I Swear on My Mother’s Grave

Welcome to 2024! I miss you and even though the podcast has officially ended, I still have so much great content you haven’t heard. So how about a little bonus episode to kick off the year! Jesse Moss is the rockstar Director of Marketing at Experience Camps , an award-winning national nonprofit that transforms the lives of grieving children through summer camp programs and year-round initiatives....

Welcome to I Swear on My Mother’s Grave and the finale episode of Season 3. Yay! 3 seasons, baby! I don’t want to bury the lead…so, I also want to welcome you to the end of my podcast journey with all of you. This is it, friends. I am turning off the mic after this episode, but I might release a special compilation of conversations you haven’t heard yet at some point…so don’t unsubscribe forever!...

Today’s guest is a friend I met on TikTok. Yep! Mary McGreevy, hosts the Tips from Dead People page on TikTok, where she earnestly, and respectfully curates and personally reads unique obituaries from submissions she receives from all over the world. She has collected stacks of obituaries for years, and has now built quite an online following! Mary and I connected this summer around the time my be...

Mitchell Fain was b orn a natural storyteller. He is an incredible actor/comedian/circus performer who grew up in a Jewish home in Rhode Island and now lives in Chicago. In this episode, we will talk about how his bingo-gambling mother never cleaned her stove, lived on Winston cigarettes and Oreo cookies, and taught her children to lie to the electric company when bills were due. She also married...

Jessica Guthrie is a millennial, only child of a single mother living with Alzheimer’s. She likes to say that she has made an active, conscious choice to care for her mother in the last 8 years, at first commuting from Texas to Virginia, but now living with her mother as her full-time caregiver since 2019. In this episode, Jessica and I talk about the definition of caregiving and what it means to...

The one and only, Barri Leiner Grant is here. Barri is the Chief Grief Officer and a Certified Grief Coach with The Memory Circle, a space and place to be with your grief. When Barri’s own beautiful mother died in 1993, there were no resources available to help her family through the pain. Nobody said grief or grieving. She knew motherless daughters deserved better. So, she created and opened a do...

In this episode, my dear friend Kevin, talks about how his Christian mother struggled to accept her son’s sexuality even though she deeply loved him, and he loved her. Kevin’s mother always avoided the spotlight for most of her life, made a choice to learn sign language later in life, and loved working with the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. “I think in general, my mom never accepted her fabu...

Hey! Pull up a chair and let’s talk about how to set our loved ones up for success by making a will and checking it twice. It is one of the kindest things you can do for the people who love you.  Wading thru grief without dealing with the legal system is complicated enough, so thinking ahead about what COULD happen to you, and planning next steps, is key. Our guest, Ryan Holmes, is with the law fi...

In this episode, Amanda shares the shocking moment in her early 20s that she discovered she was adopted, how her lone-wolf mother“ loved to party," what meeting her birth mother in a coffee shop felt like, why the smell of gasoline reminds her of her childhood, and how spending time with her own young daughter Lola is the most time she has ever spent with someone she is biologically related to.  S...

Welcome to the 3rd Season! In this episode, a mother and a daughter are going to try to remember a fight they had (yep, they are going to struggle to find ONE example), they are going to discuss suicide and personal end of life wishes together (so please take care while listening), they are going to talk about making art and teaching children, and they are going to thank the universe that somehow…...

I missed you, and I hope you missed me too! Drumroll, please…we are coming back with a 3rd Season on Mother’s Day! Yay. I can't wait for you to get to meet all of these amazing humans. So many stories, people to learn from...and a big reminder that you are not alone in this journey. We got you and we GET you!  This show is for you, the living.  I can't wait to talk to you soon. And remember, our s...

Welcome to the last episode of Season 2! Yay! Do you believe that someone can love more than one person during their lifetime? Do you ever wonder what your parent’s sexual history or desires were? Are you curious about how to talk to your own young daughters about intimacy and sex and pleasure? Are you craving hearing a guest play guitar during a podcast interview? Well then we have the conversati...

Today, it’s just you and me in front of a crackling fire talking about holidays past, American Girl Dolls, and inherited objects that are heavy literally AND figuratively. Grab a cup of hot cocoa, put on a warm robe and let’s process some grief around the holidays and reminisce together. Happy holidays, to you and yours … however you celebrate.  Thanks for being here! This show isn’t just about ou...

