L+R Presents: Death of an Artist

Love and Radio

This episode of 'Death of an Artist' explores the profound and tragic decision of beloved children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, to die by

Key takeaways

• Petra and Michael's suicide was a premeditated, joint decision made out of love and a desire to avoid aging, illness, or loss of autonomy.
• Their relationship was described as deeply romantic and spiritually aligned, with friends noting an almost supernatural connection from the moment they met.

Main topics

• Suicide as a conscious choice
• Love and partnership in end-of-life decisions

Notable quotes

"I wrestle, was it courage or was it cowardice? Oh, you know, I don't think it was cowardice. No. Except they were afraid of what the future was."

"This was not a desperate move. I mean, I felt jealous of them just looking at photos, and I never even met them."

Conclusion

Petra and Michael Mathers' story challenges conventional narratives around suicide, presenting it not as a failure or breakdown

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hey there, it's Nick. While we're in our off-season, I wanted to showcase some shows that I've enjoyed, and I think you might too. Despite the 8 trillion podcasts out there in the world, I think there is so much more for the people making them to explore creatively, to create new genres and experiment with new approaches to storytelling, to make work that respects the intelligence of its audience. So when I began working on Blood Memory, I wanted to do something that I'm pretty sure had never been done before. That is, I wanted to marry a non-narrated style that invites the audience in as an equal participant, along with the exhaustive research and reporting headed by my friend Robin Amer. It's a brand new genre that I've been calling investigative radio verite. Well, I'm very lucky that we put out Blood Memory when we did, because if it had been delayed any longer, and knowing Love and Radio, that was a real possibility, it would have been beaten to the punch by the new season of Death of an Artist, presented by Leon Nafok and Alice Gregory. In my view, the story they present is also part of this brand new genre. Leon's name you might know from the podcasts Slow Burn and Fiasco, They're also very excellent. Check them out. And Alice is a frequent writer for The New Yorker. In other words, they are capital J journalists. And they've put those skills to work to craft a story that is deep, richly reported, and very intimate. This is episode one of season three of Death of an Artist. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. But you already knew that, didn't you? Speaker 8 (1:44) Hello, you've reached Michael and Petra Mathers. Leave us a message. Speaker 8 (3:08) Are you Speaker 2 (4:19) scared? Speaker 2 (4:21) What are you scared of? You hiding behind mom? Remember when we recorded you and you listened to yourself? This is just that. It's just a toy. You can make any sound you want into this. That was a funny sound. Tess, can we show you a video? We're going to show you a video that starts with the most beautiful song you've ever heard. Then we're Speaker 4 (4:47) going Speaker 2 (4:47) to read a book. You want to see it? Speaker 4 (4:51) Yeah. It's Speaker 8 (5:06) kids, yeah. Yeah, kids. Speaker 8 (5:15) right there. That is a rainbow right there. Here's a story about someone whose life took a wonderful turn when she learned to dance. It's called Sophie and Lou. I'm Lou. Speaker 2 (5:37) Tess, look. Speaker 4 (5:38) What Speaker 2 (5:39) do you see? Speaker 4 (5:40) It's the same book. I remember this book from when I was little. When Auntie Gracie was your age, she had this book. Speaker 2 (5:50) See, Tess, Petra Mathers is the author. She's the person who wrote the book and drew the pictures. Speaker 4 (5:56) Do you get that? She's the lady that Mommy and Daddy are so curious about. Speaker 2 (6:02) She also wrote all these other books you have. Remember Lottie and Herbie? Speaker 4 (6:08) She Speaker 2 (6:08) wrote Lottie and Herbie, too. Speaker 4 (6:13) Copping for her? