In today’s episode, I explore the creative response to loss and trauma with my dear friend, artist, and former GSB podcast guest Krissy Teegerstrom. In A Grief Journey Delayed in Season 1, Krissy explored the delayed and disenfranchised grief over the death of her father. Not long after that conversation, Krissy came to recognize the unnamed neglect and emotional abuse by her mother in the wake of her father’s death. In this episode, she speaks openly and vulnerably about coming to grips with th...
Dec 06, 2022•59 min
Bonus Holiday Episode Somehow the holiday season snuck up on us, didn’t it? Host Lisa Keefauver knows that whether this is your first or 21st holiday in the wake of loss, it can be tough. So in this bonus holiday episode, she is speaking directly to you. She put together 10 tips for you to consider as you navigate the holidays in grief. While she can’t promise you that grief won’t show up over the holidays (because of course grief will, even and especially when not invited), she offers you 10 in...
Nov 22, 2022•20 min
What must it be like to be a pediatric ICU Nurse day in and day out, witnessing children and families in the most vulnerable and often grief-filled moments of their lives? Today’s guest, Hui-Wen Sato weaves a beautiful narrative about the realities of professional grief and the important cultural shifts needed to better serve both families and the medical professionals that serve them. She also shares the personal resources she draws on to sustain her and the role of storytelling as healing for ...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 17 min
My guest Myra Sack shares the heart break and the beauty of what it was like to be with her daughter Havi in her too short life. She and her husband Matt ended up having only 13 months between Havi’s diagnosis of Tay-Sachs Disease at just 15 months old and her death at home with them. In that time, the created a sacred weekly ritual that combined the Jewish tradition of Shabbat with birthday celebrations that Havi would most likely not be alive for. The result was 57 Shabbirthdays and the recogn...
Nov 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min
WELCOME TO SEASON 4! In this first episode of the season, host Lisa Keefauver invites Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher she has long admired, to join her in a conversation that explores grief, stress, and rituals. Although they do touch on the wisdom she has gained from her seminal work in the areas of intergenerational trauma and stress and PTSD, they also got much more personal, including exploring what Dr. Yehuda learned about grief and ritual growing up in an observant Jewish household and com...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Have you ever devoured a book in a day? Well that’s exactly what I did with The Healing Power of Storytelling - an incredibly profound book written by my guest, Annie Brewster. Annie is an Assistant Professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a practicing physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, a writer, and a storyteller. She is also a patient, diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2001. She started recording patient narratives in 2010 and, integrating her personal experiences with the...
Jul 14, 2022•56 min
Oh my friends, I’m thrilled to bring you this beautiful and rich conversation I had with Naomi Edmonson. Naomi offers so much wisdom and insight as she explores her experiences and lessons learned after losing both a mother figure and her mother. She also shares the journey she’s been on creating safer grief spaces for Black people, something she felt missing in her early grief where she was often the only Black Queer person in the room. We explore the expectations we have about being alongside ...
Jun 30, 2022•57 min
Cecilie Surasky is my guest in this special episode of GSB. Her stories of love and loss and ritual and divine connections with her 18 year old son Teo, who passed accidentally by unknowingly ingesting a lethal substance, will move you, sometimes make you laugh, and honestly might just inspire you to think differently about we can stay connected with our loved ones even after they’re physically gone from this earth. Cecilie is a longtime movement-builder who is currently the Director of Communic...
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 11 min
About this episode: My friends, what can I say about today’s guest. The minute we were introduced last year, we fell into deep and ongoing discussions about the importance of narrative and storytelling in healing spaces. Rachel Rusch is a social worker, educator and researcher specializing in pediatric palliative care in Los Angeles, California. Her work centers on the intersection of narrative and storytelling in healthcare the relationship between patient, family and clinician perseverance. We...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 3 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: My guest J’aime Morrison and I dove right in to such a rich and beautiful conversation about grief and loss and the way our bodies hold and can be used to express our grief. She is a former professional dancer and now a professor of theater and movement at California State University at Northridge. She's also a woman who fell in love with surfing later in life, which turned out to be a profoundly important passion that has helped her navigate the waters of deep grief after th...
