Good Grief

  Francis Weller's new book, In the Absence of the Ordinary, gives us help to face these uncertain times. On the occasion of its publication we share an interview with Francis about his first book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Grief touches us at the outer reaches of our experience, challenging us to respond to new  and unfamiliar terrain in our own souls. Finding rituals and pathways to carry us thro...

How can we create an open conversation about the damages and continued disconnects which result from racism? Shakti Butler believes that "in order to manifest human rights and dignity for all, it is necessary that we seek union between the head and heart. It is the head that can recognize, analyze and strategize to overcome disparities. It is the heart that obliterates fear." Join us while we talk...

In 2019 I interviewwed Tembi Locke after her first book, from Scratch, was published. As she launches her second, Forever Now, we revisit our hour together! When Tembi Locke spent a college semester in Italy, it changed the course of her life. Meeting Saro, the man she would love and marry, filled her with joy and also challenged them both to bridge the gap between his Sicilian farm family and her...

Melanie DeMore, an outstanding and internationally recognized vocal artist, embodies her own principle that music can be a force for social and political change. Join us as we talk about how she uses her powerful voice to heal and transform. What experiences in her own life responded to music's healing potential? What led her to dedicate her life to sharing her gifts with adults and children throu...

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? Wha...

Throughout the world, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex people continue to experience oppression, including physical attack, psychological torture and rejection by family, friends and communities. In his travels as a journalist, Robin Hammond began to meet people whose very identities are still illegal in their own countries. He set out to interview and photograph them, telling thei...

The war between so-called pro-choice and pro-life forces in America seem divided beyond repair. But where does that leave women who have made the often painful and important decision to have an abortion? As Kassi Underwood says, they are left with a choice between regret and relief, with few opportunities to talk about the experience and feel supported in their personal struggles. Kassi knows from...

Across the great divide in America, city dwellers and the nation's farmers often fail to understand each other. Marie Mutsuki Mockett set out to close the gap, going back to the place in Nebraska where her family owns a farm and listening with her whole heart to the many of the men and women who raise the food that keeps all of us alive; midwest rural America. She travelled to seven states to part...

Susan Hayden experienced three sudden losses that shaped her life; her childhood best friend, her father and her husband. How did she shape these losses into the creative voice she crafted over a lifetime? How did they change her? Going forward from loss, what do we take with us and what do we leave behind? Her first published memoir, Now You Are a Missing Person, makes poetry of loss, showing us...

Abbe Greenberg and Maggie Sarachek have literally written the book on supporting yourself through anxiety and panic attacks. And of course, they tried it ALL to deal with their own anxiety, because experience is the best teacher! Join us to talk about how they each experienced anxiety, what they did to address it, and what it is like to support others through the same struggle. So much is lost as...

What leads us to explore our relationship to death? For Angela Fama, it began when a terrible accident caused her to consider her own death. But she noticed that when she tried to talk about death, she met discomfort and resistance. Instead of dropping the conversation, she searched for ways to enter into it; to make others more comfortable with the subject. Out of this need of hers, the Death Con...

Some believe that dying people increasingly speak nonsense, losing their grip on reality. But Lisa Smartt, a linguist trained to pay deep attention to words, realized as her father was dying that what he was saying was coherent and deeply moving, pointing to a world which she little understood and inviting an exploration of what he might be talking about. After his death, she hurtled headlong into...

I admire this woman so much! That's why I am running this episode again. Women of color are reliably at the forefront of every progressive movement, both in sheer numbers and in activism. Yet there are many factors that limit their leadership and put an undue burden on them, resulting in a loss to the movements themselves. Former Groundswell Fund founder and executive Vanessa Priya Daniel knows fi...

A week before their wedding, Kate Truitt's fiancee died unexpectedly. In deep grief and trauma she saw no way forward and, even as an informed investigator of the way trauma affects us, she could only live the reality. It was a very long time before she could see the potential for growth and flourishing. In telling her story she invites us along on her path of discovery; her road back to herself....

On a day like any other, Jonathan Santlofer was suddenly dropped into the chaos of intense grief when his wife of 40 years suddenly died. His losses before this did not prepare him for his upended life. It did not prepare him for the insensitive and alienating things people said to him when he was too vulnerable to respond. It did not prepare him for the internal conflict of whether and how much t...

Adoption is a loss that often lives in the shadows, both in the world and inside of adoptees. Losing everything you've ever known before there are even words to name it, when you are an absorbent, unformed human being can take a lifetime to understand. But it is only by recognizing the loss that adoptees can claim their birthright; a life of beauty and meaning. Michelle Madrid knows this territory...

Diana Kupershmit had the plans for her life clearly mapped out; finish college, graduate school, marry your high school sweetheart, start a family. She was not prepared for the jolt of the unexpected that arrived with the birth of her first child, Emma, who came with severe disabilities. Feeling unable and unprepared to raise a child with such profound needs, she and her husband looked for a famil...

In these times of increasing assaults on the queer community, we replay an episode from 2015 in which Kevin Fisher-Paulson recounted the triplets he and his husband fostered then lost as a result of homophobia. Going on the adopt two more children as the climate improved, his story is a cautionary tale about the family traumas that can come from societal bias. Kevin Fisher-Paulson was the author o...

Marty Ross-Dolen grew up in the shadow of her mother's grief. Her mother's parents had died in a plane crash when she was 14, just 5 years before Marty was born. She knew that her mother was different from her friend's mothers. Knowing this led to Marty trying to protect her mother, never really asking to know the whole story. The ways in which she could still know them were also blocked off. But...

When Dr. Paul Kalanithi faced a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis in his last year as a neurosurgical resident, his wife, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi faced it with him. In the twenty-two months that followed, they continued to work, had a child and he wrote a best selling book . But since his death, how have her grief and her love showed themselves? She made sure that his book, when Breath Becomes Air, was pu...

When Leslie Streeter's husband, the love of her life, died suddenly after asking for kisses, she struggled to fulfill the life they had built together. Would she be able to complete the adoption of their son, not even 3 years old? How would she raise him alone? And how would she navigate this crushing grief? She would rely on community, family and humor to clear a path, taking one step at a time a...

Raised with a keen awareness that everything is impermanent, that all life ends, Sunita Puri was challenged to find a way to come to terms with medicine's inability to accept these truths. Her perspective was at odds with the training she was receiving as a medical student, where any death, even an inevitable one, was a failure. When she was finally exposed to a palliative care rotation she found...

Aditi Sethi was a doctor who agreed to act as a death doula for Ethan SIsser, who wanted to die in joy and share it with the world. The extraordianry film The Last ecstatic Days, tells  the tale not only of Ethan but of the loving and open community that coalesced around him, fulfilling his deepest wish. Aditi was changed by the commuity that showed up and continues to work towards a world in whic...

Growing up with a sister who might at any moment die, a father who was an angry alcoholic, Maura Casey learned to take care of herself. She also learned to drink and run from the bullies. When her mother donated a kidney to save her sister's life, the whole family thought their troubles were over. But it would take decades for Maura to heal the hurt of alcoholism, illness, and the sexual assault s...