Soft Endings

What do you do when someone becomes part of your grief… and you still love them anyway? Our culture tells us there are only two acceptable endings: if someone hurt you, you should hate them. If you still love them, you should go back. But what if neither is true? In this episode, I explore one of the loneliest and least-talked-about forms of grief: the transformation of love after relational hurt....

Sometimes growth arrives too late. Long after the breakup. Long after the friendship ends. Long after the conversation you wish you’d had. This week, I’m reflecting on seeing someone from my past for the first time in years, the uncomfortable humanity of Beef Season 2, and a kind of grief we rarely talk about: the grief of realizing we’ve hurt someone we loved. What happens when accountability is...

June is supposed to be a month of celebration. Pride. Juneteenth. Progress. Visibility. But what happens when the thing we’re celebrating isn’t finished? In this episode, Chris explores the tension between joy and responsibility, tracing a thread through Pride displays, Juneteenth commemorations, Frida Kahlo merchandise, and the stories we tell ourselves about social progress. Together, we’ll ask...

What if grief isn’t love with nowhere to go? After watching Is God Is and spending a weekend supporting a family through an end-of-life transition, I found myself questioning one of the most common phrases about grief. Because grief doesn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like laughter in a hospital room. Sometimes it looks like anger. Or relief. Or storytelling. Or a cup of coffee wh...

This week, Chris talks about a grief many people might dismiss at first glance: grieving a video game. But this episode isn’t really about gaming. Using Destiny as the emotional anchor, this episode explores ambiguous loss, third spaces, fandom, identity, ritual, online communities, and the very human grief that can happen when something meaningful changes instead of fully disappearing. From weekl...

A recent virus headline made my body react before my brain had fully caught up. Not because I thought I was in immediate danger. Because some things don’t register as information. They register as memory. In this episode of Soft Endings, I’m talking about unresolved collective trauma, COVID grief, nervous system memory, and what happens when something changes us collectively—but we’re expected to...

Some things get passed down in recipes. Jewelry. Family cheekbones. And some things get passed down as habits, instincts, and survival strategies so old they start to feel like personality. In this episode of Soft Endings , I’m exploring the grief of realizing that some of what people raised inside girlhood inherit may not be universal truth—but adaptation. The “good girl.” The therapist friend at...

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned that surviving meant hardening. Stop feeling so much. Stop caring so deeply. Focus on yourself. Keep moving. But what happens when softness is the very thing that makes connection, care, grief, and love possible in the first place? In this episode of Soft Endings, I talk about the real cost of staying soft in a world that rewards emotional shutdown — fr...

There’s a version of caregiving that happens quietly. The late nights. The calculations. The moments you don’t say out loud. This episode is about the grief that shows up before anything officially ends—the kind that lives inside caregiving itself. It’s about love, exhaustion, resentment, devotion, and the parts of this experience people don’t always feel allowed to name. In this episode, we move...

Sometimes grief does not fit inside the official room. This episode is about the private ceremonies people make when formal mourning cannot hold the whole truth — the small rituals, repeated acts, funny moments, and intimate forms of remembrance that help love keep speaking after loss. I talk about laughter at funerals, why unscripted moments can feel truer than polished ones, and how private ritu...

There is a particular kind of loneliness in having something real happen to you and still being expected to keep functioning like nothing did. This episode is about grief inside systems that were never built to hold human pain well. It explores what it means to hurt while still being asked to work, answer emails, stay polite, stay legible, and keep moving. It names grief not as a personal failure,...

Some changes bring relief and grief at the same time. In this episode of Soft Endings, I’m talking about the losses that can come with becoming more yourself — and why those losses still deserve to be named, even when the choice was right. This is for anybody who has felt the room change after honesty. Anybody who has been looked at differently once they stopped performing an older version of them...

When Words Won’t Hold It: Making Something With Grief A lot of us don’t know what to do with grief except keep moving. We work. We clean. We take care of everybody else. Or we shut down, scroll, go flat, and call it rest. This episode is about another possibility: making something with grief. Not because art fixes loss. Not because everything painful has to become beautiful. And not because you ne...

Some losses get named right away. Others sit in the body without ceremony, without witness, without language anyone else seems to respect. In this episode of Soft Endings, I’m talking about grief that doesn’t fit the script — the grief of breakups, estrangement, identity shifts, and futures that disappear without a funeral. This is for the kinds of loss people step around. The kinds that can make...

In this anchor episode of Soft Endings , I introduce the heart behind the podcast: a space for grief, care, transition, remembrance, and living tenderly in a brutal world. I share why I created this show and the image of the covered bridge as a way of understanding shelter, endurance, and crossing through. We start with the image of a covered bridge: not a destination, just enough shelter to get a...