Pleasure, Power, and the Silence Around Death with Elizabeth Wood

Elizabeth Wood, a sociologist who studied gender and sexuality, found her focus shifting when her mother was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2009 and later terminal cancer in 2012. Watching her mother’s final months opened her eyes to the ways our healthcare system avoids death and how families often do the same. This deeply personal experience led Elizabeth to explore death work from a more practical and emotional place, beyond academic research.

Her mother’s story was unique. After a life of unfulfilling relationships, she discovered her identity as a sexual dominant in her late 50s. Those years, especially during peritoneal dialysis, were surprisingly freeing and fulfilling for her. She even began writing about her experience for an online sex magazine, opening a window into the joy she found in reclaiming her sexuality.

Though mother and daughter always spoke openly about sex, they struggled to talk about death. Elizabeth’s mom often received mixed messages from her medical team, with some doctors avoiding end-of-life discussions and others trying to prepare her.  Even as her health declined, she never verbally acknowledged that she was dying, though Elizabeth later found journal entries that hinted at her quiet attempts to say goodbye.

The experience revealed how little space there is in medicine to talk about both death and sexuality.  Despite being open in many parts of her life, her mother feared judgment and avoided sharing her identity with healthcare providers. Elizabeth believes this silence, rooted in stigma and power dynamics, leads people to miss out on important support and care.

https://elizabethannewood.com

Bound: A Daughter, a Domme, and an End-of-Life Story - https://www.amazon.com/Bound-Daughter-Domme-End-Life/dp/1631526308

Between Us: Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo215858659.html

https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethAnneWoodAuthor

https://www.instagram.com/elizabeth.anne.wood/

Transcript

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] This idea that kids can't handle death. What kids can't handle is abandonment. Euphemisms we use are sometimes ing. They're more likely to create a sense of fear of abandonment. Instead, if we're honest about death than what death is and that it happens to all living, things will die. It's hard, but it's better to give kids that foundation.

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end of life coach. Here on my show, I have conversations with guests. That explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself. My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects.

I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true. In this episode, sociologist Elizabeth Wood shares the personal story of her mother's final years filled with both sexual awakening and terminal illness. As her mother embraced her identity as a sexual dominant in her late fifties, she also navigated.

[00:01:00] Peritoneal dialysis and a healthcare system uncomfortable with both intimacy and mortality. Elizabeth reflects on the silences that shaped their experience of even a family that was comfortable talking about sexuality. Struggled to talk about dying. We explore the lack of space in medicine to address pleasure, identity, and emotional honesty at the end of life, especially for aging ill or disabled people.

This episode offers a compelling look at the intersection of desire, dignity, and death, and what becomes possible when we speak the unspeakable. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Elizabeth to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm really excited having this conversation with you today.

I know you wrote a book and we're gonna talk all about your book. If you wanna start us off with a little bit of backstory about who you are, where you come from, anything like that you wanna share. 

Elizabeth: Sure. And thank you so much, Jill, for having me on your podcast. This is so fun. I am a sociologist and I spent most of my time as a [00:02:00] sociologist studying gender and sexuality.

But in 2009, my mom got sick with kidney cancer. I started thinking a lot more about death and dying, and then in 2012 she got a terminal cancer and going through the process of her last eight months really showed me a lot of the gaps in our healthcare system death, denying parts of our culture, including in my own family.

And so it was through that experience that I felt really called to studying death and dying more closely in a way that was less academic and more practical. I really wanted to think about what it means to support people through the process, and that's when I started thinking about death doula work. I live in New York City.

I've been here for 25 years. I did college and graduate school in Massachusetts. New England will always feel like a home to me, but I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Been kind of all up into the northeast seaboard. 

Jill: That's great. Actually, I live right [00:03:00] outside of Philadelphia, so Yes. You're in Jersey, right?

Yeah, I'm in Jersey. Right on the other side of the bridge, I think, 'cause I've been trying to get somebody to come on the podcast to talk about the similarities between sexuality and death in our culture. I've reached out to sex therapist or whatever, like people that are on social media, like I'm a sex expert.

And a lot of them are like, no, I don't want to talk about that. Which even makes me more like, oh, oh. So like, yes, for some reason talking about death makes people super uncomfortable. But so does talking about sex, I have to admit, I am still a little uncomfortable talking about sex. Yeah, and I would consider myself sex positive in a lot of ways, but it still makes me uncomfortable.

Where death, I could talk about it all day every day and I would have no issues. I don't know. I'm excited to talk to you. Can you tell me the title of your book again? 'cause I just looked at it, but I wanna make sure I get it right because I find it totally fascinating. 

Elizabeth: The book about my mom's experience and my experience with her is called Bound a Daughter, a Dom, and an end of [00:04:00] Life story.

