SERIOUS REPORTING ON DEATH
AND LIFE IN THE MEANTIME
From the Editors
Welcome to the very first edition of GraveSite’s newsletter, which will go out weekly to all subscribers once we launch next month. But as our first supporters, you get to see it take shape — and help us figure out what exactly that shape is. (Scroll to the end to take our poll, and respond to this email with any additional thoughts. We’re fiends for your feedback as we build.)
This space is also great for delivering some of those prelaunch goodies we promised. Today’s issue includes our first two Grave(in)Site guides — the crown jewels of our flagship members-only franchise featuring uber-practical and oddly approachable guidance on dealing with death.
There is a poignant essay from Jessica Gentile on the word game she plays daily to honor her dad and also a deeply personal reported feature by Xintian Tina Wang on the growing desire among believers and skeptics alike to communicate with dead loved ones.
We’ll be back toward the end of the month with more early reporting and resources. Thanks for being here.
— Delaney Rebernik, founder + editor-in-chief
The Short Read · Slice of Death
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“What Did You Get It In?”
A game of letters filled the silence when talking about my dad’s diagnosis hurt too much.
BY JESSICA GENTILE
“What did you get it in?”
This is how all conversations with my dad began. Sometimes, it was the extent of them.
The “it” was our daily score in Wordle. Like so many families, we began playing the simple New York Times game in winter 2021 as a pandemic pastime. But soon, it was taking over our lives. Phone calls, text threads, even major milestones became consumed by score swaps. An hour after I gave birth to my daughter, Dad was demanding my Wordle time; his new grandchild’s height and weight could wait.
Our ritual became so sacred that we never broke our streak, playing for over four years without missing a day’s game until his death earlier this year.
AD BREAK!
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The Long Read · Belief
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I Didn’t Believe in the Beyond. Then a Medium Helped Me Talk to My Dead Grandfather.
As ancestral communication gains ground, the question isn’t whether the dead can speak but how the living can listen.
BY XINTIAN TINA WANG
The first thing Daisy Tamberino asks me to do is imagine a white light hovering above my head. Picture it moving through my third eye, she prompts. Then through my throat, my heart, spine, legs, and feet. The light, she says, will open a channel for spirits.
I sit across from Tamberino, a psychic medium, in her Manhattan wellness shop and try not to overthink it. I’ve known about Earth Angel Crystal since it first opened in my Long Island City neighborhood in 2022 — long before it moved to the 11th floor of the trendy New Yorker Hotel in Midtown. Business, it seems, is booming.
In the shop’s early days, I only went in to buy crystal bracelets as gifts. For years, journalism has trained me to trust what I could verify: documents, dates, records, transcripts, and quotes I can play back. I don’t believe in the beyond. Or at least, I don’t think I do.
Grave(in)Site · Guides + How-Tos
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New! How to Manage the Digital Demands of Death
Spoiler alert: Start while you’re still alive.
Free access! How to Get Your Affairs in Order
A dread-free guide on the end-of-life and estate planning documents you (yes, you) should have on file.
GraveSightings · Death News from Elsewhere
‘It looks like I’m dead’: After receiving a terminal diagnosis, Linda Murphy wrote her own glorious obit to yuck it up from the great beyond.
Sex after death: A Holiday Inn rendezvous broke Diane Gottlieb’s eight-year dry spell that began when her husband died in a car accident.
“The mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody is at its highest level in over a decade and has more than doubled since Trump’s second term began,” says an alarming new report from the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights.
Here’s how to talk to your kids about death. (Bonus: Get some sage wisdom from The Boss.)
MAID watch: A new Medical Aid in Dying law took effect in New York last Wednesday. Rusty Martin, a 66-year-old retired Iowa Senate staffer with Alzheimer’s, plans to die in Switzerland next week even though that’s earlier than he wants. As MPs in England and Wales prepare to debate a new assisted-dying bill on September 11, here’s what researchers are gleaning from Canada’s equivalent law, which more than 16,000 people used in 2024.
“Must organ donors be dead before vital organs are removed, and must removal never cause their death?” Tissue recovery specialist Deyaan Guha weighs in on these fundamental — but still hypothetical — questions of transplantation ethics amid broad MAID uptake.
Are You Dead? The popular Chinese app prompts users to confirm daily that they’re alive, laying bare “a pervasive but underarticulated anxiety: the fear of dying alone and remaining undiscovered,” write researchers in a new JAMA article.
‘Inside the World’s Largest Near-Death Experience Database’: A radiation oncologist’s brainchild boasts more than 16,000 encounters.
Hereditary: The Musical couldn’t have come across this horror-and-showtune wonk’s desk at a better time. How many people do I have to behead for Paimon to see the whole thing staged?
Meet the team
Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Delaney Rebernik
Co-Founder and Executive Producer: Alexis Haut
Audience Editor: Charli K Elder
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