Episodes

In her work encouraging healthier relationships as a way to live a happier life, Katarina Blom already knew how key connection is to happiness. Then she was chosen to be the psychologist in a television series called The Gent...

Ethan Sisser wanted to die in ecstasy, surrounded by music, community, beauty, but mostly, love. His wishes did not fit neatly into even the hospice paradigm but he was able to draw together a group of supporters, one of whom...

Anticipating the joy of welcoming her first child, Lindsey Henke was completely unprepared for the shock of that child's stillbirth. Although Lindsey had been a practicing psychotherapist for a few years, she had not had that...

Personal experience with grief and mental health challenges in her family led Anastasia Zadeik to write her novel, The Other Side of Nothing. The families she wriwtes about struggle to know how to support themselves and each ...

As a younger sister, Ona Gritz idolized her older sibling. But as the favored child with a disability, she could see her sister struggling. It was thirty years after the murder of her then pregnant sister, partner and baby th...

When Dena Rueb Romero discovered a box full of letters and memorabilia in her mother's house, she furtively took it home with her. Although she knew her parents had fled the holocaust, they failed to share the details of thei...

What gets you through your own times of chaos? For Noah Asher, it is a deep Christian faith. Already a practicing Christian, his understanding of how that could support him as he faced prison and profound loss grounded him in...

Have you ever imagined you were getting a handle on your loss and then been blindsided by a surprise tsunami? As Lisa Keefauver captures in the title of her new book, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch. But there are some tricks to help...

Myra Sack and her husband Matt were very lucky. They had fallen in love with the right person, had work they were deeply committed to and had a new baby. Into the middle of their charmed life came the worst possible news; the...

Courtney Deane knows grief from the inside out, having lost both of her parents at a young age. Determined to create something beautiful out of her losses she wrote a book exploring what happiness ever after looks like after ...

Every body that has been lived in will eventually need to be cared for after death. What is the most earth friendly option currently available for after death care? Recompose is arguably not just the greenest but also the mos...

Have you ever noticed that after similar traumas, at similar times of life, with so much in common, some people remain traumatized indefinitely, some recover through resilience, while others transcend and grow? Although there...

Faced with numerous losses and feeling deep grief, Jamie Thrower could not find grief services that understood how to support a queer griever. Struggling through the feelings and inevitable difficulty of their own grief, they...

Warren Kozak thought he had prepared himself for the death of his wife. He knew he would feel sad but had no idea that he would have to invent a new Warren. In the absence of her larger than life presence, he felt unmoored an...

Roshni Kavate and Rebecca Servoss noticed in their own grieving the lack of services to support grief, especially for people across all identities. They committed to creating a new paradigm for grief support, built on hope, j...

Growing up with a father who was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer when she was seven, Laurel Braitman was taught survival skills from then on. Out of her own fears she embraced the lessons, hoping they would prevent the te...

When a horrific explosion happened in Beirut, Dalal Mawad was living nearby and felt a compelling urge to help. As a journalist she naturally searched for ways to tell the story. But what was the story? The explosion happened...

After Ann Anderson Evan's beloved husband killed himself, she wondered what could have led him to such an end. He had not seemed suicidal, or deeply depressed, or haunted by demons. She imagined it must be some secret misery ...

When a declining parent needs help, it creates a delicate balance of care and acceptance. Marsha Gray Hill thought she had found that balance, even as her mother began to show signs of dementia. But then, COVID ripped the rug...

Darnell Lamont Walker makes it his life's mission to seed joy everywhere he is. How do his callings intersect? He is a children's television writer, a death doula, a filmmaker. In every case he hopes to inform, encourage and ...

The cause of anxiety and pain in our bodies can't be reduced to any one explanation. But in Jen Soriano's book, Nervous, she follows the threads of her own struggles to the personal, familial, cultural and intergenerational t...

Once, we were all children, incapable of protecting ourselves from the adults around us. If they were cruel and abusive, it laid tracks in us that made it hard to love and be loved, to see our own beauty and to become who we ...

Audrey is a fictional character who resembles her author, Gail Marlene Schwartz. They both suffer from anxiety. They have both lost friends to suicide when they were young. And they are both queer women constructing the famil...

Glenn Hileman's parents lived a love story for the ages. Their story ended together when the East Troublesome fire in Colorado took their lives and the home they had built and loved together. Their son, Glenn, needed action t...