Death: the podcast

Hosted ByDr Arian Elfant

New Orleans has a unique relationship to death: we have a ridiculously high murder rate, we party at funerals, and we end up above ground. Death: the podcast tells the stories of personal experiences of death - fear of it, laughing at it, life-changing brushes with it, dealing with lost loved ones, and our own inevitable and unknown heart-stopping moment. Through confronting death we learn what it is to be alive.

Allison Durant’s Motherless Daughters – Death: the podcast – It’s New Orleans

Allison Durant’s mother died on the heels of her high school graduation.

Allison Durant, Jane Durant

For years before, Jane had been absent from Allison’s life, mostly in hospitals, fighting a losing battle with lung cancer. Allison’s teenage invincibility gave her the strength to brush her mother’s death aside and throw herself wholeheartedly into her own hectic life.

Soon enough Allison was married and had 3 kids. It wasn’t until Allison’s own children entered adolescence that she was able to stare her mother’s death in the face and admit it was one of the defining moments of her life. Coming to terms with alcohol abuse and finding expression for her buried grief, led Allison to form a New Orleans chapter of a national organization called Motherless Daughters.

Allison Durant Motherless Daughters group

Motherless Daughters has helped Allison deal with her mother’s death, and is helping other women – of all ages – deal with theirs.

Allison Durant

When Allison agreed to sit down and talk with Arian about Motherless Daughters for Death: the podcast, it coincided with the first time her mother’s death was not the largest loss she was facing. This edition of Death: the podcast traces a full circle. Of life and death.