. So I don’t think they’re going to go into that dark night quietly. 

Mark Dowie: Well, look, what’s happened just recently in our lives, in the world. I mean, There are now 10 states in the united states where it’s legal for doctors to assist people in death, right?

And I think there are bills pending in about another 25 states they won’t all pass it But I think that we’re going to have it canada passed it the entire country The uk is considering it and and and I think there’s seven or eight countries in the world where the entire country supports it, so it’s a worldwide movement, which is heartening and helped by death cafes and activists and people who, you know, believe that we’re instructed all our lives to control our lives.

We should be allowed to control our deaths, right? Yeah. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah. I love it. I love it, Mark. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. I I think this is really important for people to consider and that even a deaf cafe as small as two people has an impact and has has an experience and I for sure have witnessed how helping someone guiding someone.

Providing them both information and ideas about ritual and stepping forward and going really deliberately and intentionally towards their death, the impact that has on the partner on the community on the broader community on people who hear the story, you know, the ripple effects really keep building.

And so I think a book like yours is another way for people to kind of access that both information and advocacy and and learn about what the options are. 

Mark Dowie: Well, the heartening thing for me about this book Diane, is that and I write books to be read, not to be sold. And I’ve gotten in trouble with a lot of publishers for saying that, but I do.

And when I do book readings now, people come up to get their books signed. Never ever have they turned up with less than two books in their hand. I, and I did one last week and a woman came up with a bag full of books, right. And just said, this is for Jack. This is for Tess. This is for maybe this, and just had me sign them all.

There were gifts. That’s what’s driving the sales, his gifts, and it is a gift. It is a gift to give somebody this book. 

Diane Hullet: It is. It is. Oh, that’s great. That’s great. Well, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. I know you’re a busy, busy person, and I love that you’re out doing book signings and reading to people and sharing this magnificent story of your friendship and your walking.

Mark Dowie: Thank you. Nice to meet you, Diane. 

Diane Hullet: Thanks so much. You’ve been listening to the best life, best stuff podcast. You can find out more about Mark and Judith letting go at. What’s your website? 

Mark Dowie: Oh, I don’t have a website. Oh, Google it. Google is my website. If you Google my name, you will actually learn a lot about me.

You will learn 

Diane Hullet: a lot about Mark. This is true. More than 

Mark Dowie: I would ever put in a website because all the people who don’t like me are on Google too. And there’s plenty. Remember, I’m an investigative reporter. I’ve made a lot of enemies. It’s 

Diane Hullet: true. It’s true. So, Judith Letting Go, you can find on Amazon. 

Mark Dowie: Or, or, or the publisher, what New Village Press.

They, they 

Diane Hullet: prefer it, 

Mark Dowie: and it’s, it’s actually cheaper to do it that way, and they prefer to sell direct. So so. 

Diane Hullet: Let’s redo that part. Let’s say you can find the book at New Village Press. 

Mark Dowie: Or, yeah, or your, your local bookstore will order it. 

Diane Hullet: Love it. Love it. Terrific. And as always, you can find out more about the work I do at Best Life.

Best death.com. Thanks for listening.