Grief Out Loud

Dr. Jill A. Harrington grew up surrounded by superheroes on television and in comic books and movies. As a parent and a professional, she turned to superheroes as a way to connect with her children and clients around loss, grief, and transformation. She recently teamed up with Dr. Robert Neimeyer to publish Superhero Grief: The Transformative Power of Loss in an effort to bring superheroes into th...

Just weeks before Adam Mansbach's wildly popular book, Go The F**K To Sleep, was published, his brother David died of suicide. In interview after interview promoting the book and talking about its success, Adam worried that someone would ask about his brother, would catch him off guard with a question about the grief that was raw and painful. In the years after David's death, Adam found himself wr...

On Valentine's Day of 2018, Fred Guttenberg rushed his two children, Jaime and Jesse, out the door to school. He had no idea it would be the last time he saw Jaime who was shot and killed later that day in the Parkland School mass shooting. Jaime was murdered just a few months after Fred's brother Michael died of as a result of being exposed to toxic substances when he ran into the World Trade Cen...

One day while driving between visiting her mom who just had knee surgery and caring for her dad who had a progressive illness, Priya Soni wondered, "Where are the others?" By others, she meant the other adult children caregiving for parents and family members. Years later, this question would lead her to start The Caregiving Effect , an organization dedicated to bringing adult children caregivers...

Breeshia Wade's new book, Grieving While Black: An Anti-Racist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, puts grief into a wider context. The context of our relationships and the larger systems that shape who has access to resources like time, power, and the space to grieve. Breeshia is an author, end-of-life caregiver, and grief coach.  Get your copy of Grieving While Black . Connect with Breeshia and her w...

How do we live with grief over the course of our lives? Hope Edelman, author of the groundbreaking book, Motherless Daughters, joins us again to talk about her newest book, The AfterGrief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss. The AfterGrief is what happens as we move out of the initial acute distress when someone dies and into a lifetime of learning to live with what that loss means for us...

What is collective grief and how does it affect members of communities with marginalized identities? Dr. Amber Nelson, PsyD talks about both her professional and personal experiences with recognizing and supporting collective grief. Specifically the collective grief of bearing witness to the highly publicized murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and the others who w...

Mariyam was six when her father, Nurtay, died just before his 34th birthday. Over the next 14 years, she would experience the deaths of four more family members, including her mother, Bagitgul, and maternal grandmother, who both died this past summer during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mariyam's home city in Kazakhstan. Now 20, Mariyam is figuring out how to live without both of her pare...

When you think of the word "widow" what image comes to mind? When author Melissa Gould's husband Joel died, she didn't fit what she imagined widows looked and acted like, even if she felt like one. This dissonance led her to come up with the term "Widowish" which is also the title of her new memoir. Widowish is the story of her husband Joel, their love, and how she and their daughter Sophie found...

What does it mean to train to be a death doula for your community? This is a question a group of Indigenous youth in Canada grappled with as part of the Death Doula Mentorship Program, created by Blackbird Medicines and the Indigenous death doula collective. Chrystal Wàban Toop, founder of Blackbird Medicines, joined us to talk about how early experiences with grief grounded her in the the work sh...

Even if you don't really celebrate it, Valentine's Day can be rough when you're grieving. This year, we decided to bring you a compilation of love stories from listeners. In their clip they answered one of these questions: How did your person love you? How did you love your person? How did you fall in love? Even though Valentine's Day is usually marketed as only about romantic love, this episode f...

For the past twenty years, the Native Wellness Institute has worked to promote wellness and balance for Native people throughout North America. Their Executive Director, Jillene Joseph, joined us to discuss how settler colonial policies outlawing funeral rights purposefully cut people off from traditional knowledge and practices. This trauma reverberates today as Native communities work to reconne...

Molly loves her life, but she didn't always feel that way. 18 years ago, on a rainy winter morning, Molly's life changed in an instant. The instant was her mom, who was also her best friend, dying of a heart attack while driving Molly to school. In the almost two decades since that day, Molly's worked hard to figure out what helps her feel healthy and grounded. Part of that work was realizing that...

