Are We There Yet?

In this episode, John Biggs takes us through the heartbreaking odyssey of losing his wife Samantha to a sudden mental breakdown. Seemingly overnight, Samantha went from being an incredible mother and artist to someone who could no longer function when their kids were just 12 and 14. John is a very entertaining storyteller so we laughed even more than we cried as he recounted the years when he had...

In this episode, I speak to the amazing Mackenzie Mazen about being a little buddy and then a big buddy at comfort zone camp after her father died by suicide when she was ten. Once again, I was so impressed by another GenZer who is open to sharing her experience of grief. Mackenzie is very light-hearted and loves to joke and laugh about her childhood trauma which made our conversation fun and enga...

In this episode, I talk to journalist and author Dan Keoppel about how he centered his role as a father when choosing his treatment for bladder cancer. As a science reporter, he approached his diagnosis with curiosity and extensive research to figure out how to manage his cancer while being the Dad he wanted to be. Dan is so knowledgeable about his disease that he has been able to make the most in...

I had so much fun interviewing Evin Rose Terranova who I met volunteering at Comfort Zone Camp earlier this year. She has been volunteering at the grief camp for kids for several years and has learned a lot from supporting grieving kids. Evin was just eight years old when her father died by suicide and she was lucky enough to have an amazing mother who supported her beautifully with therapy and gr...

In this deeply moving episode which is also packed with useful information, Dr. Lucy Hone shares her unique perspective, expertise, and personal knowledge of resilience. Resilience is a tricky word because it sometimes gets used inappropriately with kids as a way to discount their experience. We've all heard the phrase "kids are resilient" which is often true but is not an excuse to assume they do...

Sarah and Ben Satzman are both in their early twenties and were very close to their grandfather Joel Satzman when he died unexpectedly last year. They were able to be with him at the very end of his life and that experience had a huge impact on them. You can hear in their stories about him how much they adored their grandfather and the unique role he played in their lives. He was a great support a...

Terry Chatkupt is a visual artist whose current show at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California is about the 2020 lockdown and its effect on his family. This podcast was started, in part, to address some of the reporting on adolescent mental health in the aftermath of the pandemic that was sorely lacking. Stories in mainstream media missed an opportunity to interview young people an...

Acclaimed author Sara Zarr has published ten novels for young readers, as well as two books of non-fiction about creativity. She’s a National Book Award finalist and two-time Utah Book Award winner. Her first book, Story of a Girl , was made into a 2017 television movie directed by Kyra Sedgwick. She also hosts the podcast "This Creative Life," all of which you can find on her website below. I'm a...

I'm excited to kick off the second season with another interview with a young adult. In this episode I talk with Léa Greenberg, a junior in college, about losing her mother and maternal grandmother by age fifteen. Her mother and grandmother were both French so Léa also lost a big piece of her French identity. We could have talked for hours so it took a lot of work to edit our conversation to fifty...

This is an extra fifteen minutes of my conversation with Léa Greenberg. It won't make much sense if you haven't listened to the full episode but we talk about Harry Potter, holding onto her French identity and what she plans to do for her career. Please consider subscribing to the podcast on whatever platform you use or on my substack: I'm Listening Special thanks to Josephine Wiggs for the song "...

Coming soon! Season two is shaping up nicely and I should be posting the first episode in a couple of weeks. This trailer is about what you can expect from the next season and how my thinking about adolescent grief has expanded and changed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm so pleased that my daughter Grace Muller was able to come on the show for the last episode of the first season. Grace is an artist and a junior at Bennington College in Vermont, so we sat down to record while she was home for the holidays. It's a more casual, less edited conversation but we went deep into the ways that she understands her relationship to grief and I had no idea where the conve...

This week I speak with Elise Gaul, a therapist specializing in grief and loss who works in multiple modalities including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitizing and Reprocessing) therapy. Elise explains why EMDR works well to address "covert grief," a term she coined for the parts of childhood grief that can profoundly affect a person's life, often without their awareness. Her stints as the executive dir...

