My mother on her deathbed, a few days before Mother’s Day / St. Petersburg, FL // May 2025
Dear One,
I hope this makes you laugh as much as it made me laugh.
Laughter in the midst of grief is so good. As good as tears. Different sides of the same emotional release.
My dear friend & brilliant psychiatrist-writer, writer-psychiatrist Dr. Owen Muir, called to check in on me. We joked about my plan to write a scathing critique of this looks-so-nice-from-the-outside, for-profit Assisted Living facility my mom had been living in for a year. (This is not a joke.) Owen suggested I write a scathing critique of everything, and then used the phrase “the terrible consumer experience that is death.”
He said I should write it. I said he should write it.
So he called me and we recorded it. Together.
Because this is what we do. We collaborate.
We collaborated on the project of my independent podcast, horizontal with lila (from which this Substack gets its name). Owen mixed and mastered the recordings of my first season, and even recorded several of my episodes back-to-back in his basement recording studio.
As winners of the Clubhouse Creator First program, we collaborated on episodes of our live interactive social audio shows. His show (co-hosted with his brilliant wife Carlene, who is destined to be Television’s go-to psychiatrist) was called The Frontier Psychiatrists, and my show was Positively Sex! (that’s the one that went on to become my iHeart Radio podcast).
We also collaborated on the project of my life, when I was so depressed I felt like it might be better to not be. His colleague David at Acacia Mental Health prescribed me TMS, and the technicians at his practice in Brooklyn, Fermata, administered it.
In fact, we have collaborated on the project of my life three times.
It is entirely without exaggeration when I tell you that Owen saved my life.
This is a brain magnet. It’s working. / Fermata Health // Brooklyn, NY /// March 2024
I hope you will enjoy some laughter with us (as J. Leigh Rantly said in our horizontal episode, “Laughter: the other orgasm”), as you listen (or read) the unedited 7 minutes and 18 seconds of a genuine certified-fresh 100% organic Owen-Lila exchange.
Thank you, and you’re welcome.
Big Love,
Lila
Death is Not a Great Consumer Experience
by Owen Muir
The net promoter score is commonly used across industries to measure customer satisfaction. You ask your customers to rate their experience with your product on a scale:
How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”
They answer on a scale from 0 to 10.Categorize responses:
Promoters (9–10): Loyal enthusiasts.
Passives (7–8): Satisfied but unenthusiastic.
Detractors (0–6): Unhappy customers.
Calculate percentages:
% of respondents who are Promoters
% who are Detractors
Then you'll apply this formula
NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors
For some reason, I haven't seen the NPS for death.
Part of that may be that 100% of potential promoters and 100% of potential detractors have all passed into the great beyond.
My dear friend Lila. She is sitting at the bedside of her mom, only a very short period after her father died. Her mother is not going to make it. Over a long enough time scale, none of us make it. This is a cold and lonely experience, only made worse because none of us can meaningfully prepare for an event so inevitable, yet so awful.
Death is a constant of the human experience. Unfortunately, given the sharp precipice between being and not being that all of us fall off, it's tough to get empirical data about how satisfying the experience of death is for customers, which is all of us, of the experience of life inevitably ending. We are left with the less satisfying data of death observers, a hypothesis about what the death experience may or may not be like.
Not satisfied with just trying to write this column from my own brain, I decided to call my friend Lila, who's coping with death right now, to ask her what she thought about death from a customer experience standpoint:
Owen
You’ve inspired me to try to create something mild to moderately amusing about the poor customer experience that is death.
Lila
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha yes please.
Owen
OK, so my contention is that since — wait, do you know what a net promoter score is?
Lila
No.
Owen
Ok so, in business, broadly, we have this concept of a net promoter score. We ask people, “Can you rate the customer experience between 1 and 10,” (Lila guffaws) and then you take people who rate it like a 9 or 10 or 8, and they're promoters, and then you subtract people who rate it any lower than 5, so you have like percent promoters versus detractors, and the people in the middle don't count really. And so it's like, then, it's so, like, for example, United Healthcare is like negative 20, on a scale of 1 to 100.
Lila
Of course. (laughs)
Owen
And in my clinic, it’s like in the 90s, like Apple is the gold standard at 82, but we don't have a net promoter…
Lila
OK, OK.
Owen
…score for death, and so we are left to talk to, basically, cause we all, you know, when we're dead, we can't report back whether it was good or bad as a...
Lila
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Owen
…customer, and so we actually just don't know…
Lila
What product or services are we using?
Owen
Uh, Death. Death is the product or service, and so, we have to ask people who are like observing the customer experience? And you're one of those people, so I'm calling to ask you about the “death customer experience.”
Lila
Yes. Zero out of 10 would recommend. It’s awful.
Owen
It’s awful.
Lila
Yes, I’m—
Owen
So you're a detractor.