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to start reading this book. It's called Sophie and Lou by Patra Mathers. Sophie was shy. So shy she did her shopping during the lull hours so she wouldn't have to talk to anyone. One morning she heard pounding and shouting across the street. What are they up to over there? Look, and then they opened a dancing studio right across the street from her house and she's looking in. All those animals are learning to dance and Sophie's curious, looking in but still pretty shy. Speaker 7 (6:42) Sophie and Lou, I think, to this day, I think is a classic children's book. Oh, Speaker 5 (6:47) I love that book Speaker 7 (6:47) so much. Speaker 5 (6:48) We Speaker 7 (6:48) just... Speaker 5 (6:48) The dancing and the... Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Speaker 7 (6:51) And that's Sophie and Lou, our patron Michael. Speaker 8 (6:55) Sophie and... Sophie. Speaker 4 (6:59) No, that's Lou. Who is this? It's Lou. I like his face, she thought. All the way home, she danced inside. Speaker 7 (7:16) Do you want to go first? Speaker 5 (7:17) I'm Michael Braske, and Michael Mathers was one of my best friends. Speaker 7 (7:22) I'm Michael Coy, and Patriot was my best friend, and she's always said I was her best friend. Do Speaker 4 (7:28) you each call each other Michael? Speaker 7 (7:29) Yes. Speaker 4 (7:30) You do. Do your friends have nicknames for you? Speaker 7 (7:33) No. We're just known as the Michaels. Speaker 7 (7:37) People think it's our last name. He's Michael number one and Michael number two. That's true. Speaker 5 (7:43) What Speaker 2 (7:43) does that make Michael Mathers? Speaker 5 (7:44) He could be number three. He Speaker 2 (7:46) could Speaker 5 (7:46) be other Michael. Yeah, the other Michael. No, Patriot's Michael. Speaker 7 (7:53) Yeah, Patriot's Michael. Speaker 5 (7:54) He was my Michael to her always. That's what she referred to him as, my Michael. Speaker 5 (8:00) Do you know about when Petra met Michael in a bookstore? Speaker 7 (8:05) We're not there yet. We're not there yet. You're jumping way ahead. Am I? Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:09) Well, why don't you just tell us how you met Petra? Just start at the beginning. Speaker 7 (8:13) I can't remember now where I was when I met Petra, but I moved to Portland in 1975, January of 75. I was working for a chain of bookstores when I was 27, 28, something like that. She was... like no one I had ever met before. I have this sense of how I felt, which was gobsmacked. Tell how you hired her, your interview with her. Speaker 5 (8:39) Someone came up to me in the store, one of the other people that worked there, and said, there's a young woman downstairs that wants to work in the book department. Would you go down and interview her? So I went down, and Pedro was there. She was on a beige sweater set with a matching skirt. Speaker 5 (8:58) touched me and she said, I'm really good. I want to work here. And I said, well, that's good enough for me. I said, do you have a background in books? And she said she had a degree in book selling from a school in Germany. And she had a pretty thick accent. And she was beautiful. So I went up to my partner in the book department. I said, go downstairs and interview a patron and then tell her she's hired. Speaker 5 (9:27) One weekend, I stopped by Petra's, and I went in, and there was art all over her kitchen. And they were little postage stamp paintings that I'd never seen anyone do before. They were just beautiful. There would be a rather large 18 by 24 watercolor, and it was filled with tiny little pictures. And I said, I didn't know you were an artist. And she said, oh, yes, I am. And then we discovered in Portland that she... had created a whole wall in a children's bookstore with large paintings that filled the whole wall. A lot of them were based on nursery rhymes or just anything that came to her head. So I went in and bought three of them, I remember, for $25 a piece. Still have one. And that's when we discovered that she was an artist. And we thought she was really good and she wanted to do children's books. Don't get ahead of Speaker 7 (10:19) yourself. Speaker 5 (10:20) You're jumping. Okay, I'm sorry. You take over, would you? Speaker 7 (10:24) At some point, Petra and her then-husband David were living down at the Oregon coast in a house that they had built. And we knew that she wasn't happy with David. He was a very nice, very ordinary, kind of a schlubbish guy. And definitely, I mean, we never thought he was in her league, right? Speaker 5 (10:50) Well, yeah. We didn't realize he was even home sometimes when we visited. It was just the three of us, but David was there. Speaker 7 (10:57) She really married him to stay in the country. Speaker 5 (11:00) I don't think she ever loved him, but he was madly in