This episode features my first pair of siblings! Billy and his sister Evelyn are actually half siblings, and they grew up in Texas. Their mother was raised a missionary kid, became a beloved math teacher, loved to travel, had a cackle that could cut thru the room, birthed a mini version of herself in her daughter Evelyn, and was taken from this life way too soon, and eclipsed way too often during...

This episode’s guest is Rachel Matlow, a producer, audio content creator, and writer based in Canada. They created one of my favorite audio pieces ever, “Dead Mom Talking,” which won the Third Coast International Audio Festival Best New Artist award in 2016. I discovered the piece in 2021 and haven’t stopped thinking and telling people about it since. As Rachel’s mother was dying, Rachel recorded...

Greg Geffrard lost his Haitian mother when he was only 16. She died from AIDS, but that is only a part of her story. This is an episode about a black son seeing his mother’s infectious “joy” and wanting to protect it. It’s about what it is like to watch the women in your life being mistreated and hurt by the men who were supposed to be your role models. It’s about revisionist history towards our p...

Welcome to the second season of I Swear on My Mother’s Grave podcast. In this episode, we go back to my mom's former classroom at Glenbard North High School in Carol Stream, Illinois, where she taught honors biology for over 20 years. She retired in 1996, and trust me when I say that the room looked like a time capsule—completely the same as it was when she left. I'm not exaggerating!  My guest, M...

Welcome to the 2nd Season of I Swear on My Mother’s Grave podcast. My second guest this season is the one and only…Peter Sagal, the long running host of NPR’s news/trivia game show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! In this episode, Peter and I chat about dealing with grief on a public stage, running, divorce, new marriages, new babies, chronic pain, Jewish mothers, and a word called “forgiveness?” Thanks f...

We are back, baby! Welcome to the 2nd Season of I Swear on My Mother’s Grave podcast. My first guest is my friend Lauren Montgomery. She is an amazing actor, a new mom, and a professor at Chicago’s Truman College. In this episode, we talk about preparing for my wedding this past summer, how to manage a big life moment without your mom by your side, how romantic relationships are modeled to us by o...

Hey, I'm back! Real quick...to let you know that I am getting married this week! Ahh! And it's on the patio of my 95 year old Nana's nursing home. In this bonus/mini episode, I wanted to talk thru some of my fear around the words "till death do us part", navigating triggers around wedding planning in a world that loves making sure your Mom is present for everything, blue eye shadow and remembering...

Today’s guest is Suzi Pond. We recorded this conversation one year ago, on Mother’s Day 2020. It was my first interview for this project/podcast. I didn’t know yet what this was going to be, but I knew I needed to talk to one of my oldest friends first, who just happened to be an editor, and someone who had lost her mother when she was just 13 years old. Suzi also loved my mother, and my mother lo...

Today’s guest is Halley Mayo. She lost her mother when she and her twin brother were just 4 years old. In this episode, Halley expresses how she doesn’t know her life without grief and doesn’t understand why she is still crying…over a woman she didn’t even know. She talks about how grateful she is to her step-mother, who is actually her mother’s cousin, for choosing to be a mother when she didn’t...

Today’s guest is Daisy Salto. Daisy is currently 16 years old, grew up in Chicago with her 4 siblings, and lost her mom when she was just 8 years old. She remembers watching Curious George with her mother and, even though she didn’t speak English, her mother thought that monkey was hilarious. In this episode, Daisy and I talk about learning what addiction was through the actions of our mothers, ho...

Today’s guest is Lucy Sandy. Lucy was born and raised in Houston, Texas by two immigrant parents from Sierra Leone: Mommy and Daddy, as they are affectionately called. In this episode, as Lucy approached the 10-year anniversary of her mom’s death, we talked about how it's time to acknowledge that your parents weren't perfect, the challenges of being raised in the shadow of two cultures, and the pr...

Today’s guest is Jess Jones. She used to be an agent (one of my agents, to be exact!) and is now the Center Director for The Kaufherr Center in Chicago, which supports professional and emerging performing artists seeking opportunity within the entertainment industry. In this episode, we talk about faith, bringing your children to your childhood home, how her mom spent her life leading others throu...