And so it's a book that reflects on her having discovered her sexuality as a sexual dominant late in her life. She had spent most of her adult life. Pretty celibate, like very little sex, if any. She had had some very unsatisfying sex and romantic relationships with men early in her adult life and my childhood, and was pretty fed up with men for most of my life, which as a heterosexual woman, which she was, was really difficult position to be in.

And then she had this, this recognition that she could have. Fulfilling sexual relationships with men if she was operating from this position of dominance with men who wanted to be submissive. And that was amazing. And so that began for her couple of years before the kidney cancer diagnosis. And then the kidney cancer diagnosis, I was afraid, was gonna derail the whole thing because I thought dialysis, my God, how's this gonna go?

[00:05:00] But as it turns out, the three years between. The kidney cancer diagnosis and her terminal cancer diagnosis were like the most fulfilling, most active of her life, in part because the kind of dialysis she did freed up her body. She did not do hemodialysis for most of that time. She did peritoneal dialysis, and that was an amazing freed for.

It changed a lot of things in her body in a really positive way. 

Jill: How old was she when she started becoming a dominatrix? I 

Elizabeth: can't pinpoint the exact date, but it was in her late fifties. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. In fact, she started writing at the time, so we're talking like, mm. 2000 7, 8, 9 ish. The kidney cancer diagnosis was in 2009, I think around 2009 and 10.

She was writing an article. She was writing a column for a online sex magazine called Carnal Nation about discovering your sexuality as a woman in your late fifties [00:06:00] and going into your sixties with this new realization that there's like this whole world a waiting for you '

Jill: cause. Yeah, that's one of the things that, you know, when you hear from our society and culture, right, that when you hit menopause.

I literally had somebody one day say to me. Maybe six or seven years ago. So I was like just turning 40 and she was like, if you like sex at all, you should just enjoy it now. 'cause once you hit menopause, you're just gonna hate it. And I was like, oh, that's terrible. That's wrong. Yeah. And it's like hearing that from your mom, I'm like, that's 

Elizabeth: so cool.

Well, let me say also to somebody who knows some sexuality studies. It is not unusual for women to find that they have their best sex. After menopause begins like perimenopause and postmenopausal, it's not that there aren't issues like vaginal dryness and lowered libido and all of that can be difficult, but the for, for many women, the freedom from concerns about pregnancy, the availability of tons of different kinds of lubes, so you can find one [00:07:00] that works with your body, can actually create space where your libido is freer and you can engage in sex with less of the worry.

That keeps us from enjoying ourselves. Our bodies change. We are certainly not in the category of conventional physical attractiveness that lots of people think is what's gonna draw men or women or anybody else to you as a sexual creature. But when you find the people who you have mutual attraction with, the freedom is really pretty impressive.

I think to those who have that idea in their head that sex is over when you hit menopause, not necessarily. And there's a lot of ways to prevent that from happening. 

Jill: Because I think for so many of us, we have a similar story to your mom of just negative sexual experiences when we were younger.

Unfulfilling just not great, and so we kind of go through, you know, our twenties and our thirties, that's when we're supposed to be like the most sexual 'cause again, that's when we're the most. Like conventionally attractive, but so many women that I talked to, myself [00:08:00] included, where that really was not a time for me to be like, oh, I love this.

It's like, no, this is more just something that you're supposed to do if you wanna be married, if you wanna have children. And I have found personally in my forties. That there is something I'm discovering about sex that I enjoy more. And I don't know if it's just the change in communication, being more willing to be like, no, don't like not what to do.

Yeah. You know? Or if it, I had my tubes tied. Yeah. So like for me, there was the freedom of not worrying about. Getting pregnant, not worrying about trying to get pregnant. Right After having two kids, I was like, done. I don't wanna worry about it anymore. So there was definitely a sense of freedom in that, just being able to explore things I was interested in when I was younger, but maybe didn't ever wanna talk about.

So I have found this freedom and enjoyment in sex that I never had. The thought of that going away when I hit menopause was anticipatory grief for me. I was like, no, I 

Elizabeth: finally found it. [00:09:00] You can totally keep it. Something that I think is a really important part of sexual education for people at any stage, but particularly as we're aging, which is that.

We not only potentially learn how to communicate better about sex, but we learn a lot more about what we like and what we don't like. And if we can mature in a way that gives us a feeling of more power like that, we have the authority and the power to say yes or to say no to things that we don't want or that we do want.

That alone makes sex so much better. I think like those two pieces, that we know what we like and what we don't like, and that we can communicate them more freely and that we feel free to say no. Mm-hmm. Like that's something a woman in her twenties may have a harder time with than a woman in her forties.

