Episodes
Sept. 6, 2017
Caring for Red
Mindy Fried resolved to take the best possible care of her father as he neared the end of his life. That commitment was complicated by distance, a lifetime of relationship and the usual difficulties of care management, both h...
Aug. 30, 2017
Time to Fly
When Laura Lewis children were three and six, the love of her life, the father of her children, killed himself without warning. In the years that followed, she struggled to regain her balance, experiencing a destructive rebou...
Aug. 23, 2017
Dying to Make a Difference
After years of work in end of life care, Mary Matthiesen was blindsided by the death of her mother. She was also filled with inspiration resulting from the conversations they had and the choices her mother made about completi...
Aug. 16, 2017
You're Alive!
After the death of his mother, Ned Buskirk wondered why we don't talk about death more. As a producer and artist, he found a way to invite the conversation when he hosted a small event in his home, called You're Going to Die:...
Aug. 9, 2017
Unbroken
As a young and innocent 13 year old, Madeleine Black experienced an unimaginable and brutal rape which changed the course of her life. Although she spent many years affected by the experience, she was able, through her own pe...
Aug. 2, 2017
Caravan of No Despair
Mirabai Starr was decades into a deep spiritual practice. Then on the day her first book, a translation of Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, came out, her daughter was killed in a car crash. All she knew went o...
July 26, 2017
Choosing to Die
Phyllis Shacter's husband made a series of radical choices about how his life would end. When he received two life limiting diagnoses within six weeks of each other, Alzheimers and cancer, he refused cancer treatment and empl...
July 19, 2017
Recovery
People experiencing serious mental illness are likely to suffer numerous losses; of family, jobs, stability and security. How can they be supported to identify their own goals and move towards accomplishing them, even if thei...
July 12, 2017
Living the Fullest to the Very End
Until recently, very little attention was paid to the quality of our lives at the very end of our lives. But that is changing, fueled by patient demand but also by a group of medical practitioners who are passionate about mak...
June 28, 2017
What Abi Taught
Lucy Hone was already an expert on resilience when she faced the worst nightmare of her life; her daughter, best friend, and best friend's daughter were killed together in an auto accident. How did she use what she knew about...
June 21, 2017
A Letter to My Wife
As a person who had a long time meditation practice, Joe DiNardo had carried himself through hard times with presence and grace. But his wife's diagnosis with pancreatic cancer required that he bring every resource he had to ...
June 14, 2017
Messages
From the time Fleur was 4 years old, she communicated with the souls of people who were no longer alive. By good fortune, her family recognized that this was a gift, that she was different in a good way. Still, she didn't ant...
June 7, 2017
I Remember
Filmmaker Matt Wolf is compelled by the people who nurture the legacy of artists who died of AIDS. He has made films about and interviewed many people who lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic and fight to keep the pub...
May 31, 2017
Great Day To Be Alive
How does a cancer diagnosis change a life? When Patricia Bahia was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, it resulted in a commitment to live her bucket list. For her, this meant committing her life to two things; well-being and musi...
May 24, 2017
Meant for Heaven
Holland Young was an impish and active 3 year old when she started complaining to her parents that she had a headache. In short order, she transformed from a very healthy to a very sick child. As the Youngs navigated the agon...
May 17, 2017
Insomniac City
Bill Hayes left his life in San Francisco for New York City, hoping to heal from the loss of his partner and find comfort in the sharp rhythms and landscape of the New York skyline. Unexpectedly, he fell in love with Oliver S...
May 10, 2017
Radical Survivor
Nancy Saltman has had and survived cancer twice. But that could not have prepared her for the worst losses of her life. On an ordinary day, she got the phone call telling her that her husband and two sons, her whole family, h...
May 3, 2017
Middle Life Maze
Finding recovery, purpose and peace all the way to the end of our lives can be challenging. Aging, with its accumulated losses and disappointments, finds us. Navigating the territory of life's difficulties in midlife carries ...
April 26, 2017
Once We Were Sisters
When you watch someone you love live, and ultimately die, in an abusive relationship, how does it shape your own life? Sheila Kohler's sister was her childhood friend, her confidante. Living parallel lives, her sister Maxine ...
April 19, 2017
Tug at My Heart
One crushing event by itself would have led Deb Hart into a dark night of the soul. But how could she absorb two terrible losses; the death of her son at 22 and a breast cancer diagnosis? She asked all the usual questions; wh...
April 12, 2017
Surviving the Storm
As the life span of people diagnosed with cancer has lengthened, questions arise about what life looks like after. A physical illness is also a life event, a story that often needs to be told and existential questions that ye...
April 5, 2017
Every Breath I Take
How does it feel to live with life-limiting illness from your first day? How does it influence the way you look at the world and what you believe. And what is the impact of living with an illness that so many people die of, t...
March 29, 2017
The Roadmap Home
In a childhood filled with loss, neglect and longing, perhaps the biggest loss is a connection to one's own heart. Hardening to cope with what is lacking, we can become rigid, avoiding our deep feelings and most precious long...
March 22, 2017
Words at the Threshhold
Some people think that dying people increasingly speak nonsense, losing their grip on reality. But Lisa Smartt, a linguist trained to pay deep attention to words, realized as her father was dying that what he was saying was c...