Apr 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: I’ve been a fan of today’s guest for a long time so I’m thrilled to share my conversation with Dr. BJ Miller with you today. BJ is a longtime hospice and palliative medicine physician and educator. He has worked in all settings of care: hospital, clinic, residential facility, and home. Led by his own experiences as a patient, BJ advocates for the roles of our senses, community, and presence in designing a better ending. We began our conversation with the story of how he came ...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: In today’s episode, my guest Dr. Lizzie Cleary is bright and warm and engaging and her training in psychology and work in the fields of oncology meant we spent some time exploring the professional borne wisdom on the topics of grief and loss and post traumatic growth. She currently serves as a Senior Psychologist and Clinical supervisor at the Simms/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology. But our conversation begins with a much more personal experience of loss that happene...
Mar 03, 2022•1 hr 5 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: My conversation with widower Wesley Bain is truly one of the most profound and important conversations I've had on this show, and in my life. In October 2020 I had the honor of interviewing his late wife, Christina Bain who at the time had been experiencing chronic Stage 4 Colon Cancer at age 36. On February 8, 2021Christina died. Eight months later I got a note from Wesley. Wesley’s note began a conversation that blossomed into the interview we recorded on February 9, 2022. ...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: I’ve been desperately wanting to include climate and ecological grief in this show for such a long time and I’m thrilled to begin it with today’s guest, Ashlee Cunsolo. Ashlee is the Founding Dean, School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at Labrador Institute of Memorial University. She is a Researcher, Educator, and Environmental Advocate Ashlee offers so much wisdom today born of her lifelong personal passion for the environment and because of the deep and extensive qualitat...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 6 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: I’m so thrilled to bring you a conversation with my new friend, Marisa Renee Lee. Marisa shares what it was like to be a teenager and young woman caring for her mother who was ill with MS and breast cancer in the most formative years of her young life, with her mother dying just a few years after she graduated from Harvard. Marisa and I explore how her CEO personality was helpful in keeping her family together and getting things done and yet likely delayed her inevitable need...
Jan 20, 2022•1 hr 3 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: In 2012, Beth’s partner went mountain biking and that was the day their lives changed forever. In Accidental Grief, guest Beth Erlander explores what it was like to process the news that her life partner was quadriplegic, the grief that accompanied that news, how her personal, professional, and spiritual practices helped her healing process and how she’s using all that she’s learned to tend to those of us who tend for others. I really can’t wait for you to meet her. EPISODE R...
Jan 06, 2022•51 min
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: My guest Ilyse Kennedy of Moving Parts Psychotherapy is a trauma-informed therapist who has a passion for supporting and educating her clients, the general population, and fellow clinicians like myself about the myths and realities of what it means to experience trauma. In this episode, she helps us understand what trauma is and isn’t, the relationship between grief and trauma, the importance of understanding our physiology, getting the right kind of trauma-informed support a...
Dec 16, 2021•58 min
About this Episode: In this episode, my guest Barbara Jones and I explore a wide range of topics from grief in the adolescent oncology population, the innovations she is seeing in cancer care to help address the WHOLE person (not just the disease), the very real and frightening moral distress and empathetic strain our health care professionals are under today and so much more. I can’t wait for you to meet her! Dr. Barbara Jones is Associate Dean for Health Affairs at UT Austin Steve Hicks School...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 17 min
My conversation with today’s guest, Allan Cole, was such a powerful reminder that loss comes from so many places, not just death and that even those of us trained to help others need help sometimes too. He offers up so much warmth and wisdom as he shares the story of his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease at the age of 48. The layers of loss he unpacks for an individual with a progressive illness like Parkinson’s and the road to mean-making he shares is shaped not just by his personal ...
Nov 23, 2021•59 min
Widowhood is obviously a topic very close to host Lisa Keefauver’s heart, and it’s also an experience no one is prepared to go through as her guest Melissa Gould shares in her best-selling book Widowish and in their conversation in this episode. Jump straight into - (05:18) - On Melissa’s first experience with loss and the importance of exploring grief without judgement (10:27) - A love story: The value of friendship and the importance of memory keeping (20:13) - Managing anticipatory grief and ...