And of course, it depends on the relationships that we're in, right? That all depends on how much respect we have from the partners we're engaging with and how flexible they are in their willingness to. Think about sex differently than they used to. One of the things I think was so powerful in my mom's story, [00:10:00] I, when I give talks about this, I talk about kink itself as a toolbox for not just helping us have better sex sometimes, but also helping us deal with illness and aging.

The kink community is often more accepting of different body types than the mainstream sexual norms. The way people engage in kink sexuality encourage redefining what sex even means, like what counts as sex? Where can we find pleasure? How do we think of sensations? Is something painful or pleasurable?

Or is the pain pleasurable? And when we can do that, then that actually can translate into strength and and resourcefulness in dealing with medical concerns. For example, we may see that maybe we don't like pain. But pain is not intrinsically bad. It's not intrinsically something to be avoided. It can be endured.

And we can think about the ways that it operates differently in a sexual context and a medical context. [00:11:00] It gives us a place from which to think about these things differently. Like the more flexibility that we have in our thinking, the better able we are to cope with the whole range of situations. Mm.

Jill: Yeah. I love that. I found a link between death and sex in the way we deal with it in our culture. I'm just needed that you and your mom were able to talk so openly. About her finding sexual freedom later in life. And did that translate at all in the way that you were able to then talk about her illness and potential death that was coming?

How did that kind of work together at all? Or was it like, I could talk about this one thing, but I can't talk about the other at all? 

Elizabeth: What was interesting with me and my mom is that we were very open talking about sex, and we had been really my whole life, my mom was remarkable in her openness dealing with.

Our sexuality as her kids. And so I always felt supported me, her willingness to take me to Planned Parenthood when I was 17 and had my first boyfriend in high school that I wanted to have sex with, she thought I was too young, but she was [00:12:00] willing to be supportive if I was sure it was what I wanted.

When I came out as queer in college, she was super excited 'cause she figured that meant the end of men in my life and she like celebrate this queer life I was going to have. Then I ended up. Thinking of my sexuality more in terms of bisexual and pansexuality, which men, men were back involved. And she was really disappointed at first.

Um, but she was super supportive. The whole in graduate school, my dissertation was on sex work. She read the entire dissertation, helped edit it. She was incredible. So we always had an easy time talking about sex. It did not translate into an easy time talking about death. She was not. Very willing to accept the fact that she was dying, and part of that was not just her.

She was getting flicking messages from the healthcare team surrounding her. Her lead oncologist was not taking a tone of let's prepare for death. More like, let's see how much life we can get for you. [00:13:00] Let's see how much time we can get without a real focus on what is the quality of that time like what are we trading for that time?

There was one particular hospitalist oncologist who tried a couple of times to have a conversation about hospice. With my mom while she was still in the hospital. That didn't go all that well. I was ready to have that conversation and my aunt, my mother's sister was very ready to have that conversation, but my sister wasn't.

And my mom, partly because of her history with alcoholism and other kinds of things in her life, was very much a people pleaser. She was sober for many, many years, so she was not actively alcoholic at this point. But I do think her alcoholism history had a lot to do. Everything that happened later in her life.

One of her main characteristics was as a people pleaser. She hated telling anybody anything she didn't think they wanted to hear. So if I was talking to her about the possibility of hospice, she would often sound like. Okay. Maybe that's [00:14:00] something I should think about, but not have an easy time talking about it.

Then my sister would come into the situation from a distance on the phone generally and be like, but mom, why would you wanna give up now after all the stuff you've gone through, we might still be able to get some time. And my mom would be like, right there. Rallied to that. So we did not have an easy time.

There's a story I tell Inbound about a decline she had in the days right before she died. She was at that point in something called a long-term acute care hospital. 'cause there was really no medical treatment that was gonna help better her situation. But she wasn't ready for hospice and she was too seeable to be in like a rehab center or.

She was in this L Tech unit and had really started going downhill in terms of cognition and had a lot more pain. But she was in this moment of what seemed like a little bit of clarity. My aunt and I had had a conversation about hospice with the folks in the facility. I had had a conversation with my sister about it, so my aunt and I talked with my mom in her room.

Then I left. My aunt [00:15:00] was still there and my sister called. Just started talking to my mom about hospice. It was the first time and my mom got really angry and she said, I don't understand why everybody thinks I'm so sick. I thought, wow, like she's just clearly not ready to have this conversation. And to think about the end of her life after she died, I found a notebook that I had brought her to write in when she felt like writing things down.

A writer all her life. There were notes in it. There were little things she had written and I don't know exactly when she wrote them, but it sounded like she was trying to say goodbye, and she had never said anything like that out loud when we were talking to her about these things. So I don't know what to make of that in terms of her readiness for those conversations.

But I have always felt for myself that because I spent so much of my career. Talking about things that are uncomfortable for people to talk about in the world of sex and gender, that that was why it was easier for [00:16:00] me to talk about the uncomfortable things around death and dying. But it turns out that it doesn't work that way for everybody.

