There is a line from Samuel Beckett that a friend whispered to Stephen outside the hospital room where his wife Kate was dying.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

It became, as Stephen says in his memoir, a pretty accurate summary of his life after Kate and Anna.

Anna came home from China at seven months old, a charming, sweet, luminously happy little girl who had a gift for drawing people to her. Children would flock to her on the playground, sensing something in her they could not name. She loved music, loved to sing, loved every meal she was ever given. She also had a rare and devastating neurogenetic disorder called Niemann-Pick Type C, diagnosed when she was five, after a fall and a head bleed led doctors to notice her enlarged liver and spleen. They told Stephen and Kate she would likely not live past thirteen.

She lived to be twenty.

Kate died of lung cancer in March of 2012, three years before Anna. She walked into the hospital on her own, refused to let Stephen call an ambulance, would not let him help her through the door. Doctors were puzzled by how a woman with a tumor wrapped around her lung could still be walking around. It was, Stephen says quietly, very much on brand for her.

He was left to grieve his wife while watching his daughter continue her slow decline, and to hold his younger daughter Jane together through all of it. He did not do it gracefully. He did it the only way anyone does it. Imperfectly. One foot, then the other.

I recognized something in Stephen's words that I have carried in my own grief. There were so many days when I turned to my dear friend and said, I can't do this. And every time, she looked right back at me and said, Marcy, you are doing this. That is the whole of it, right there. You feel like you cannot, and somehow, impossibly, you do.

Stephen's memoir, A Ribbon for Your Hair, captures that truth with a writer's precision and a father's aching heart. He reflects on the weather of grief, how you live in it, how sometimes you notice it and sometimes it is just there. He shares the grief advice he received over the years, much of it well-meaning, almost none of it useful. And he stands on a sidewalk outside the apartment where he and Kate were once happy, weeping, while strangers walk past him as if nothing in the world has changed.

Because for them, nothing has. That is grief's loneliest truth.

He survived it because he had to. Because Jane needed him. Because that is what we do.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

A Ribbon for Your Hair is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Bryan carried the sadness.

That was his decision. Not the devastation, not the incapacitation, but the sadness. A conscious, daily choice to let his broken heart stay open rather than rebuild the walls around it. And in doing so, he discovered something he did not expect.

The broken heart made him better.

Noah was Bryan's son, born in 1987, a boy of rare and tender empathy who greeted his father every morning before work and asked, at ten years old, to attend the funeral of a classmate's father because he already knew, somehow, how to be present in someone else's pain. He grew into a young man full of promise, studying finance and Chinese, warm and funny and deeply loved. And then, quietly, the opioid crisis found him. He once told his father that the first time he took one of those drugs, it was the first time in his life he had ever felt completely free of anxiety.

What followed were years of loving a child through addiction. Rehab. Sobriety. Relapse. Bryan eventually had to fire his own son from the company he ran. He and his wife told Noah they could no longer pay his rent, that they would support his recovery but not his destruction. Noah understood. He said a friend would drive him to rehab.

The call from rehab never came. Bryan had the police do a welfare check.

Noah was gone.

In the years since, Bryan made a choice. He would not rebuild what grief had torn down. He would stay open, stay soft, stay reachable by other people's suffering. Because he had come to understand that as long as we tell ourselves we are safe, as long as we build the little narratives that say the worst cannot happen to us, we create invisible walls between ourselves and everyone around us who is hurting. Grief demolished those walls. And in their rubble, something beautiful grew.

One evening, Bryan and his wife Carolyn walked together and reached the familiar dead end of the why. And one of them said, simply, oh well. And they both laughed. Not because anything was less sad. But because releasing the need for an answer brought such relief that joy slipped in uninvited, right through the broken places.

Joy and sorrow are not opposites. The broken heart that stays open is the one that feels everything more deeply.

Carrying deep sadness, Bryan says, is a condition for me being as compassionate a person as I can be.

Bryan's book, The Gift of a Broken Heart, is available wherever books are sold and at thegiftofabrokenheart.com.

This week's episode didn't happen the way we planned.

