5 years ago, while today’s guest, Nikki Mark, was driving her 12-year-old son, Tommy, to a soccer game, he turned to her and asked, “Mom, is it possible to go to sleep and not wake up?” Nikki told him that’s how one of his grandmothers passed away: “it’s the best way to go-no pain, no drama.” He surprised Nikki further by stating, “It must be hard for a parent to lose a child.” Something told her in that car ride to tell him all the things she loved about him. Three days later, Tommy passed away...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 12 min
I’m thrilled to share my conversation with Peter A. Levine, the renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing - a naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma, which he has developed over the past 50 years. He holds a Medical and Biological Physics doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in Psychology from International University. He is the recipient of four lifetime achievement awards and is the author of several books, including Waking the Tiger , w...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 14 min
In this episode, I bring you my conversation with the wise and warm grief therapist and author, Claire Bidwell Smith. There are some common themes most grievers experience, regardless of the source of their loss. These include things like a loss of self-identity, heightened feelings of guilt, time spent ruminating on the what ifs, and increased anxiety and fear. What makes these typical experiences even more challenging is that they are so rarely named by others, or shown in media, and so we oft...
Mar 05, 2024•1 hr 13 min
My conversation with guest Devin Moss was so rich and expansive, from our shared passion for the big existential questions to his rich and complex podcast series, Momento Mori (that dives deep into mortality), to his unexpected journey to becoming a Humanist Chaplain. He shares one of the most unique experiences of a bedside death I’ve ever heard. Soon after becoming certified Devin said yes to a request from an inmate on death row to have a non-theist chaplain accompany him in his final months ...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 35 min
Darnell Lamont Walker joined me for an expansive conversation in this episode - from the questions you might want to ask yourself and others in life instead of waiting until death’s door, to the complex and layered experiences of grief and loss in the Black community, to the power of creativity and play as a tool of healing. Darnell is an Emmy-Nominated children's television writer who understands the power of representation and joy, creating content in hopes that all children get the opportunit...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 6 min
As my guest, Asa Merritt knows, it's important that we see, hear, experience a wider expanse of grief stories that show the messy, beautiful, dynamic experience of a wide variety of losses. That’s why I’m thrilled to share my recent conversation with him. In his most recent project, Six Sermons, a new Audible Original series starring Stephanie Hsu from Everything Everywhere All At Once, Asa spent a month embedded with a team of pastors at a Lutheran church in Cincinnati, OH. Six Sermons is dedic...
Feb 14, 2024•1 hr 10 min
In this interactive bonus episode , host Lisa Keefauver invites listeners to reflect on the importance of honoring or creating ritual for the anniversaries of the day their lives changed - even when they're “not all better yet.” This episode emerged after the overwhelming feedback she received from an essay she recently shared called “Honoring the ‘Not All Better Yet’ Anniversaries” about the one-year anniversary of her Breast Cancer Diagnosis. In this episode, listeners are: Guided through a co...
Feb 07, 2024•39 min
My guest, J.J. Duncan, knows firsthand both professionally and personally how powerful storytelling is and the openings they create. She is an award-winning television producer, writer, advocate, and co-founder of the nonprofit, “Not Today Cancer,” which raises funds for childhood cancer research. J.J. is widely known in the entertainment industry as an Executive Producer and Showrunner of such hits as Project Runway, and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, among others. After losing her e...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 24 min
My guest, Gina Moffa, author of Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss, is a licensed grief and trauma psychotherapist and mental health educator in New York City. In practice for two decades, Gina helps people seeking treatment for trauma, grief, as well as challenging life experiences and transitions. Whether we’re grieving a death loss, the end of a friendship, a breakup or an ambiguous loss, 100% of us experience grief. Yet so many of us feel stuck because the o...