I'm thrilled to have my son Skops Faison and his friend Sean Dillon on the show to talk about the grief that results from coming out as trans or nonbinary. Skops and Sean are both seniors in high school who came out to their families as trans during the pandemic. There are many parallels in their stories and many contrasts as well. The conversation was wide-ranging in terms of the many losses and...

In this episode, I talk with Fran Mason who lost her mother when she was 11 years old. It's interesting how different it was for her than it was for me because she was three years younger than I was when my mom died. Hearing Fran talk about going through early adolescence without her mom highlighted the difference it made to have three more years with mine. We talked about memory and how her persp...

Vanessa Fierstadt started a counseling practice called Kintsugi Grief Center that's near me in Pasadena, CA. I wanted to find out what drew her to work with people who are grieving and our conversation was wide-ranging and fun. As Vanessa recounted her earliest losses it was clear that her curiosity about grief both helped her heal and find her calling. I loved Vanessa's take on creativity as a wa...

When I started to Interview Peter Rukavina for this episode, I had no idea we were going to be exploring such overarching questions about grief. The story of raising his daughter Olivia after her mother died is extraordinary because of Olivia's intersectionality. Olivia is autistic and came out as trans in the wake of her mother's death, so her experience of grief, and Peter's, were multi-layered...

This episode took my breath away. Maddie McFadden lost her father Brad to cancer when she was fourteen and she has been through a lot in the four and a half years since then. From dealing with anxiety and depression, being in charge of her younger sibling, rebelling and fighting with her mom, Maddie learned a ton about growing up and taking responsibility for her choices. She talks about her anger...

This conversation is extraordinary in many ways. Laura Aviva is the only person I've interviewed so far who has lost a sibling, and her story is not what I expected. Laura was 23 when her brother Michael was killed at age 20. They were not teenagers, and Laura articulates how she feels she was already firmly who she was by the time he died. She talks about how her brother Michael was her "sage" an...

Lynne Hughes is an exceptional example of someone who has tremendous strength and fortitude despite her traumatic childhood. Lynne lost both parents by age twelve and had to move in with extended family, including an uncle who refused to acknowledge her presence, let alone her grief. For Lynne, summer camp was a place to grow and learn to create lasting bonds with friends and have fun doing it. Sh...

Hope Edelman is my guest this week and I couldn't be more excited to share our conversation. Hope is the leading expert on historical loss for women who lost their mothers at a young age. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and many other books on grief and loss. She now has a thriving business as a grief and loss coach, and writing instructor, who helps women-iden...

Charlotte Maya's memoir Sushi Tuesdays chronicles the many years she navigated her grief and that of her kids and stepkids after her husband Sam died by suicide. Charlotte unexpectedly found love again with a widower whose wife had recently died. So when they married they became a family of six grieving individuals, trying to find love and stability all under one roof. In a way, this was like livi...

This week I talk to author, screenwriter, essayist, and producer Emily Ziff Griffin about her latest project, her recent New Yorker essay , and her 2017 novel , all of which have something to do with her father's death from AIDS when she was fourteen. I have written extensively about losing my mother at that age but I don't know too many writers who have chosen to write about this deeply complex s...

On this week's episode, I talk to Lauren Schneider, the clinical director of child and adolescent programs at Our House, the only grief support center in Los Angeles, serving the second-largest school district in the country. Lauren has been doing this work for over 20 years and she understands adolescent grief better than anyone. We talked about grief as it relates to child development, therapy v...

This week health reporter and author Rachel Zimmerman shares her story of raising two young daughters after her high-achieving husband suddenly died. She had no preparation for how to deal with telling her kids what happened but she instinctively kicked into gear and got the advice she needed. This is an amazing story of strength and love in the aftermath of a death no one saw coming. Meanwhile, h...