Episodes

Our picture of widowhood conjures a grey haired woman, maybe a grandmother, mourning the loss of a life long love. But that picture does not always fit the facts. Melissa Gould was young, still raising a child, when her husband, the love of her life, died. How would she move forward into a life she never anticipated? What would support her along the way? In her intimate and illuminating memoir, we learn not only what she relied on to reimagine her life, but also what she slowly began to offer ot...

What does it mean to us when we dream about a person in our life who has died? Sometimes we are working to understand the loss or move forward from it. Sometimes we are plagued by the need to know that they are ok. Sometimes we hope for just one more moment, one more time to feel as if they are with us. Whether our dreams are positive or negative, they are significant. Joshua Black had a dream after his father died that changed his grief. His dream was comforting and led him to feel more at peac...

Just getting a call that someone you love has died brings grief and profound impact. But what if the second call is from a police officer theorizing that your uncle, your mother's brother, has killed her? This stark and terrifying day sent Kory Marie on a quest not only to navigate her own grief, but to try to discover what had happened. And then, it became clear over time that there were aspects of her mother's life and death she would never truly know for sure. With an inquisitive mind geared ...

What we create as a result of learning to navigate our grief is unique; a creative expression of our deepest lives. For Reid Peterson, creating the Grief Refuge app reflected his deep desire to offer a daily companion to people who had experienced loss. But first he had to work with his own grief for the two men who had fathered him; his father and stepfather. After each of their deaths, he chose to move towards the feelings he was having and find ways to support himself and, ultimately, to grow...

Nothing prepares us for the three words you have cancer. How do people facing this frightening diagnosis navigate the emotional fallout which, for most, will be a significant aspect of their cancer experience? When Cynthia Hayes faced her own diagnosis, she felt ill equipped to help herself. Over time she gathered new skills and trusted advisors to support her. She felt compelled to offer what she had learned, and what she researched, to other people facing what she had faced. The result is The ...

Faith Wilcox faced the unimaginable. Her healthy, accomplished and intelligent 13 year old was diagnosed with a lethal form of cancer and, despite the best efforts of her health care team, she died in less than a year. In the meantime, Faith had left the bad marriage she had endured for years. She knew she could not help her daughter through this illness and stay married to her husband. Her older daughter faced the loss of her sister and, at least temporarily, the loss of her mother; the focus w...

When Lily Dulan gave birth to her baby girl, it seemed like the culmination to years of work to create the life she'd envisioned. Despite complications at the start, her child was given a clean bill of health and she and her husband joyfully headed home. But not long after, her beautiful baby Kala died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. None of the work she'd done n the past to heal from her traumas prepared her for this. But over time, she inched her way forward, creating meaning and deepening th...

Arriving for a weekend trip, Lisa Goich was unprepared to hear that her beloved mother had just 2 weeks to live. Suspending her everyday life, Lisa devoted herself to her mother's care, fulfilling a deep commitment to honor their relationship. In the process Lisa's relationship to death itself changed. Resulting in two books; 14 Days: A Mother, A Daughter, a Two-Week Goodbye and I Wonder: A Guided Grief Journal, Lisa applied the lessons of a lifetime she learned in that short time watching her m...

There is a comfort in growing up in a cult; believing absolutely in whatever we are taught, giving members a framework for all the difficulties in life. But for many, there is a terrible price to pay; suspending our own capacity to process information and determine our own truth, denying evident contradictions, limiting our own possibilities. For Angela Himsel, the path away from the cult she was raised in led to a complete reorganization of her beliefs, evident in the biggest change possible; f...

When the unimaginable happens, each of us enters our own grief language, unique to our deepest selves. When Mike Bernhardt's wife died in 1991, poetry (both writing and reading it) connected him to his own pain and, over time, healing. As time went forward, he wanted to share the gift of poetry with other grievers and began collecting poems that spoke to him, resulting in a compilation; Voices of the Heart. 30 years later, during COVID, Mike is re-releasing the collection, adding poetry that ill...

Up until recently, families who experienced pregnancy loss, still birth and other reproductive losses had very little to depend on to carry them through the confusing and heartbreaking grief of a loss society often fails to recognize. Recently, several public figures have chosen to talk publicly about these losses in their own lives, opening up the conversation and helping other women who have experienced these losses to know they are not alone. Into this conversation comes a book designed to su...

How often have you heard someone who has been through loss say they are living their lives to honor the person they lost? This impulse to give back ofter loss is powerful and pure. But the shape it takes varies, showing itself in unique and moving ways. For David Richman, the death of his sister from cancer led to a 5,000 mile bicycle trip to raise money and also to explore existential questions of life and death her illness had awoken in him. The result is a book about the people along the way ...