It was supposed to be a livestream. And then, within the same week, both Gwen and I found ourselves facing something neither of us expected. My mother-in-law, who had been like a mother to me for nearly 30 years, was suddenly placed on hospice. Gwen's own mother was in hospice as well. We looked at each other and simply said, we cannot do a livestream this week. So we didn't. We let it be smaller, quieter, and just the two of us.

And in a strange way, that became exactly the right backdrop for the topic at hand.

This episode is built around questions we posed to our community about navigating grief alongside the demands of daily work. What tips would you share about going back to work? How do you balance the daily grind of work and your grief? Do your coworkers and bosses know the pain you carry, and how much do you disclose?

The answers that poured in revealed something important. There is no one right way to do this.

Some of you went back to work and told everyone everything. Others went back and told no one at all. Some of you simply could not go back, not to the same job, not to any job, at least not yet. All of those are valid. All of those are normal, depending on your circumstances, your safety, and what you personally need in order to function.

Practical tips came pouring in too, like asking for help navigating FMLA paperwork, returning part-time before full-time, and clearly communicating boundaries to coworkers and supervisors rather than trying to silently muscle through. Some of you found that work became a meaningful place to honor your child, while others found it became a place to set grief aside for a few hours, a kind of necessary, temporary relief.

The conversation around disclosure was especially honest. Some workplaces respond with grace and flexibility, and others do not. Some losses carry complicated layers underneath them that need to stay private for many reasons. Disclosure is not a one-time decision but something navigated moment by moment, situation by situation, for the rest of your life.

And things change. I once believed I could never see patients again, retreating into administrative work instead, only to find myself months later unable to bear administrative work at all, wanting nothing but my patients back. A job that meant nothing before a child's death can become someone's entire calling afterward. Grief and work are not static, and neither are we.

If you are navigating this balance yourself right now, we hope this conversation reminds you that whatever choice you have made, or are making, is the right one for you. There is no universal answer here. There is only yours.

We are all born into a house of stories.

That is something Dan, Jacob's dad, believes deeply, and it shapes everything about how he has carried his grief. Dan is a professional storyteller by trade, and when his son Jacob was born fragile and uncertain in the NICU, not expected to survive, Dan did the only thing he knew how to do. He sat by his side and talked. He told stories, sang songs, even recited Chaucer in Middle English, because he believed his voice could be a beacon, something Jacob's soul could navigate by to find his way into the world. He called the experience talking him in.

Jacob lived. He was eventually diagnosed with Prader-Willi syndrome, a condition Dan explains in simple terms as leaving someone always, organically hungry, with locks needed on the fridge not because Jacob was sneaky, but because his body simply could not register being full. He grew up big, sometimes teased, slow to make friends, but open to the world in a way Dan deeply admired. His great-grandmother told him once that he was born for a purpose, and Jacob carried that with him quietly for the rest of his life. Years later, working as a beloved school crossing guard in Toronto, he helped save a toddler who had run into oncoming traffic, and told his dad afterward, through tears, maybe that is why I chose to live.

Jacob died at 26, eight days after a car accident, with enough time for his mother and brother to make it to his bedside. Dan calls those final eight days talking him out. He believes there is a kind of circle in that. Talked in at the beginning of his life. Talked out at the end of it.

In the two years that followed, Dan did something he had spent years encouraging other people to do, first as a storyteller in residence at Baycrest Health Sciences, and later in palliative care settings. He became Jacob's story keeper. He gathered every scrap of Jacob he could find, poems, apology letters, nicknamed lists of fishing rods and fedoras, all of Jacob's own words and ways, and wove them into a book written entirely in Jacob's imagined voice. It is called I Am Full: Stories for Jacob, and a major publisher offered to print it if Dan would write about his own experience instead. He said no. The book was never meant to be about him. It was meant to be about Jacob.

Dan's belief is simple and profound. We are each other's story keepers. Not just parents and children, but everyone who has ever loved someone and chosen to remember them out loud. He shares the story of an Italian woman in a palliative care unit, encouraged to collect her dying mother's proverbs in her final days, who became her mother's story keeper in the process. He shares the old expression that a person is not truly dead until they are forgotten.

This podcast exists, in many ways, to do exactly what Dan describes. We tell stories. We collect stories. We keep them, together, so that no child is ever just a name on a headstone, but a whole, full, remembered life.

