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This week on 7 Minute Stories, Aaron reflects on loss, legacy, and the fragile weight of being human.
From the passing of cultural icons like James Van Der Beek and Robert Duvall to the deeply personal grief of losing his uncle and cousin—both Cleveland firefighters who ran toward danger for a living—this episode explores the difference between distant loss and the kind that reshapes you.
Recorded on Ash Wednesday, “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust” wrestles with mortality, memory, and a question Aaron first asked at age 12: When the body stops, does everything stop? Or are we more like radios—receivers of something that continues beyond us?
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The Team:
Story created & performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional vocals: Cori Calafato
Art: Pete Whitehead
Original Theme Music: thomas j. duke
Additional Soundscape Design: Isaac Gehring
TRANSCRIPT
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
“If the radio breaks down, the music stops here… but does the music still exist somewhere else?”
A lot of deaths in 2026.
But maybe that’s something we say every year once we’re old enough to start noticing it more and more.
We read it in the pop culture headlines. An actor you grew up with. James Van Der Beek, for instance. Way too young. Then you have someone like Robert Duvall. Another actor. A man who seems eternal because he inhabited so many lives on screen.
When an actor dies, it feels strange. We didn’t know them, and yet we did. Their performances are stitched into our memories. High school basements and crappy TVs. College apartments with popcorn. First apartments with our first loves. Hand-me-down couches.
When they go, it’s like a version of us goes with them.
But that’s the easy kind of grief for those of us who don’t know them personally. That’s the kind you can process from afar.
Then there’s the other kind. The kind that doesn’t trend. Many of you know that one too well.
I’m recording this on Ash Wednesday evening. It wasn’t planned. In the Christian tradition, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. A priest or pastor presses ashes onto your forehead in the shape of a cross and says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
It’s a day that confronts you with your mortality. With your limits. With the physical reality that this body, as sturdy as it feels some mornings, is temporary.
And maybe that’s why it feels fitting that I’m recording right now. Just yesterday, I was at my uncle’s funeral.
He lived a relatively long life. An entrepreneur. A Cleveland firefighter for decades. A man who literally ran toward fire and danger for a living.
But it still felt too soon. Disease doesn’t care about potential.
A few years before he passed, his son, my cousin, also a Cleveland firefighter, died in the line of duty. Another man who ran toward danger. Who loved his family. Who had a ripple effect of good. Another life laid down for the sake of others.
The truth is, their stories are not mine to tell. Not fully. Not properly. Seven minutes would not even scratch the surface of the lives they led.
But I loved them. And I admired them both in different ways.
That particular line of our family has carried more than its share of loss. That’s hard to make sense of.
Then I was asked to be a pallbearer.
I said yes.
I’m standing there with one of my cousins and a group of Cleveland firefighters, holding the casket. I remember the weight of it as we carried it to the back of the hearse. Then later, carrying it to the gravesite and lowering it into the ground.
And I’m thinking, wait a second.
Twenty-five years ago, I was working construction as a grunt for my uncle. He brought me onto his construction team to teach me what it was like to work hard in this life. He had me clean up the bars in the morning and mop the floors, even though I hated it. He was teaching me what it meant to build something for yourself.
This man, full of power and vision and success and charisma and strength. We did that for two summers.
And now, twenty-five or thirty years later, I am carrying his body and placing it into the ground.
What an unbelievable honor it is to shepherd the bodies that helped raise us and lay them to rest.
Through the emotional fog of all of this, a strange memory surfaced. A question I asked my teacher when I was twelve years old. I wrote it down. She handed it back to me and said, “I’ll never be able to answer this for you, but one day you’ll know.”
I photocopied that question. I still have that copy in my recording studio to this day.
Here was the question:
If my brain is what makes me think and feel and remember things, then when my brain stops working, does all of me just stop too? Sort of like a candle. When the wax is gone, the flame can’t keep burning. Is that what we are?
Or what if my brain is more like a radio, and the “me” part, the thinking, the loving, the cool person that I am part, is something the brain just picks up and plays? So that if the radio breaks down, the music stops here… but does the music still exist somewhere else?
I think she was right.
It’s one of those questions you’ll know eventually.
As I heard the bagpipes play “Amazing Grace” and walked away from the burial site, I didn’t know.
But I felt closer to that answer than I had ever been in my life.
I’ll talk to you next week.