So like my mom had a really easy time talking about sex and sexuality, and she would talk to anybody about it. She talked with her coworkers about it. The exception to that being, she did not talk with her doctors about it. Wonder why not. She and I did talk very briefly once about the why not, 'cause there were a couple of very specific openings for the conversation to happen, and I was already very irritated that it hadn't happened, that nobody had said any at any way.

Here's the disease, here's the treatment, here's how that treatment might affect your sexual relationships. You know? Or do you have any concerns about your sexuality or your sexual relationships that we should be talking about? As we're talking about these things, never Did anybody have a conversation like that?

I think partly because medical people have so much power over us, the fact that they don't start the conversation leaves a lot of people, including my mom, afraid that they'll be [00:17:00] judged. 

Jill: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: If they're judged in a way that we all know there's bias and inequality in our healthcare system. Better to avoid it, because who knows how that judgment might come out implicitly or unconsciously in differential treatment.

Right. I had mentioned that she wrote a column for this magazine called Carnal Nation for a little while in one of her columns. She does specifically say that she wished she had asked the physical therapist who came to her house after her kidney surgery for arm strengthening exercises, the. Physical therapist came specifically to help her with leg strength so they could like get up off the toilet and walk around and do her ADLs.

Um, but she reflected afterwards that she wished she had asked for arm strengthening exercises and that when the person had offered her a cane, she had picked it up in a particular way that made the person glance at her phone and she put the cane down that he says that they're not ready. Physical therapy aimed at helping an aging dom.

So she was clearly concerned that doctor or physical therapist might not treat her well if they knew. So [00:18:00] I respected that concern of her that I wasn't gonna out her to somebody if she wasn't ready to do that. Herself. There was one meeting we had with a palliative care pharmacist right as she was getting ready for discharge.

One of the chemo treatment discharges and pain had been an issue. They were having a hard time controlling some of her pain. She had had a shingles infection on top of everything else. She had like nerve pain. This palliative care pharmacist was talking with us about all the pain. Control alternatives she might consider outside the hospital, one of them being a TENS unit.

And my mother said, what's a TENS unit? And I thought that was an odd question 'cause I knew she had one. She, but her brain was kind of fuzzy from the chemo. So I figured, okay, sit back, see what happens here. And the pharmacist explained that it's this. Device used in physical therapy, and it has electrode pads you put on your skin and a current runs between them.

People inside is helpful for reducing pain. I saw this little light come on in my mom's eyes and she was like, oh, I have one of those, but mine doesn't have those little bandaid shaped patches you're [00:19:00] talking about, but the person never asks, what kind of attachments does yours have? Or what do you use it for?

Which would've been a really gentle entree, I think, into that bigger conversation. But we didn't go there. That is so fun. Great story. 'cause 

Jill: I think there's probably a lot of people that have these things that we're hiding for a variety of reasons. I've even talked to folks that are in a same sex relationship that when hospice gets called in, they've had to basically rearrange their house and make them look like they're just roommates.

Me because. Hospice nurses have outright said, I will not treat this person. It's horrible. Yeah. I find it frustrating because it's like, okay, maybe you are not in a same sex relationship. Maybe you never will be, and even if you think there's something wrong with it, this is your job. This has nothing to do with your absolutely personal beliefs.

And also, even if they are doing their job, if they really don't respect the [00:20:00] person and what they consider to be living in a lifestyle that is not according to God or whatever their reasoning is, they're probably not gonna give them great care. Anyway. When I heard that. Not just from one person. I was really heartbroken because that's at one point in my life when I really want to have my support system of my people that love me around me, and to think that I won't be able to because I might not get treatment.

That really was hard to hear and I can totally understand why your mother didn't wanna bring it up because there is so much judgment. But it's interesting 'cause, and again, now I'm thinking like doctors are not great typically in talking about death. Not all doctors, of course, they're not trained in it.

Some of people like your sister are like, we don't wanna talk about that. How dare you bring that up. I don't know if she said that, but there's that idea of we're not ready for this conversation. So they're uncomfortable having Yeah. Because of the reaction of the people. Yeah. But I'd never really thought [00:21:00] about that with sex.

Yeah. They're not asking. People questions about their sexuality and they're not offering any, because there is a lot of treatments that are going to affect, yeah, your libido. It's gonna affect your ability to even have sex, whether it's because if it's a man, they might not be able to get an erection because of treatments, but also the pain if you have surgeries.

Yeah, there's a lot of things that can affect your sexuality. There's not a lot of. Ways to help people with that. I actually have had one person once ask me like, what do I do? Because my partner doesn't want to have traditional sex anymore, but we want to be intimate. How could we still keep up an intimate relationship?

