In early 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband,
photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let
them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy,
and in love. Why did they choose to die together? And what did that decision do to the people
left to mourn them? On the new season of Death of an Artist, journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice
Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters—as one
married couple trying to understand another. Through intimate conversations with Petra and
Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends
they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling
with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind. Listen to Death of An Artist
wherever you get podcasts. And if you want to hear the full story right now, ad-free, you can
binge the entire season with a Pushkin+ subscription—sign up on the Death of an Artist show
page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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