The Adventures of Memento Mori

What does a dying man's dream of coconut ice cream, an incarcerated high school reunion, and a Marine getting dragged face-first across a lake have in common? In the penultimate episode of the season, D.S. Moss confronts this riddle with the help of his Zen Master mentor. Now nearly finished with his chaplain internship at Bellevue Hospital during the global pandemic, Moss notices something that keeps showing up in the patient's room that he can't quite put his finger on. That something turns out to be the most obvious hidden thing that we all share. Please join us for another episode of The Adventures of Memento Mori.
Host: D.S. Moss
Produced by: The Mayda Creative Company
Mix & Sound Design: Aman Sahota
Story Editor: Laura Standley

Moss makes the rookie mistake of thinking a chaplain's job is to absorb the suffering of strangers. Soak it up like a sponge, room after room, story after story. Sounds noble until four months in, when the weight of it starts showing up in places you didn't invite it: your shoulders, your sleepless nights, your ability to be present with the people you love. So how do you sit with someone in their worst moment without letting it move in and take up permanent residence? How do you let energy flow through you instead of collecting inside you? In this episode, Zen Master Trudi teaches Moss the secret technique of flushing and reveals the true healing power of a prayer.
Host: D.S. Moss
Produced by: The Mayda Creative Company
Mix & Sound Design: Aman Sahota
Story Editor: Laura Standley

Does refusing to face a difficult reality become the thing that saves you from it? Or is denial what ultimately takes you down? Moss is three months into his chaplaincy and handed a new framework for caring: hope, meaning, and connection. But when he walks into the rooms at Bellevue, hope is the one box that won't check. The harder he reaches for it, the more fraudulent it feels. How do you project hope onto someone's life when everything about their situation tells you not to? In this episode, a roadside sign, a nun's prayer, and an ostrich named Amadeus force Moss to ask whether denial is actually a tool and hope is nothing more than a weak wish.
Host: D.S. Moss Produced by: The Mayda Creative Company Mix & Sound Design: Aman Sahota Story Editor: Laura Standley

What does a Nazi, an ancient prophecy, and a pack of gum have in common? When beautiful philosophy meets overwhelming suffering, what holds you together when you're falling apart? How do you practice compassion when you're faking it—when you're standing in a room you're supposed to care about, but you feel nothing? Moss learns the difference between an open heart and a bleeding heart, discovers he's connected to the people he despises, and finds out why trying to save the world will destroy you. In this episode, an ancient warrior prophecy offers two weapons for facing darkness—but only if you can wield them both.

Moss thought the hardest part of being a chaplain would be sitting with the dying. He was wrong. It was contextualizing people's suffering. At Bellevue, he meets a man so broken by life he swallowed razor blades just to get medical treatment for hemorrhoids—a man convinced God is actively torturing him, questioning how he could possibly love a God that doesn't love him back. Having experienced hundreds of stories like this herself, Zen Master Trudi reveals an ancient text that offers no resolution, no silver lining, only brutal validation. In this episode, Moss learns the chaplain's job isn't to fix suffering—it's to help people find the constellation that makes sense of their chaos, even when that constellation reflects back their darkest truths.