Grief Out Loud

"Are we going to be okay?" This was one of the first questions Amy Choi & Rebecca Lehrer, co-founders of The Mash-Up Americans, posed in their new podcast series, Grief, Collected. Throughout episodes with folks like adrienne maree brown, Dorothy Holinger, and Linda Thai, Rebecca and Amy explore what grief is and how it impacts us emotionally, physically, culturally, and collectively. Rebecca & Am...

Many of us end up working in the grief world because of our personal experiences. We want to give others what we most needed. This is especially true for Melody Lomboy-Lowe and her niece Gracelyn Bateman , who co-founded Luna Peak Foundation in the hopes of supporting both those affected by cancer and those grieving a death. Melody was diagnosed with cancer when she was 6 and went through intensiv...

When your parent is one of six people in medical history to be diagnosed with and die from a rare disease, the phrase, "The odds are one in a million" takes on a very different meaning. This was true for Rebecca Hobbs-Lawrence, Pathways Program Coordinator at Dougy Center, who was 11 when her father died of heart cancer. At that point, she decided that if something tragic could happen, it would mo...

For a lot of us, the end of year holidays + grief = the (not) most wonderful time of the year. Rebecca Hobbs-Lawrence, Pathways Program & Group Coordinator at Dougy Center, is back for our annual Holidays & Grief episode. We discuss negotiating with family and friends around how we want to celebrate or not celebrate and how the past few years have shifted our priorities. Rebecca also shares how sh...

Have you found it difficult to read anything longer than a paragraph since your person died? It's a phenomenon familiar, both personally and professionally, to Eleanor Haley, MS & Litsa Williams, MA, LCSW-C. Eleanor & Litsa started the What's Your Grief community back in 2012 as a way to create the kind of grief resources they most needed in their own lives and for the clients they supported. They...

We deliberated for a long time about whether it was appropriate for us to do an episode on pet loss. We know from those grieving the death of a person that it can hurt when someone tries to relate to their loss by sharing about their pet who died. We also know that grief is grief. Pets bring us joy and laughter and frustration and tears and love - just like humans do. In the end we decided to do t...

Día de Los Muertos, or "Day of the Dead," is a two-day holiday to remember family members and friends who have died. Día de Los Muertos has origins throughout Mexico and parts of Latin America, and is celebrated on November 1 and 2. The holiday is not a version of Halloween, but rather an enduring ritual celebrated since ancient times. Valenca Valenzuela, MSW, Volunteer Coordinator at Dougy Center...

Charlie Tull has two lives, but he's not deceiving anyone. There's his civilian one that he lives with his kids and family and there's his professional one that h e spends with his firefighter family. In 2018, one of his fire family members, Eli, died of a heart condition. Three years later in 2021, another member of his fire family, Scott, died of COVID. Charlie's first reaction to both of these...

Mark Chesnut is a NYC-based journalist, editor, and public speaker. His book, Prepare for Departure, Notes on a single mother, a misfit son, inevitable mortality, and the enduring allure of frequent flyer miles , is about love and care and acceptance – not the infamous acceptance from the 5 stages of grief – but the acceptance that can happen between a mother and son when one of their lives is com...

This was meant to be a story about grieving in a foreign land. A story about navigating cancer treatment and funeral planning in a different language. And, it is that story, but it it's also the story of the accumulation of loss and grief. Rebecca was 22 when her mother died of cancer. She was 23 when her fiancé died in a car crash, leaving her with their two young children. In the 8 years since s...

This is a story about the people behind the numbers. A new study came out this week (September, 2022) estimating that 10.5 million children, across the globe, are grieving the death of a parent or caregiver from COVID-19. Lissa and Bryce's children are four of those. Bryce died in late December, 2021, after weeks in the hospital, receiving treatment for COVID-19. Throughout Bryce's illness and sin...

Adam Stevens, RDT, (he/they), knows grief. He grew up in a family of five. A family that is now a family of one. Adam brings this deep knowing of grief to his work as the Program Manager for Bereavement and Mental Health Services at the Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI) , where he supports primarily BIPOC queer & trans youth in transforming grief & the pain of loss through creative arts therapy.  We...

