Episodes

One of the most important things for us when we're ill, especially when we are dying, is the compassion and empathy of our doctors. But how do physicians retain these human qualities with each patient when they are bombarded with mulitple losses and the weight of such influence over life and death? How do they avoid becoming jaded and cold, or falling into a perpetual state of numbness or paralysing emotion? Jordan Grumet does it by writing about his experiences as a doctor and as a person in hi...

As a hospice social worker and as someone whose husband died of cancer, Marcy Bernstein has learned a lot about the end of life and what kind of support people need to support a good death. It is her calling to offer advice, support and wisdom to people facing what she has faced and what she has helped many many clients to face. She has created an advice column and website that offer anyone a place to ask questions and get answers. Following her own inner voice and addressing the needs she encou...

Katy Butler was dedicated to supporting her parents at the end of their lives and acting as their part time caregiver and full time medical advocate. But the experience taught her just how hard it is to craft a good death in the highly medicalized environments in which most of us die. Discovering how hard it is to keep control over our choices at the end of our lives, she wrote a beautiful book honoring her parents and making a case for a better way of dying. In sharing their stories, we are giv...

Out of the African-American experience in this country, spiritual and gospel music was born; moving and beautiful music celebrating spirit, faith and the capacity of human beings to overcome adversity. The Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, singing spiritual and gospel music for almost 30 years, uses this music to help people pray, celebrate, be touched and to heal. The choir also sends a message of hope that people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, races, sexual orientations, religions and idea...

How can taking care of a sick loved one teach us about taking care of ourselves? The stakes are high, and we can't afford to push ourselves beyond our own edges. If we do, we may not be able to help the person we love at all! Susanne West knows this territory, from years of caregiving and years of working with caregivers trying to find their balance in impossible circumstance. What helps to keep us balanced? How do we say no at the risk of our loved ones not having the help they need? How do we ...

At the end of life, we want to feel at home, even if we can't BE at home. After a career in nursing, working with very ill patients, Kelley Scott saw the need for a home place for dying people and set about to fill that need. The social model on which her hospice is based prioritizes comfort, love and care in a home-like environment, helping those who live there to end their lives in the best way possible. Kelley has made it her mission not only to run Clarehouse, the hospice home she started, b...

Helping a parent face the end of their lives can be a sacred part of living. When the relationship has been special and close, we are giving back to a person has given us life and, sometimes, a great deal more. And when that parent faces their death in a way that inspires and transforms us, we are truly blessed. Julie Saeger Nierenberg wanted to be there for her father. They had always been close and seeing him face metastatic cancer inspired her to a sense of presence deeper than what she had k...

When playwright and actor Ann Randolph faced difficulties and losses, she applied her art to them and created comedy. Being able to laugh at what we cry about is a soothing balm for our difficulties and griefs. Creating characters that touch everyone who meets them with their humanity and depth while bringing laughter is Ann's true gift. How do we take a humorous view of our life stories while taking them seriously? Ann has taught countless people across the U.S. and the world how to do just tha...

Kiley Krekorian Hanish and Ivy Margulies dreamed of supporting women who have lost babies, to grieve the loss and share the experience with other women. Kiley and her husband were the subject of the film Return to Zero with Minnie Driver. Ivy was (and is) a therapist and Death Midwife working with women who had lost babies. Their dream bloomed as the Return to Zero workshops, the most recent one held in Australia. They are returning to Good Grief to share the experience with our listeners and le...

How do we face the end of a mother's life? This is usually a difficult and painful prospect. But what if your mother wants to end her life by her own volition. How can one accept that? After years of struggling with Parkinson's disease, Zoe Carter's mother was preparing to die and wanted to make her own decisions about how and when that would happen. She was also determined that her children show up for all of it, including requests to fly across the country and meet with the Hemlock Society. Th...

Sometimes it's time to let go of a dream. How do you know when to keep trying and when to grieve and create new dreams? And how do you let go of that dream that has compelled you for such a long time? What helps you to find what awaits you beyond the life you thought you were destined for. Tracey Cleantis learned how to let go of old dreams, grieve them, and move towards new dreams through her own experience. Now she is a voice for change when what you've been seeking does not come to you. Her p...

How does a mother of a two year old, just beginning her marriage and her life as a mother, face the sudden loss of her 32 year old husband? Rachel Kodanaz had to discover how to do that when her husband died leaving his office. Sometimes the worst times of our lives lead to our greatest callings and for Rachel, that was a mission to educate workplaces about how to deal with loss. Ultimately, she became a speaker on loss, embracing her own nightmare and, in the process, learning to support others...

