When Desire Outlives the Body
I recorded this episode in Berlin — the city my mother once called home, and the place I brought her back to in hopes of finding some kind of peace, or beauty, or closure. Instead, what I found was diapers in hotel bathrooms, bureaucracy in cold German offices, hospital corridors, rage, tenderness, shame, laughter, and the kind of intimacy no one prepares you for.
This is not a clean story. It is messy and visceral and full of contradiction. My mother is eighty-four, with dementia, and still lights up like a schoolgirl when a handsome man walks by. She is storm and tragedy and beauty — part Judy Garland, part Marilyn Monroe, part my very own haunting. She lived for drama and eros, numbed herself with pills and drink, and still remains hungry for love, even now.
In this episode, I open my grief diaries and speak the truth: the rage, the shame, the exhaustion, the moments of bone-deep hatred, and also the tenderness that keeps cracking me open. Because eros is not just sex or romance. It is survival, it is presence, it is the ache that keeps us tethered to life even as memory dissolves.
This is an episode about what it means to live and to love when the body declines but desire refuses to die. About what it means to face your mother — and yourself — in the most raw and unfiltered ways.
Because eros doesn’t retire. Desire outlives the body. And the mess of being alive might just be enough.