Without traditional sex. Yeah. And I was like, oh shit. I don't know. Yeah. Like that's a great question. Which is partially then when I was like, I need to talk to people that are like sex positive and they do this for a living, and I had more than one person be like, no, not my topic of conversation. 

Elizabeth: I'm totally [00:22:00] there for that conversation because I think the idea that we have to give up intimacy and pleasure.

Because we're old or ill or disabled or somehow defined as not sexual anymore or because there are certain kinds of sex we're used to that we no longer wanna have, and we then think that's all there is. We, we actually kind of voluntarily give up access to a lot of intimacy that we could have. That's tragic.

We need intimacy at all kinds of levels, just human beings. We are fundamentally social creatures. We need to connect to one another. That doesn't mean conventional sex necessarily. There's all kinds of ways to continue to have intimacy and pleasure, and it takes negotiation. If you're talking about two partners who are in very different places about what they want, one part of that story might be one partner giving the other permission to seek what they want somewhere else.

While creating pathways for [00:23:00] intimacy between the two of them that they both still feel good about, which might be some as sim, like hand or foot massages. If your abdomen is really uncomfortable because of a surgery or an illness, all kinds of genital oriented sex might be a problem if you have. Other kinds of medical, uh, treatments that are making ion difficult, and that's how you are used to thinking about sex.

You might need to think about other ways where your penis feels good, you know, other things that feel good to you. Maybe what we have to do is take orgasm out of the equation and say, orgasm is not the goal. Our bodies feel good together in all kinds of ways, and we can actually enjoy that pleasure much longer.

We're not focused on orgasm. There are so many things people can do to feel close to each other, to feel physically connected to each other, to feel emotionally intimate and to have eroticism. And it doesn't have to look anything like conventional sex. And I think the queer community and the kink community are way ahead of [00:24:00] the conventional heterosexual community in that, right, because we've been doing that.

All along. And I'm not suggesting that people in the queer and kink community don't have their hangups when it like people who are sick or people who are dying, but we have a much broader vocabulary or kind of imagination for what might be included as intimacy. So I think, you know, for people in more conventional relationships, maybe just reading some stories that edge into those other worlds.

Can give them a sense of the possibilities. Hopefully there are lots of sex therapists out there who are willing to have conversations about sex and illness. Sex and death may be harder for people to find folks to talk to them about. I'm fortunate to live in a part of the world where there's a lot of openness and a fairly liberal leaning to most things.

The doctors I talk to at the hospital where I volunteer are brilliant at having conversations with families about. End of life care [00:25:00] planning and death and dying. I don't think they generally initiate conversations about sex. I would be confident that most of them could handle a conversation about sex if it was raised, and this is the problem when doctors don't initiate the conversation, patients aren't necessarily going to feel trusting even when the medical folks could be trusted.

With that information, the medical folks have such an authoritative position. Their role is so powerful. I would love to see medical schools giving a lot more training on. Including sexual history interests in every major healthcare conversation. It's an enormous part of people's lives. So the fact that it's allegated to the shadows in those conversations is not okay.

Jill: So I'm hoping, yeah, that things will be changing in the newer doctors that are coming up because there is still a lot of discomfort for me. In talking openly about things that have to do with sex. I'm getting better and I'm trying with my kid. I [00:26:00] have two children, 11 and 14, so I'm trying to get more comfortable having that conversation with 'em where I could talk to 'em about death and dying.

We had conversations about suicide, but when it comes to sex, I'm still like, oh God, okay. I gotta do it because I know how important it is to have these open and honest conversations with children. Because this way then as they get older, they will be more comfortable talking to their doctors, asking questions, talking to their partners, talking to their loved ones.

When it comes to things like sex and death and our society just. Does not do well with either one. I think we're getting a little better though. 

Elizabeth: Well, the fact that there are podcasts like this, for example, and that there are a lot of people training to be death doulas, and a lot of them have podcasts or have websites or do social media around this.

And sex educators, whether they're working with middle school, high school students, or whether they're working with adults, have also been very present online, making it easy to find information for people who [00:27:00] want to look for it. That. I think that's evidence of some amount of progress. I'm really worried about where we are as a society politically right now, because I worry about censorship on the internet, making a lot of that information harder to find.

I do a lot of work with an organization called Wood Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Which is such the only national human rights based organization focused exclusively on gender and sexuality rights as human rights, and they've made their focus for the last a couple of years around internet censorship, partly because of the importance that that information plays in all of our ability to access our sexual freedom.

Our human rights, given that we don't provide that information openly in many other places, and given that lots of people are growing up in families where it is hard to talk about these things, if you're a 15-year-old kid and you need information and your parents aren't able or willing to talk to you about it.