We welcome back Melanie DeMore, consummate musician and death bed midwife. She lost her father and I lost my mother within a few weeks of each other in Fall, 2014, both from pancreatic cancer. Join us for an intimate conversation laced with music about their lives, their deaths and our grief. If we live long enough, we will all face this moment; letting go of parents. What the relationship was like, how the death unfolded and what we witnessed in them as they faced the final chapter has so much ...

When Marie Mutsuki lost her American father and Japanese grandparents, she feared she would never find her happiness again. Motivated by a deep desire to have some joy to share with her young son, she travelled to Japan, the land her mother came from, to find answers. Unable to fulfill her mission to bury her grandfather's ashes because of the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, she discovered that many of the people she met had a very different relationship to loss and to grie...

Katrina Cavanough knew all her life that she saw beyond what others saw. But it took working as a social worker in a hospital to realize that she had the capacity to reach beyond our everyday world and speak with those that had left the earthly plane. Suspicious of what she was experiencing, she looked for verification that these ghosts, as her father had long ago called them, were communicating precious information about how to live her best life. Although she didn't tell her clients what she w...

What do we mean when we say we've had a run of bad luck? We mean that we have experienced loss after loss, until we're not even sure which heartache is sending us into the depths of despair. Like quicksand, it seems as if we'll never get out. Annah Elizabeth went through such a time, with numerous fertility losses, her husband's affair while she was still vulnerable and the loss of the ground she had always stood on. How did she come through all that to live a joyous life? Join us to discover wh...

Through the loss of two of the most important people in her life, Marilyn Ababio became deeply interested in supporting others to make the most out of their lives, and their deaths. Compelled to make her work accessible to people who might not otherwise get the support they need for the end of their lives, she began a program for her local county government called Getting the Most out of Life. How did Marilyn actualize her dream of bringing her mighty skills to bear in underserved populations? W...

A few women with cancer felt isolated, unsupported and scared. They were also community activists. Out of their own need, they created a Center dedicated to women with cancer, planting the seeds for a community serving thousands of women at their most difficult times. In the process, they created a lively and engaging set of services for women (and their families) LIVING with cancer. Learn how the WCRC grew with the times, promoting diversity, knowledge and loving support and earning a reputatio...

Do we continue to transform with each new loss? Tom Zuba thinks so, and wants to share the profound lessons he learned grieving the loss, first of his 18 month old daughter, then years later his wife, and years after that one of his remaining two children. What was at first an unlit and terrifying landscape through which he had no idea how to travel, slowly illuminated, showing him the way through his grief, noticing everything along the path. Dedicating his life to helping other people navigate...

Katherine Ingram opened the door to find the experience many of us dread on the other side; a police officer on telling her that her loved one would not be coming home. In her grief over her husband, killed in a plane crash, she was opened to the grief for her father who died when she was eight. Already trained in psychology and journeys of the soul, she learned to appreciate not only the happy beautiful moments but the painful and searching moments that lead to our deepest growth. After the los...

When a lifelong practitioner of Buddhism, philosophy and healing loses her husband, how does she grieve? Elaine Mansfield observed her own experience, capturing her grief in a beautiful book and ultimately answering the call to support others through their losses as her life's calling. Unafraid to explore each aspect of her experience, the things she noticed about her grief became a book, Leaning into Love, in which she shares her own deep sorrow for the good of others. By the time she faced thi...

Rabbi Melvin Glazer dedicates his life to helping people face loss because he has faced loss. Drawn to a life of service, he became a rabbi and then an expert in death and bereavement. What does he have to share about weaving Biblical stories into our dealings with death? Can he help us to see how to bring some faith into our grief? Whether we are Jewish, of some other faith, or of no faith at all, losing loved ones inspires some of the deepest spiritual questions we will ever face in our lives....

Betsy Rose has long used her music to express her deepest experiences, and has sung for others in order to open their hearts. So it was only natural that the loss of her father inspired her to create and compile songs she wrote for comfort in her own losses. A prolific recording artist and performer, her latest recording, Long for This World soothes and comforts in hard times of loss. Betsy now adds death and grief work to all her other accomplishments, which include singing at conferences and l...

The world of elder care and assisted living can be exhausting and demoralizing. How does a daughter insure that the needs of her declining parents are met? How does she accept the deficits in a system of health care that sometimes does not care? Marcy Baskin learned first hand how ill prepared we are to advocate for our elders, especially when they are suffering from Alzheimers. She set out to learn all she could and, in the process, found a new calling. Trained in elder care, she wrote the book...