Are We There Yet?

Parents, there's a bit of profanity in this one but it's a great episode. My friend Mark Lightcap was a young punk when his best friend and bandmate was diagnosed with cancer. Listening to Mark share this amazing, often funny story, I was struck that losing a friend is less destabilizing than losing a family member and allows grief to feel more liberating in some ways. Losing his friend made Mark...

"Kids make you better," Heather said, talking about how much she's learned from parenting her kids after their father died. Heather's husband died a year before the pandemic hit, so she was in survival mode, trying to support her family, be there for her kids and deal with all the uncertainty of Covid. Fear was the undercurrent until she eventually realized she needed to slow down and take care of...

This week I'm talking to Austin Liston who entered parenthood fast when he started dating Chad, his now husband, who already had two kids. Then they decided to have more kids and ended up with four foster children. Austin co-hosts the wonderful podcast Best Wives Club with his best friend, Amanda, who happens to be Chad's ex-wife. We talked about how the loss of their birth parents affects his you...

In this episode I talk to the first of several professionals in the field of childhood and adolescent grief, Jana DeCristafaro from The Dougy Center in Portland, Oregon. Jana is also the host of Grief Out Loud , a great podcast about grief and early loss. The Dougy Center was founded on the idea that grieving teens know how to support each other, in ways that adults might find challenging. Jana ex...

This week I talk to Kimberly about how she did her best to navigate her kids' grief, as well as her own, in the wake of her husband's death. Having lost her mother to cancer a few years earlier, Kimberly knew how to deal with medical insurance and doctors, treatments, and surgeries. But as her husband's prognosis worsened, Kimberly and her husband had to do a constant calculus to prepare their kid...

In this episode, I talk to Nancy and Eric, a couple who didn't realize (or don't remember knowing) that they were in the same club when they met. The club of parent loss is one that no one asks to be in but its members often enjoy lasting bonds. For Nancy and Eric, it has resulted in a long marriage that has endured many hardships. Even though every early grief experience is unique, the impression...

In this episode, I interview my sixteen-year-old son, Skops, who has a lot to say on the subject of grief. He reminded me that I'm doing a show about adolescent grief, so I should have younger guests on, sooner than later. I was intending to save that perspective for later in the season but decided to listen to him. This podcast is all about making adolescent grief more visible by talking about it...

My close friend, Vivian (Trimble) Lewine died this month so I am dedicating this episode to her. This interview with another close friend, Raequel London, was the most meaningful one, for me personally, to date. Raequel lost her mother to breast cancer when Raequel was in her twenties. Because she was older, she had the opportunity to see her mother's death coming and to be with her at the end. Th...

In this episode I talk with Trilby, a former schoolmate, about the aftermath of her mother's murder in 1980. We go into depth about how she tries to support students, as a teacher, when they are going through something hard. We also talk about what it was like to deal with people's responses to her family's traumatic loss and how she and her siblings managed to support each other as they grew up....

In this episode, I talk to Diane, whose father died on Veteran's Day, 1963, eleven days before the assassination of President Kennedy. Diane was born in the aftermath of World War ll so she is from a different generation and grew up in a different culture than I did. She also had to help support her family right away so there wasn't much time for grief. We talk about the difference between our gen...

In this episode, my friend and fellow artist Ivette and I go deep into our earliest experiences with shame, grief, and art. For Ivette it was theater, and, for both of us, music, clubs, and dancing. Ivette also talks about the culture of grief in her large, Mexican-American family which was quite different from mine. We also get into shame and how it weighs on kids who have an early grief experien...

My older brother Shep talks about how he managed to escape his grief by traveling and becoming a foreign correspondent. But it all came back when he began his new life as a father and faced a personal crisis. We also talk about the responsibility older siblings feel toward younger ones in the wake of losing a parent. Music by Josephine Wiggs from her Album "We Fall." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

As I get my feet wet recording interviews, I decided to start with the people most familiar to me: My siblings! In this episode, I interview my sister Quinn Faison about her experience with adolescent grief and how it has affected her as a friend, a parent, and a parenting coach. Quinn and her wife Sarah have a coaching business called Plan P where they support parents through the challenges of ra...

For the first episode of this podcast, I will lay the groundwork by talking candidly about my most significant losses and how they intertwine. It's a surprising story about how losing my mother at a young age helped me decades later to grieve a child and mother my other children as openly and honestly as I know how. I also discuss my book, "Dancing with the Midwives: A Memoir of Art and Grief" whi...

"Are We There Yet?" is about gaining a better understanding of grief by looking at the consequences of an early loss. It's also about helping kids and their communities better understand the short and long-term consequences of grief. Ann Faison is an artist and grief specialist who has read, researched, and written extensively about grief since losing her mother to cancer when she was fourteen. In...