The word complicated came up a lot in this episode with Joe, whose dad died in 2017 after a decade of failing health. Joe's dad was a complicated guy. Joe's relationship with his dad was and continues to be complicated. So, it's unsurprising that Joe's grief since his dad died has been equally complicated.    That grief has evolved over time, from numbness at the start to beginning to feel and exp...

Everett's spent the last few years trying to access and process the emotions that come with grief. Emotions that he learned to push aside when he was 12 and his father died. Emotions he didn't know how to make sense of in his early twenties when his brother died. Emotions he was better able to feel and express to when his grandmother died just this past winter.  Grief doesn't happen in a vacuum an...

Valenca Valenzuela, MSW, was born on Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) which seems fitting for someone who grew up to hold space for people before and after a death. Valenca is the Volunteer and Group Coordinator at Dougy Center, supporting children, teens, young adults and their adult family members who are grieving a death. As a death doula, she supports people who are facing the end of their...

Amanda Drews is the founder of Buzzy's Bees , the organization she started after her son Hudson, who was 13 months old, died of SUDC (Sudden and Unexplained Death in Childhood).  Amanda started Buzzy's Bees with a mission to provide financial support to families dealing with the unexpected loss of a child. Over time, Amanda realized what families really needed and wanted was a chance to talk about...

This episode originally aired in June, 2019.  What is it about dark humor and why are we drawn to it when wrestling with painful life events? Laughter, especially the kind that wells up from a shared understanding of heartbreak, can be a surprising aspect of grief. Harry Jensen's father died of stage 4 colon cancer in January of 2017. Harry turned to stand-up comedy as a way to put his grief into...

Dr. Micki Burns, Chief Clinical Officer at Judi's House and Dr. Laura Landry, Director of Evaluation & Research at the JAG Institute join us to talk numbers. They, along with the team at Judi's House/JAG Institute, created the CBEM , the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model, which estimates how many children and teens will experience the death of a parent/caregiver or sibling before they turn 18...

Rebecca Soffer, co-founder of the Modern Loss Community, started becoming an expert in grief the moment she learned that her mother Shelby was killed in a car crash. Her expertise expanded when four years later, her father Ray died of a heart attack while traveling.  As a single woman in her early thirties, Rebecca needed to talk about her grief, and she really needed to hear others talk about the...

As humans, we have a pervasive desire to compartmentalize. To box up messy thoughts and emotions and "just get on with it already."  For Marisa Renee Lee, this was the approach she took to navigating grief. Grief that started when she was 12 and her mother, Lisa, was diagnosed with MS. Grief that grew as her mother was later diagnosed with cancer and died in 2008. Grief that expanded to included i...

In grief land, lots of groups are talked about as invisible or forgotten. Children, parents grieving a miscarriage , ex-partners, and siblings. For siblings, their grief often exists in the shadow of their parents – or it's at least treated that way by others.   Jordon Ferber ran into that when his younger brother, Russell, died when Russell was 21. While Jordon's parents recognized that Jordon ne...

Being a plumber doesn't mean the pipes in your house never leak.  Being a landscaper doesn't mean your own yard is magically free of weeds. Why is it then that those of us who work in grief sometimes fall prey to the magical thinking that we will somehow be immune to the heartbreak when someone dies? Meghan Riordan Jarvis, LCSW, is a trauma-informed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical e...

Lingering. Shivering. Simmering. Splintering. These are the words DJ Arsene Versailles wrote to describe grief after his mother, Florcie Yves Versailles, died of COVID-19 in May of 2020. This grief was and continues to be layered - as most grief is - and some of these layers are specific to his mom being a Black woman who died during a pandemic, of a disease that has come to be so much more than j...

Anne Gudger was pregnant with her first child, Jake, when her husband Kent died in a car crash. Years later she met and married Scott and they had a daughter, Maria. Fast forward to March of 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, when Anne and Maria found themselves drinking a lot of coffee and talking about grief. Those conversations inspired them to start Coffee and Grief, a Facebook group for fol...

There are a lot of things in life that are difficult to describe. That's why it can feel so gratifying when someone gives voice to something that we can barely grasp for ourselves. Kathryn Schulz is used to finding the right words. S he is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Marg ins of Error . She won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize in...