[00:28:00] You can go online and find it, but that information's gonna be harder and harder to find online if a lot of these censorship bills pass, if a lot of the age verification bills that are underway pass, and many of them are passing. So that's really scary to me. I think there's a backlash against the progress that's been made, and we're in that moment of tension.

I think often change happens at that person to person level. Hmm. We learn through an interaction and then we interact with other people different as a result. And that kind of viral spread of social change is where I have the most hope right now. 

Jill: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. I think that's the only thing that.

Gives me hope is that there's enough of us out there that even if they try to censor the information online, we know the information and we will still spread the information in our communities as best as we can. None of us are gonna be perfect about it, but that's where I think the bulk of death doula work.

Really falls is going into our communities [00:29:00] and having these conversations and educating the people around us and just getting them more comfortable talking about death and dying. It's like that's kind of the big change that I see is that we can really make the most difference locally. But yeah, it is.

It's. It's really, it's unfortunate. Mm-hmm. It's not surprising that there's such a backlash. I'm 46 now and over the last 20 years, especially, I think like from like my twenties to my mid forties, just a change in the way that women interact with men. And so many friends of mine that are my age are like, I'm not having children.

I don't want them. I'm not having them. You're not gonna make me have them. They've either found partners that have been okay with it, or they're happy being single, and they're like, whatever. I travel, I'm fine. Yeah. And so I think it's, you know, I look at the younger generations that are now being influenced by women that are my age.

Like, [00:30:00] oh, well look at how, again, how like open I was about a lot of different things that even though it still makes me uncomfortable, I was more open about my sexuality than the women older than me for work. I kind of was like, I'll do what I want. Right? I had the shape head, I had the colored hair, I had all the tattoos.

Like I was fairly open about being bisexual and polyamorous. Even though there's that little part of me that's like, oh God, well please don't judge me for it. Like I still have a little bit of that reaction. I've been pretty open about that my entire adult life, and so now it's like the people that are feeling threatened by that, fortunately, are pushing back and we're gonna swing a little bit backwards, but I'm hoping that we still have enough momentum moving forward.

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Jill: They're not gonna be able to stop it. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Jill: Right. Whether they want to or not, because I look at my kids and their friends and how many of them. Are, you know, like, oh, I'm bisexual, or I'm transgender, or they're changing their names and like they're doing like not to the extreme of like, I'm gonna go [00:31:00] through the whole surgery and whatever else at a young age, but they're exploring all these different things and their parents are being more supportive and doing their best to be like, all right, they changed their name, or whatever else it is.

And so I would've never felt comfortable doing that when I was in high school, if I would've ever like. Then like I think I like girls. I, it took me until I was like 30 years old to finally be able to say that out loud, even though I had eventually admitted it to myself. Like the fact that my daughter and her friends are like, sure, I don't know.

I'll probably marry a girl 'cause I don't think I'm gonna marry a boy. Boys are gross. They're annoying. Like all these things, and again, it will probably change. I think having that open flexibility as well, because there's this thing in our culture of like what you say you are. Is what you are. Mm-hmm. And change is bad.

Mm-hmm. Oh, I mean, change is okay. I have friends that were married to women and now they're out of those relationships and now they're partnered with a man and they're just kind of like, I don't know. We don't have to stick to this one thing just because we [00:32:00] said that that's what we were when we were whatever age.

It's a little scary right now. 

Elizabeth: One thing I can say as a sociologist is that when you study social movements and social change, they're rarely linear. So often there are cycles, aggressive change, then backlash, and then more progressive change, and then more backlash. And we've been through that with sexuality and feminism and we'll be there again.

I just wonder in this moment how much damage will be done before we get to the part where we see more progressive change. I'm going to commit myself to feeling the optimism that we need to do the work and share the stories, because I really think that personal storytelling is how we get the information out there in that viral way.

And so we need to, in our own selves, feel open enough and trusting enough to talk to each other. So that's where I'm gonna try to keep my focus. 

Jill: Yeah, that's a good focus to have. It is hard to stay optimistic. A question for you, if 

Elizabeth: you're open to a question. Sure. Why do you think that you're more comfortable talking about death than you are with sex?

What is it? [00:33:00] To you that explains that difference? 

Jill: I fear, not judgment necessarily, but I think there's always been a little part of me that is feared for my own safety. Just as a woman that grew up in a small town in South Jersey, that was always weird and different. It did not take long for me to get beat up and jumped and bullied and all of those things.

By the time I was 11, I was already like, oh, it is not safe. Mm-hmm. To be your full self. And I just feel like that probably got so deeply ingrained in me that it's been a really hard process of unlearning it and especially 'cause again, like. Not to generalize, but I've had men, never a woman has ever done this to me, but I've had men when they find out that I'm polyamorous, automatically exhume like, oh, so that means you're gonna like have sex with me?