As of January 21st, 2021, over 400,000 people in the U.S. have been killed by the coronavirus. Globally, the number is over 2 million. Despite attempts by journalists and public health officials to put these numbers into context, what gets lost in tracking case counts are the stories of the people who died and their family members left behind. This is one of those stories. The story of Maria, belo...

This is the story of how a random encounter led to a transformative friendship that's lasted for more than 50 years. A friendship rooted in the shared experience of grieving a parent who died of suicide. David Pincus and Rick Knapp met as high school seniors and they had a lot in common, including having a mothers who died of suicide. Prior to meeting it was something they rarely talked about, but...

After her oldest son was killed in 2017, Julia Mallory had a sense that creativity was a place she could go in her grief. In that place, she wrote Survivor's Guilt , a collection of essays and poems about grief, joy, and the moments when they intersect. In this episode we discuss: The early days of grief. What focusing on resilience asks us to ignore. The concept of survivor's guilt. The push to "...

When Carmel Breathnach was 11, her mother died of cancer. While she felt supported at home by her father, she didn't feel that way at school. Now as an adult, Carmel's carried this grief though graduations, through moving from Ireland to the U.S., through getting married, and now through a pandemic.  We talk about the role anger played in her grief, what she needed from her teachers, how she honor...

Amber Jeffrey is the creator and host of The Grief Gang , a podcast by and for young adults who want to normalize the conversation about loss. Amber was 19 when her mom died suddenly, throwing Amber into a period of questioning and reworking so much in her life, including her friendships and relationship with her older brother. We talk about what inspired her to start The Grief Gang , the solace s...

When Dara Kurtz was in her late twenties, she was excited. Excited about being pregnant. She was also devastated. Devastated t hat her mother was recently diagnosed with stage IV cancer. As Dara's baby grew, Dara's mother grew closer to the end of her life. Two weeks af ter Dara's daughter was born,  her mother died – sweeping Dara into a whirlwind of diametrically opposed emotional states: the th...

It's our third annual holidays & grief episode with Rebecca Hobbs-Lawrence, Pathways Program Coordinator at the Dougy Center. We share updated ideas for navigating the winter holidays while grieving, during a pandemic.  For more ideas on holidays & grief visit our website , listen to Ep. 27 & Ep. 98 , and follow us on Instagram (@thedougycenter) & Facebook (@thedougycenter) to catch all of our Dou...

For Allison Hite, two questions sparked a community project called Never, Ever Give Up . The first question was, "How do I be grateful in grief?" The second was, "What's the hardest thing you've had to do?" These questions became part of Allison's life after her mother died in a traffic accident when Allison was in her mid-twenties.  Answering them, publicly, led to Never, Ever Give Up , which at...

How do you go on living after your child's life ends? How do you continue to find connection, beauty, and meaning when someone we can't imagine living without dies? This is the question Margo Fowkes faced when her son Jimmy died of brain cancer at the age of 21. Margo barely had a moment to grapple with this devastating loss when just a year later, her mother also died. This led Margo to search fo...

BJ Miller is a Hospice & Palliative Care Medicine physician who works with patients facing the end of their lives. When BJ's sister Lisa died of suicide over twenty years ago, he did what so many of us do, he pushed his pain aside. It was his work, supporting patients with advanced serious illnesses, that helped him realize the importance of reckoning with his own grief.  Watch BJ's TED Talk, What...

We can't separate grief from our identity. Grief is interwoven with our race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, access to economic resources, and every other part of who we are. Alica Forneret's mother died just over four years ago in 2016. Since that time Alica has advocated for those in grief to get the support they need - in the workplace and in their communities. More recently, she...

Shelby Forsythia returns to Grief Out Loud to talk about her new book, Your Grief, Your Way , a secular daily devotional for anyone dealing with grief.  She pairs quotes with routines and practices that people can do in any order. We talk Your Grief, Your Way , what grief means during this  time of COVID and a reckoning with police brutality and racism,  the effects of cumulative grief,  and what'...