Good Grief

Nicki Durlester's family faced staggering losses as a result of the BRCAII gene, which made its members vulnerable to diagnoses of breast and ovarian cancer. Then Nicki herself was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. Her memoir, Beyond the Pink Moon, shares her family's experience and her own road to health and a new calling in her life; to advocate for other women facing the possibility or r...

Because grief cannot be predicted, it calls on us to ad lib, to feel our ways through an unfamiliar landscape and to find ways to express our experience that nourish and support us. By its nature creative, grief also opens up energy that may result in writing, art, music and many other personal expressions of profound human experience. Discovering this deep creative potential during each of their...

How much time have we each spent trying to fix our lives, and ourselves? Having been taught that unpleasant emotion in the enemy, we are ill prepared to gently guide ourselves through troubled times. But what if we learned simply to allow the moment to unfold, putting down our weapons and making friends with our experiences? Mary O'Malley found a more rich and fulfilling life when she learned to s...

Faced with the ultimate challenge of life—confronting death—how do we want to be remembered? Are there stories we want to tell? Experiences we want to share? Illuminations about how we've felt about life and why? Maybe we want to pass on family stories to the next generations. Perhaps we seek meaning and purpose and don't know how to access them. It's likely that we seek comfort and strength. We m...

A childhood filled with trauma and abuse impacts a person for a lifetime. But making sense of those experiences, moving towards wholeness, allows the adult survivor to create a meaningful, satisfying and relational adulthood. But how does this come about? Dave Pelzer, whose first book, A Child Called It, eloquently exposed his story of unimaginable physical and emotional abuse, has now written Too...

Kevin and Brian were in love and successful in their careers when they decided it was time for parenting. After a long search for a child, they were offered three; triplets who were at risk and without anyone to care for them. As a result of their excellent parenting and the help of a large community and family, they brought their children through their early challenges into health and well being....

For many parents, the fear of losing a child is more vivd than losing their own lives. We can't imagine surviving it. And yet, parents do lose their children, to illness or accident, and are left to find a way back to their lives. Eleanor Vincent's 19 year old, Maya, died in an accident just as her life was unfolding, leaving Eleanor unsure if she wanted to go on at all. How did she find her way b...

Does our exploration of race, sexuality and gender hold a possibility of helping us to awaken? Zenju Manuel believes it does. Through a lifetime of deep questioning and knowing, culminating in her ordination as a zen priest, she has used meditation, indigenous ritual and intuition as paths to liberation. Deeply exploring the losses and deep injury of our experiences, there is also the promise of d...

The end of a parent's life is often a steep reversal of roles for both parent and adult child. If the illness is fast moving, there's an avalanche of things to learn about how to care for a now dependent person who, if you are lucky, used to take care of you. How does a child thrust into a new role learn all that is needed to care for a declining parent? When Cheryl Derricotte's mother received a...

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...

Isabel and Anabel Stenzel, identical twins diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as babies, faced a lifetime of ill health and the probability that they would die very young. They also faced numerous losses of friends who had the same disease. Very young, they began keeping a record of their hospital experiences, drawing pictures and writing what happened along the way. Ultimately as adults, they collabo...

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 paralysi...

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 plac...

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 ho...

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...

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 u...

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...

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...

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 tak...

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 h...

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...

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...

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 b...

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 lik...

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,...