And I'm like, no, that does not mean that if I want to, I promise you, I will tell you. But that does not mean that every time I get a little more comfortable [00:34:00] than like a comment would get made where then I'm like, woo, gotta go back a little bit more again. Keep that in with death. I don't have that same fear to of like my own safety or even like for us, like with our kids, we live in a small town.

I don't want my children to have to deal with people saying, your mom's a slut. Things that will affect them. And here I am talking about it on my podcast. I don't necessarily hide it. Yeah. But I'm also not like. Going out places, having conversations, I'll sometimes just be like, oh, I'm going to Philly to see a friend of mine.

Or, you know, I'm going to dinner with a friend. I'm like saying like, oh, I have this partner that I've had for six years. He is very much a part of my life. I'm not saying that to people locally. I think it's just that fear of my own safety and my children's safety, where with death, I don't have that fear.

Elizabeth: Death is maybe taboo and difficult for people to talk about, but the reaction is more gonna be, I don't wanna talk about that. Less violence, less outward judgment and discrimination. [00:35:00] 

Jill: And also growing up Catholic, when I discovered my sexuality, even at like 12 and 13, when you're like, Ooh, what's, what's going on here?

I just had that story in my head of like, whore, you're a whore. You're a whore. That's a sin. That's bad. So there things still part of me like having that open conversation even with my friends, my family, my children. That tension within my body automatically comes up of like, you're a whore. And like that just echoes in my head whether I want it to or not.

Right. That unlearning process a whole thing. And you could consciously not believe that, but it doesn't mean that it's not still that program running that was put there when you were a child, whether you wanted it to be or not. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. That's the difficulty of the power of stories, is that they stay with us.

Even the ones we don't always wish stayed with us. 

Jill: Yeah, that is so true. And a lot of that definitely goes along with death where so many people I talk to, I'll say, what was your first experience [00:36:00] with death like? And it, the common theme often is it was a grandparent. I was young. Nobody talked to me about it.

I wasn't allowed to see them. I didn't go to the funeral. It just kind of was like, they're there and then they were gone. I've heard that similar story so many times from people, and so we start off as children with that same story around sex and death of like, it's bad. We don't talk about it. You keep it behind closed doors.

We pretend that it's not really happening and that'll keep us safe if we pretend it's not really happening, you know? And it's frustrating 'cause how do we break that on a grander scale? 

Elizabeth: Yeah. Well, I think in the ways that you're demonstrating by talking to lots of people about it and encouraging them to talk about it.

I do think it's something that people have to get over with kids. This idea that kids can't handle death. What kids can't handle is abandonment. When children think, oh, this person's just sleeping. If we tell them something like that, [00:37:00] there's always this question about why didn't they wake up? Why didn't they come back?

There needs to be a way, and lots of people are good at it, at helping kids understand at an age appropriate level, this person is gone forever, at least in this physical form that they had. There are lots of different cultural beliefs about what happens after. Death if, if you believe in a spirit, what does the spirit live on?

Feminisms we use are sometimes really damaging to, they're more likely to create a sense of fear of abandonment. Instead, if we're honest about death and what death is and that it happens to all living, things will die. I think nobody did this intentionally. To you. It's hard, but it's better to give kids that foundation.

Jill: It can be an age appropriate conversation. I talk to my children about death openly without trying to be like, this is a serious conversation. We're gonna sit down and know, like if it comes up in conversation, we talk about it. Yeah. And my boss did end his life by suicide, and that was a couple years ago now.

And my son [00:38:00] asked like, well, how did he die? Because it was sudden, right? And so he was probably, if he's 14, he was probably like 10. My initial reaction was. To lie and be like, oh, he had a heart attack. Because there's this idea of like if I mention the word suicide to a child, that'll plant that seed, even though that's total bologna.

It's not how it worked. But there was still that initial reaction in me to lie, and then I. Thought about it, and then I was like, no, I'm not gonna lie. And I said, you know, he ended his life and then he wanted to know how, that is not a conversation that we're gonna have right now. That is not age appropriate.

And it was fine. It's not like he was upset with me. He just kind of was like, okay. Cool. He asked it. I answered it in a way that was like, we're not gonna talk about that. Because it was a violent way of doing it. Really in the long run. Any way of doing it with a 10-year-old is not a conversation to have.

But I also was not gonna lie to him. And now at 14 when we had a conversation about suicide a couple weeks ago, he said one of his friends, he was like, oh, well that's [00:39:00] why so and so wasn't at school last week. 'cause he tried to kill himself. I was like. And then we had this whole conversation of like, was it the first time?

How long has it been going on? He was like, no, this, it's not the first time that he's done it. And it turns out that this friend of his is gay and that he had an online boyfriend that was also 13 at the time who did kill himself. All these things that my child had been talking about with his friend, and like this was all going on and I had no idea because he didn't bring it up to me.

