Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is an expert in traumatic grief and she is also a bereaved mother. The conversation today is wide and deep exploring themes including: traumatic grief, the loss of a child, the healing practices and rituals required to metabolize loss, the ways in which our culture makes navigating the messy non-linear path of grief unnecessarily difficult, and so much more. Her best selling book, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief, is one of my all-time favorite books on loss and a national award winning best seller that has helped revolutionize the way our culture thinks, and feels, about grief.

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Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is a Professor at Arizona State University, a Senior Sustainability Scholar, and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement Program. She is in the top 2% of scholars in her field around the world, and has devoted her life to research, practice, and community based care of those suffering traumatic grief. She served on Oprah and Prince Harry’s Mental Health Committee for the Apple TV Series, The Me You Can’t See, which also featured her work at the Selah Carefarm, a therapeutic ecocommunity that combines rescued animals with humans who are grieving the tragic death of a child, parent, partner, or other primary family member. Her research has been published in the Lancet, and other medical journals, and she just released one the Great Courses called Understanding and Coping with Grief with Audible in 2022.

Lisa Keefauver is a social worker, widow, and grief activist on a mission to reimagine the narratives of grief, one conversation at a time.

Learn more at www.lisakeefauver.com.

Follow @lisakeefauvermsw on Instagram.

Listen to Grief is a Sneaky Bitch Podcast - Available on all podcast platforms.

Read Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss. Available in bookstores and on your favorite online booksellers, including Bookshop.Org. Also available as an audiobook.

Watch her TEDx talk, Why Knowing More About Grief Can Make it Suck Less here

Submit your question: If you have a grief question, you’d like Lisa to answer on the air, record your question here: https://www.speakpipe.com/GriefIsASneakyBitchLive. Make sure you’re subscribed to the show so you get notified when these bonus episodes drop so you can hear your question, and her answer live on the air.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kicking off Season 6 of the show, actress and author Tembi Locke shares her experience of grief and the lessons she learned after the death of her husband. She discusses the importance of bringing awareness to grief and the opportunity it provides for connection and aliveness. She emphasizes the need to hold both the pain of loss and the joy of the person's life. Tembi also talks about the impact her husband had on her and the importance of sharing stories and memories of loved ones. In this conversation, Lisa Keefauver and Tembi Locke discuss the daily challenges of grief and the importance of finding agency and small moments of control amid loss. They also explore the vulnerability of being a young widow and the overwhelming weight of responsibility. Tembi shares her experience of navigating solo parenting and the importance of finding a partner who can understand and support her grief journey. They emphasize the need for rest, self-care, and finding moments of joy or ease in the midst of grief.

From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home: https://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Memoir-Love-Sicily-Finding/dp/150118766X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

From Scratch (the Netflix special): https://www.netflix.com/title/81104486

Lisa Keefauver is a social worker, widow, and grief activist on a mission to reimagine the narratives of grief, one conversation at a time.

Learn more at www.lisakeefauver.com.

Follow @lisakeefauvermsw on Instagram.

Listen to Grief is a Sneaky Bitch Podcast - Available on all podcast platforms.

Read Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss. Available in bookstores, favorite online booksellers, including Bookshop.Org. Also available as an audiobook.

Watch her TEDx talk, Why Knowing More About Grief Can Make it Suck Less here

Submit your question: If you have a grief question, you’d like Lisa to answer on the air, record your question here: https://www.speakpipe.com/GriefIsASneakyBitchLive. Make sure you’re subscribed to the show so you get notified when these bonus episodes drop so you can hear your question, and her answer live on the air.

This conversation was recorded in May 2024 prior to the release of host Lisa Keefauver’s book and held to be the kickoff episode for Season 6 of the podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jessica Fein has faced a lot of loss. Siblings, parents, and in 2022 her daughter Dalia. At the age of five Jessica’s daughter Dalia was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease that would claim her life at 17. Before that moment came, and inspired by Dalia’s own insuppressible zest for life, Jessica and her family would discover how to live in the present when the future can’t be fixed. In our conversation today, and in her beautiful book, Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, Jessica maps both her journey to becoming an adoptive mom and the roller coaster ride of loving and caring for a terminally ill child, persevering when the simple act of taking a breath can become an act of courage. Through it all, she discovers the need to be both relentless advocate and calm presence, to show vulnerability as well as strength, and to allow joy to be louder than sorrow.

In addition to being a writer and a fierce advocate in the memory of her daughter, she's also host of the "I Don't Know How You Do It” podcast, which features people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside. I’m grateful to share that I had the chance to be on the other side of the microphone and join her on her show recently too.

Host Lisa Keefauver’s forthcoming book Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org and will be in bookstores JUNE 4th.

Visit www.lisakeefauver.com to learn more about Lisa, sign up for her Not-So-Regular Newsletter, register for an upcoming online grief workshop, find out if she is coming to a city near you for her book tour, or watch her TEDx talk, Why Knowing More About Grief Can Make it Suck Less.

Oh, and this season, if you want to WATCH the show, you can now watch it on YouTube @lisakeefauvermsw

Recorded May 8, 2024

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.