Lila
I am hard pressed to describe how it could possibly be worse, in fact.
Owen
So, let's start with some, like, let's try to like, have a positive framing: What are some of the good parts of dying?
Lila
Um, well, if you're in pain, then ostensibly, there's no more pain, but you know... nobody can corroborate that.
Owen
Mm, you have that problem again.
Lila
Yes, yes, the uh, the uh, reporting back.
Owen
But essentially, if you had to like guess what the end of pain would be, is that? How Would— how would you rate that on a scale of 1 to 10?
Lila
I mean, end of pain, like excellent, you know, nine out of 10.
Owen
That's a nine out of 10, OK, and how about the other parts of the death experience?
Lila
Oh, uh you mean like the gradually losing ability to use one’s organs…Voice?
Owen
That's, yes, that's exactly what I mean
Lila
Ears, (laughs) nose, mouth, thinking, cognition,
Owen
Oh gosh.
Lila
creativity, innovation
Owen
So all these things.
Lila
Yeah, it just seems. Pretty bad, pretty bad.
Owen
So if you're reading the loss of your functioning on a scale from 1 to 10.
Lila
Oh yeah, that's a, that’s a negative 11.
Owen
Oh, so you would not recommend it to someone else.
Lila
(chuckles) No, would not recommend. I don't think most folks want to lose all of those wonderful capacities that we are given, having a body, as Rob Brezny describes in Pronoia, it's a pretty miraculous piece of machinery, a body. And uh, I'm not a real fan of … the breaking down of my machinery or anyone else's.
Owen
Oh my God, so, so really, I mean, ironically, like having a body would be a great customer experience if you even knew again when you're born, what you're being given.
Lila
Oh my God, what a cool machine! Oh my God you can do so much! You can run it around, you can jump, you can, you know, careen off of things like parkour, you can have sex, you can masturbate! Oh my God, there's such!
Owen
It does sound like there's a lot there—
Lila
Oh, there’s so much.
Owen
But to have that ripped away from you.
Lila
Yeah, uh, that seems—
Owen
Again, would you recommend it to a friend?
Lila
Could not recommend.
Owen
Not recommended, ok.
Lila
No. Fucking bullshit — could not recommend. (both laugh)
Owen
How about the speed of the experience? What do you feel like the customer service, like the promptness of response, was what you'd hope for?
Lila
Yeah, so um, any speed of this experience generally is just heinous, whether it is sudden and unexpected, or whether it is drawn out over the course of years with slowly failing organs and a panoply of medications. Yeah, just, all of the rates of speed are terrible.
Owen
I'm gonna put you down for it, “neither agree nor disagree.” (Lila cracks up)
I know, that’s not one of the options.
Lila
Where’s terrible go? OK fine, whatever.
Owen
It's either too fast or it's too slow, but both are bad.
Lila
(laughing) Oh, both are very bad, yes.
Owen
No rate of death is “good.”
Lila
Sir, there is no Goldilocks death, okay? There is no ‘just right.’
Owen
It's always a little, it's always somewhat wrong, or a lot wrong.
Lila
Unless! You could do the illegal thing and choose the time of your death, in which case, perhaps the customer service experience would be slightly better!
Owen
I mean, I mean, it seems like they could focus more on the customer experience more than we do now.
Lila
Yeah, that would probably free up the agents’ time to focus on said customer service.
Owen
And by agent, you mean the Grim Reaper?
Lila
(laughing) Yes I do! (giggles)
Owen
… I hope this has been mild to moderately therapeutic.
Lila
This is delightful. I love you.
Owen
Have you tried asking ChatGPT what it would think about this experience? Because, there’s a moment in time where AI is gonna be awkward or weird or something, and you can feel free to like, just check in with the robots.
Lila
No, but feel free to do it for me and send me the transcript.
Owen
See what it says.
Lila
I’m not gonna do it.
Owen
You’re not gonna do it.
Lila
No, I’m not gonna do it.
Owen
I’ll have to do it.
Lila
You can do it for me.
Owen
I may even ask OwenGPT what it would say to you.
Lila
That’s a great idea.
Owen
And see how it does.
Lila
Yeah, because, just as Vi said today— Viola, one of the hospice nurses who has been with me for four days in a row, I love her so much, she's like, “Did you ever look for that tray?” I'm sitting on the couch, and I go… “No,” and she goes. “You're not gonna look for it, are you? I'm gonna look for it cause if I don't do it, you're not gonna do it.” And I was like— “You're right. I'm not gonna do it.”
My friend is here.
Owen
Okay, enjoy.
Lila
I love you the most.
Owen
Love you too. Bye-bye.
I include the audio of this conversation here, for posterity, and as “receipts or it didn’t happen points.”
I want to thank Lila for speaking with me during this difficult time.
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