And so it just took me mentioning something and then the conversation was, well, have you ever had those thoughts? And he was like, no, I've never felt that way. And I'm like, well, if you ever do come talk to me about, I tried to be, even though it's really uncomfortable, I didn't want. To hear the answer that I might have heard when I said, do you ever have these thoughts?

Because he could have said yes, and then we would've been in a totally different place. But also that wouldn't have changed the reality of him feeling that way. By me not asking that question, it would've made [00:40:00] it so that I wouldn't have found out until he attempted it. And I don't wanna be there. I would rather have the conversations now work together, figure something out.

When he told me that about his friend, and again, this is the thing that drives me crazy about the way our society viewed the L-G-B-T-Q-I-A community of these children. Children, literally children are taking their own lives because they're feeling judged. They're feeling like they can't be themselves.

They're feeling like they don't have support. That, to me, is heartbreaking, and these will be the same folks that are low life when it comes to abortion, but yet you have children killing themselves because your religious beliefs say that them being gay is not right. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, 

Jill: it makes me insane, but. Again, we need to have these conversations age appropriate, but also have the conversation.

It's okay and there are people that can help, right? Whether it's about sex and we actually this really amazing course online with my son, probably when he was about [00:41:00] 10 by a woman, texted her social media handle is like sex positive. Parenting. She offered a Zoom class that talked about puberty, I can't say the word.

Puberty, puberty, sexuality. You know, she talked about masturbation. She talked about some of the things that I was like, I need to have this conversation, but I'm real uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. My son wouldn't even get on the screen. He was like, I'm gonna sit over there. So it's like me and my husband and Right.

Him over there, but he was there for the conversation and then we were able to have the conversation. I was uncomfortable having it by myself, but we found a resource. We found a person that was able to help us have that conversation with him. It's the same thing with, I think, you know, there's death rule is out there that would be willing to help you have the conversation.

Maybe your grandparent dies and you need to talk to your kid and you don't know how to. Reach out to a death doula. I would say all of us either would be willing or know somebody else that would be willing, and we could be like, I know this other death doula, she would be happy to help you. There's help out there.

We could do this. Yeah, we can do it. 

Elizabeth: Yes, we can [00:42:00] totally do it. I love what you're talking about in terms of making referrals to other people, whether it comes to a parent with their own kids or a business relationship like a doula or a sex educator. We are not always the right person to have the conversations and sometimes your kid needs to talk about something.

Their parent is not the person to talk to in that instance. Maybe it's an aunt or uncle, maybe it's a friend's parent, maybe it's a teacher coach. You know, it's so important to recognize that there's a world of us out there and we need many connections. We need each other in this more networked, global way.

We have to be aware of the resources that are out there and share them with each other. 

Jill: Because there is a lot of resources and talking about that. We're at the end of our time. Yes. This was amazing though. This was such a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. But why don't you tell everybody where they can find you, where they can find your book, anything like that that you wanna share?

Elizabeth: Sure. I have a website. It's. Elizabeth Ann Wood dot com. So it's just my full name. Ann has an E at the end. My books [00:43:00] are available there. There are two of them actually. One is Bound, which we've talked about, which is available anywhere books are sold. You can find it on Amazon, you can get it ordered by your local bookstore if you have a local independent bookstore.

I always encourage people to shop there. The other book is called Between Us. Healing ourselves and changing the world through sociology. That is a collection of stories about all kinds of different things, not specifically about death or sexuality, although there are several sexuality related stories in there.

But the idea there is just that we share information, we share stories with each other, and those stories give us tools that we need to feel better in our own lives and to change the world so that it's better for everybody. So that is also available wherever you can find books. And on my website, 

Jill: I'll put links in the show notes.

People can easily find it. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This was wonderful sharing stories 

Elizabeth: together. I really enjoyed it. Enjoyed it. I did too. Thank you so much for having me on, Jill. 

Jill: In my next episode, I talk with Aaron Pine, a digital [00:44:00] artist, meditation teacher and creator of Inner Realms Journey, a guided meditation adventure that blends mythology, spirituality, and imagination.

Aaron shares how his background in ancient traditions and digital design led him to create immersive audio experiences. Where users discover their unique avatars, explore magical realms and build personal sanctuary spaces. Originally developed as a fun and creative tool for meditation In our realms.

Journey is now being used in children's hospitals to support kids facing end of life. We discuss how this program helps ease anxiety, fosters legacy projects, and gives family a new way to stay connected after death. Erin also speaks about ancestral wisdom, spiritual dimensions, and re-imagining death as a return home to one's eternal sanctuary.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting. Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. [00:45:00] Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a five star review. Your positive feedback helps recommend the podcast to others.

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You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the paid monthly subscription, as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one-time contribution. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death. Clearly.