Jan 23, 2024•1 hr 12 min
My guest, Stephanie Sarazin, is a writer, researcher, and ambiguous grief guide. In this episode, as in her award-winning book Soulbroken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief, she shares how her work began. After experiencing her own mid-life trauma, she embarked on an ambitious journey - spiritually and around the world—to understand, name, and heal the grief she found within her. Her efforts revealed a first-of-its-kind definition for “ambiguous grief,” whereby grief is onset ...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 18 min
In her extraordinarily honest and beautiful memoir, End of the Hour, and in our conversation in this episode, Meghan Riordan Jarvis lays bare her experience of PTSD following the deaths of both of her parents within two years of each other. Meghan’s story and perspective is unique as she has spent the past 20+ years as a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, grief, and loss. She opens about her unraveling and the necessary courage it took to check herself into the same inpatient trauma center ...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Sally Douglas and Imogen Carn met during the saddest time in both their lives, after the sudden deaths of both of their mothers. That’s when they had the lightbulb moment to start the Good Mourning podcast, and the rest is history. From their first recording on Sal’s sofa to 100 episodes, a top podcast and a global community that reaches over 100 thousand people each month, it’s been an incredible journey. They’ve helped each other to higher, happier ground, becoming soul sisters, pod-wives and ...
Jan 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min
As artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project Guest House in San Francisco, Wendy MacNaughton witnessed firsthand how difficult it is to know what to do when we’re sharing final moments with a loved one. In this tenderly illustrated guide to saying goodbye, MacNaughton shows how to make sure those moments are meaningful. Using a framework of “the five things” taught to her by a professional caregiver, How to Say Goodbye provides a model for having conversations of love, respect, and closure:...
Dec 19, 2023•1 hr 17 min
About Episode & Guest I think we can all agree that children and grief are two words we wish would never have to go together. Yet we do live in that world and the challenge we face is that we live in a culture that is grief avoidant which makes it difficult for us to know how to offer meaningful and age-appropriate support. The good news is that today’s guest, Brennan Wood, Executive Director of the Dougy Center is here to help. The center’s mission is to provide grief support in a safe plac...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 15 min
About this episode Why are we talking about stress and burnout on a podcast about grief? Well, as you’ve likely experienced, grief is essentially a chronic stressor. This is particularly true in a culture that is grief avoidant, and where toxic positivity is rampant. Where we no longer live in tribes or communities that can help us discharge it. In essence, we’re left to our own devices to figure out how to be with our grief. The good news is that today’s guest, Emily Nagoski, co-author of the p...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 31 min
In this final episode of the season, host Lisa Keefauver takes listeners behind-the-scenes. But instead of recapping the incredible conversations she had with 17 guests this season - from Sunita Puri to Colin Campbell to Cyndie Spiegel and so many more, she's offering you a behind-the-scenes peek into her life off the air. Lisa opens up about this season of her life - living with Breast Cancer. Lisa gets deeply personal in the hopes that we can learn, grow, and navigate grief, together. In respo...
Oct 10, 2023•38 min
Some words become excruciating in the wake of loss. For my guest today, Katie Joy Duke, that word is expecting. After a whirlwind romance and engagement, Katie and her fiancé were over the moon with the discovery that they were expecting their first child together. A beautiful wedding ceremony and a fairy tale pregnancy, as Katie describes it, left them both shocked when after going into labor, they were told that their daughter Poppy, whose beautiful home had been Katie’s womb for the past 9 mo...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 12 min
Bethany Harvey, author of the beautiful memoir Dipped In It, shares the experiences and lessons she’s learned from several losses. Some we’ve explored in past episodes, such as the loss of a parent and other losses we haven’t touched on much over the seasons, the grief that results from divorce. At the end of Bethany’s marriage, her now ex-spouse came out as gay and trans-gender. And while Bethany shares that she initially grieved the loss of the “he” she was married too, she quickly realized th...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 12 min
In this episode, my guest Aly Bird shares the journey she’s been on since the untimely death of her young husband, the secondary and ambiguous losses she continues to uncover, and the inspiration to help create a culture of positive grief support which resulted in her beautiful book, Grief Ally. I can’t wait for you to meet her! EPISODE RESOURCES Since her husband’s untimely death, my guest Aly Bird has poured her heart into helping those who feel helpless during an unexpected crisis. Her extens...
Jul 26, 2023•1 hr 12 min
Steph Jagger explores one of the most common ways we experience ambiguous loss - when someone we love is in the grips of Alzheimer’s Disease. In our conversation, just like in her exquisitely written memoir, Everything Left to Remember, Steph reveals what she learned when she took her mom, who was diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s, on an adventure into big nature under the big Montana sky. While what she learned on this trip wasn’t what she expected, she gained more than she bargained for ...