What turns do our lives take after cancer? Dawn Newton wrote a memoir about the lung cancer that dropped into her life so unexpectedly. It would take nine years for the next chapter in her life as a writer to unfold- novelist. Did coming through a time full of challenge affect the book, The Remnants of Summer? How does she believe facing cancer changed her? Writing a book of fiction that confronts loss and grief could well have been informed by her experience, by the potential loss of her very l...

Of all the words that can touch our lives, you have cancer are some of the most frightening. For Nancy Novack, her diagnosis also made clear how little she knew about this new world and what she would need to face the next steps. Following her successful treatment for Stage IV ovarian cancer, she committed to offer resources to others facing a cancer diagnosis; to offer hope, information and resources to people in the same situation she had faced. As a thank you to the universe, Nancy's List, th...

Singer Amikaeyla has spent her career sharing musical healing with people facing challenges around the world. Out of her own deep experiences with music as a force for healing, her work is fueled by a belief in its magic powers. So what has this last year during a pandemic, when her work was altered and sometimes unrecognizable, been like? What has kept her optimism and personal healing going? What lessons she learned over many years have come to the fore this year? Join us as we talk together a...

In a short span of time, Maria Kefalas' husband, father and father-in-law were all diagnosed with life limiting cancer. But none of them knew that would not be the worst thing they would face. Her 2 year old daughter's diagnosis with MLD, an incurable and universally fatal illness, would take her grief to an even deeper place. And facing life with a dying child and husband would seem, at first, impossible. Over time, though, Maria found her way to her own meaning and purpose and learned what wou...

How do the lives left behind when parents leave their country and culture impact their first generation children? Esther Amini's parents carried with them the fears, oppressions and traditions they left but also the grit and determination it took to create a new life. Confused as a child about what caused them to behave the way they did, Esther has spent a lifetime seeking to understand them and, ultimately, herself. In the process, she has come to admire them more deeply and also to feel the gr...

In the hardest of times, what moves us, inspires us and takes us that one step further? For Neil Beresin, a counselor and interfaith chaplain, it is often poetry. What he learned during his own most difficult times now serves the people he works with, offering inspiration when all seems bleak. What poems most speak to him and to them? How does he bring poetry into the room for comfort and resonance? And what can we all learn about the power of poetic expression in our own lives? When poetry capt...

When Keith Cormican's brother died in an attempt at a water rescue, it sparked his search for safe ways to offer families the closure of their loved ones' recovered body. Knowing how important it is to honor the person with our personal burial traditions, he became impassioned advocate for the families of drowning victims. Free of charge, he now travels wherever a family has need of his services and has become a leading expert in safe water recovery. In honor of his brother, he conducts his own ...

Like many people, Eilene Zimmerman believed drug addiction lived in another world, far from her family. That was until her ex-husband, the father of her children, died of an overdose and she discovered his body. How had everyone missed the signs of an ever increasing relationship to substances that was robbing him of his health, his career and his capacity to focus on the important relationships in his life? Eilene became intent on answering her questions about how a brilliant, high powered atto...

COVID-19 has been challenging in different ways for different people. Some of us are experiencing more isolation and loss than we were. Some of us, especially in industries directly affected by the pandemic, are working harder. And then there are those of us who are caring for children, trying to balance relationships, parenting, jobs and social isolation. This has highlighted the differential effects of child raising on women, who still bear an outsized burden for our home lives. Zibby Owens ha...

As Nina Simone said, It is an artist's duty to reflect the time in which we live. The Artists' Grief Deck, a project that pairs visual artists with writers, offers visual and written representation of COVID's impact, especially regarding our losses. As it's creators say, COVID-19 presents a unique challenge, among natural disasters, to human culture. Loss is experienced on numerous levels, and it is ongoing. It is not geographically specific, and so there is no ‘getting out’ of the affected area...

Can we ever understand the place a spouse holds in our lives? Often, that understanding comes only after the sudden and terrible loss of that person. Jeff Porter's wife, as it turned out, was the planet around which his life, in some ways, orbited. Her sudden death threw him into outer space, careening into memories, unmoored and trying to make sense of the un-sensible. His attempt to grapple with how his life would go forward without its center point led him to unexpected reaches of his own inn...

Grief- what's in it for us? Katherine Ingram had to answer this question for herself when her husband died suddenly. Along with the deep pain of that loss, unresolved feelings about the death of her father when she was eight opened up as well. Her realization that she would have to go through every bad and ugly feeling she was having, avoiding nothing, led to the writing of a memoir, Washing the Bones, and a career working with grief. She comes back to Good Grief to talk about her new book, Grie...