Nov 11, 2021•51 min
In this episode, host Lisa Keefauver spent some time, in person, with her dear friend john a powell. john is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, racial identity, fair housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute , a UC Berkeley research institute. john offers so much wisdom about the shared human experiences of loss caused not just be death, but by our unwillingness to see ourselves in one another, and invites us to ...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 27 min
About the episode Host Lisa Keefauver sat down for a very intimate and revealing conversation with Mindy Corporon, a grieving mother and daughter. In 2014, her very personal tragedy made headline news around the world. Her son and father were shot and killed at a Jewish Community Center outside of Kansas City by a white supremacist gunman, intent on killing Jews. In the intervening years, Mindy has worked tirelessly to heal her shattered soul, also the title of her beautiful book, and in today’s...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 2 min
About the episode Welcome to Season 3 of Grief is a Sneaky Bitch! In Self-Compassion and Grief, host Lisa Keefauver sat down with world-renowned self-compassion researcher, Dr. Kristin Neff. She is author of the bestselling book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself , and recently released her new book Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive . Jump straight into: (00:47) - Kristin’s earliest memory of grief: A differe...
Sep 30, 2021•53 min
About the episode: You asked and I answered! In this final episode of Season 2, I invited the Reimagining Grief community and listeners of the podcast to ask me anything about grief and loss. I am so incredibly moved by the flood of DMs, comments, and emails I received from so many of you. I take seriously the vulnerability it took you to ask the questions and I did my best to answer many of them and hope in doing so, I will be helping other grievers just like you. I covered 1. Finding a grief c...
Jun 22, 2021•55 min
For this episode, I was joined in conversation by the lovely Lindsay Joy Taylor, the owner of The Joyful Jewelry Box , jewelry and keepsakes to honor and remember your loved ones. Lindsay’s grief story begins early on, her mother was murdered when she was only one and even if she doesn’t have explicit memories of her, the grief and trauma it left on her family made an impression on her throughout her life. Like me, Lindsay is now an advocate for thinking about grief from a different angle than w...
May 11, 2021•58 min
In this episode, Lisa talks to British-Iranian poet Fad Jamal (Khorsandjamal) about the power of artistic expression in the process of grieving. Fad intertwines her love of nature, the losses she’s faced, both death and non-death, and the poetic notions and sensibilities of her Persian heritage and the Farsi language to explore love and loss in two volumes of poetry - Quixotic Nature and most recently, Reflections and Refractions. Our conversation was so rich and expansive as we explored what na...
Apr 27, 2021•58 min
Lisa was joined by Biological Anthropologist and author, Barbara J King, for an eye-opening and compassionate conversation about grief and love in the animal kingdom. They explored how Barbara has come to understand grief in the animal kingdom, how finding compassion for animals helps us be more compassionate to our fellow humans, and why this perspective requires us to call into question some of our most fundamental beliefs and behaviors. The author of seven books, including the new Animals’ Be...
Mar 31, 2021•52 min
In today’s episode, I was joined by two incredible women, Rachel Carnahan-Metzger and Sierra Herbort. Rachel and Sierra are really special humans, who have both dedicated their careers to supporting children and families going through the most difficult times in their lives. Working at Dell Children’s Medical Center, Rachel serves as a pediatric palliative care social worker and Sierra as a Certified Child Life Specialist. They have made a career out of bearing witness, educating, and supporting...
Mar 17, 2021•1 hr 8 min
I was joined in conversation by the warm and wise Dr. Carolina Giacobone. Carolina’s grief experiences spans two continents, two cultures, and two lives - her personal and her professional. From Argentina to Ireland, from the loss of her mother to a miscarriage, from her role as a Perinatal Psychiatrist across continents, she reminds us that self-compassion and showing up in our full humanity is at the center of all our healing. Her wisdom runs deep and I can’t wait for you to meet her. If you w...
Feb 16, 2021•1 hr 10 min
In today’s episode, I was joined by a beautiful soul, Shelby Forsythia. College years can be full of new beginnings. For Shelby, they became what she describes now as her 4 years of hell, resulting in the death of her mother. While I’ll let her tell you about it in her own words, what I want to tell you is how much I appreciate the way she thoughtful peels back all of the secondary losses many of us experience beyond death loss. She has taken what she has learned from her own healing and transfo...
Feb 04, 2021•50 min