Jul 11, 2023•1 hr 9 min
My guest Laurel Braitman is an absolute damn delight! In today’s episode we’re exploring her beautiful brand-new memoir What Looks Like Bravery: An epic journey through loss to love. I appreciate so much the humor, wisdom, and insight she brought to our conversation about the expansiveness of grief in her life, from the death of her father as a teenager, to lost loves, pets, a home in the wildfires of Northern California, and more recently the death of her mother. Her adventurous spirit, which h...
Jun 21, 2023•1 hr 17 min
In this episode, my guest Daniel Wallace and I will explore his memoir, This Isn’t Going To End Well: The True Story Of A Man I Thought I Knew, a heart-wrenching and deeply vulnerable portrait of the life and loss of his seemingly perfect and impossibly cool hero. Our conversation explores his brother in laws rise in stature in Daniel’s imagination, the decades long friendship they forged, the movie-like adventures and mis-adventures William embarked on, the incredible care William offered Danie...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 16 min
From her pregnancy losses to accompanying her parents and aunt through Alzheimer’s to her work in human rights advocacy and the hundreds of people she’s sat with at the end of their lives as a hospice volunteer, my guest Barbara Becker, shares what she’s learned about the art of living with the end in mind. She is the author of the extraordinary book Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind which won the Nautilus Gold Book Award and was featured by Katie Couric Media in her "Books That ...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 8 min
My guest, Colin Campbell is a writer and director for theater and film. He’s also written a truly powerful and personal exploration of grief, in his book, Finding The Words. In our conversation today, Colin shares his experience of losing both his children, Ruby and Hart when a drunk driver hit their car and changed a pleasant family outing into the worst day imaginable. He addresses the fear, pain, denial, guilt, rage, despair, and isolation that accompanies grief. You will also hear us explore...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 12 min
I’m thrilled to bring you my conversation with Rabbi Steve Leder. Steve is the senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. He is the author of five books and in our conversation today, we explore his latest: For You When I Am Gone: Twelve Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story . We explored so much from the wisdom we gain in the wake of loss, to the most important gifts we can give others – both in our lives and in our deaths. Spoiler alert, it’s not our money, our record collect...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Media Executive Michelle Hord, was no stranger to trauma. Having started her professional career as an award-winning producer on America’s Most Wanted, she expertly guided families through every facet of unthinkable crisis. Later, she covered heartbreaking stories while working at The Oprah Winfrey Show and Good Morning America . She sat with survivors of the unimaginable. When the unimaginable struck at home, when her daughter was murdered, her world changed forever. In our conversation, just l...
Apr 25, 2023•1 hr 10 min
What I quickly discovered in my conversation with my guest, Cyndie Spiegel today is that we are kindred spirits. We went deep and wide. We cussed. We laughed. We reflected on the both/and of life and loss and how microjoys are the gift we need in these times. Don’t worry, this isn’t toxic positivity, It’s the opposite. Microjoys invites us to make space for all the feels, including the accessible moments of joy that might be hiding in plain sight. I can’t wait for you to meet her. EPISODE RESOUR...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr 6 min
My guest in this episode is Fatema Jivanjee-Shakir. We met in 2022 when we were serving together on a Mental Health Panel for a large corporate event. The minute I heard her talk about the experiences of body grief, I knew instantly that I had a lot to learn from her and that my listeners did too. That’s why I’m thrilled to be sharing our conversation with you in this episode. She helps us understand the impact of culture on our sense of self and our body-image. We explore some of the many cause...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Sunita Puri is a Palliative Medicine physician and author of the incredible book That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hou r, a critically-acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. In this episode, she explores her experiences in palliative medicine, the role of spirituality and the sacred practice of accompanying someo...
Mar 21, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Mary-Frances O’Connor is my special guest in this episode. I devoured her book, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss last year and knew I needed to have a conversation with the author on this show. I’m grateful to share that late last year, I had the honor of sitting down with Mary-Frances to explore the fascinating work she has been doing studying the Grieving Brain. I’m 100% confident you will learn so much and appreciate the warmth and wisdom she bring...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 6 min
