Death, Love, and the Words Between with James Navé

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles—fertile ground for conversations worth listening to and remembering. I’m your host, James Navé, going solo today.This episode is an improvisational field recording of a question I’ve been invited to answer onstage in six minutes: how do we unlabel words like death? A friend, Dr. Aditi Sethi, nudged me toward the idea that many of us carry rigid definitions of death—definitions shaped by fear, habit, and inherited language. So I start by listening to the way we casually toss death around in everyday speech, then follow the thread into story and poetry: E. E. Cummings’ “Mister Death,” Langston Hughes’ quiet disappearance, Sara Teasdale’s wartime spring, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love after death, and Tennyson’s Ulysses sailing “beyond the sunset.”Along the way, I tell a few dog stories—classroom dogs, my own dog Traveler—and I look at the “little deaths” we live through all the time. This is a meditation on death, yes, but also on love, attention, and the language that shapes what we can bear.