Here Be Monsters: Facing Your Fears

"Here Be Monsters" is a podcast named after a concept in cartography that shows the edge of the known world, the end of the map, beyond which hic sunt dracones (here are dragons). In keeping with this concept, the show explores the fears that lie deep inside us. It takes us on a journey, at the end of which you come out on the other side if not emboldened, then at least wiser.

“The Last Ones” is an episode about grief and the long process of mourning what’s gone, as experienced by a man who lost his entire immediate family over the span of a year and two months, and another, whose son has a serious form of epilepsy, which causes him to have frequent, violent seizures. After one particularly difficult period of induced coma, followed by out-of-control devastating seizures, the father says he saw God as just a big child abuser. “I remember feeling just fucking get it over with, God, if you’re gonna torture him to death, just do it, don’t drag this out. It’s a very strange place for a parent to be basically praying for your child’s death, because it’s so hard to see him like this.”

The episode is recorded while producer Bethany Denton and the two men—a radio producer and a writer and conservationist—walk through the woods of Montana on a snowy January morning. You can hear the snow crackling under their footsteps, and the melt that’s dripping from the trees on the fresh snow makes a campfire-like sound. There’s an unexpected soothing element to these sounds that take away a bit of the anxiety about death and grief. It feels like there’s no other more appropriate space in which to talk about such subjects than nature.