If this conversation moves you, Dan's book I Am Full: Stories for Jacob is available through Signature Editions, a small publisher out of Winnipeg and can be purchased on Amazon.

There is a fear that lives quietly inside almost every grieving parent. It rarely gets said out loud, but it shapes so much of how we carry our grief.

If I let go of the pain, will I lose them too?

Caryn, Josh's mom, spent years living inside that fear before she finally understood something that changed everything for her.

Josh was Caryn's oldest son, a champion wrestler who came within reach of Olympic dreams, smart and witty and utterly fearless. A week and a half before he died in a motorcycle accident at 23, he told her three times that he was invincible. Caryn believes now that in some sense he was right. His soul was invincible. It was only his body that was not.

The accident happened just eight days after Caryn and her husband told their sons they were separating. It was, as she puts it, the year from hell. She remembers saying out loud to her friends that she did not think she could live through it.

But Caryn had tools most people do not. As a hypnotherapist of over twenty years, she understood the power of the subconscious mind, and in the days after Josh died, she leaned on every tool she had. She also began experiencing something she never expected. Messages from Josh in the middle of the night. An unearthly peace on her deck just days after his death. A spiritual awakening she did not see coming and, by her own admission, would have dismissed as woo-woo before.

What grew out of all of it was a hard-won understanding about the difference between holding on and letting go. For a long time, Caryn held Josh so tightly that she could feel him gently telling her it was time to let him run free, that he did not need her to hold on so tight anymore. Releasing that grip did not come easily. It felt, for a while, like losing him all over again. But what came after was lighter. Freer. And Josh was still there.

That is the heart of everything Caryn now teaches in her hypnotherapy practice and her grief retreats. Releasing the heavy emotions, the anger, the guilt, the haunting last images that will not leave you alone, does not mean releasing your child. Caryn believes, and I believe this too, that what keeps our children close is never the pain. It is the love. The pain is simply what we are afraid to put down.

Caryn now leads four day grief retreats in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she walks grieving parents through exactly this work. Her next retreat is coming up in July, and at the time of this release, there are still a few spots remaining if you feel called to it. You can find all the details at carynbird.com/retreat.

Whatever your path looks like, I hope this conversation reminds you of something important. You do not have to keep carrying the pain to keep them close. Your love already does that.

After losing Isaiah, Mona did what so many grieving parents do.

She disappeared.

Not all at once. But slowly, quietly, she started skipping the family gatherings where she would feel his absence most sharply, surrounded by all his cousins growing up without him. She got good at wearing a mask, at being on for other people, at performing a version of herself that did not make anyone uncomfortable. And when the exhaustion of all that pretending became too much, she retreated. Into the cave, as she calls it. Until she felt ready to come out again.

It took her a long time to learn the difference between solitude and isolation. One is necessary. The other is lonely.

Isaiah was Mona's only child, her greatest joy, a boy who told her he loved her at least ten times a day and meant it every time. He was funny and easygoing and patient in ways she was not, the kind of kid who would watch you drop the roof of a gingerbread house and just shrug and say it was okay. He was thirteen years old when he died in an accident while clearing trees on the family property. Mona was home packing for a trip. A knock on the door. A two and a half hour drive to Flagstaff Medical Center. And then a doctor who walked out and told her he was gone.

Six years later, she is still carrying it. She has started EMDR, working carefully and bravely toward the day she will be ready to process the memory of that day itself. She has learned, slowly, that letting people in is not a burden to them. It is, as she says, a way of allowing them to love her.

And she has been loved well.

At Isaiah's celebration of life, she said something out loud - that she wanted to collect some money and give it to a charity in his name. Her friend Jessica and her twin sister heard those words, and took them seriously. Within months, they had raised $80,000 to build a medical and dental clinic in Honduras, named La Luz de Isaiah. The Light of Isaiah.

When Mona traveled to Honduras to see the clinic, strangers had painted a dragonfly mural on the wall inside, because Isaiah's favorite insect was a dragonfly. She stood in that room, and for the first time in a long time, she felt something she had been afraid she had lost.

She felt like God had not forgotten her.

Out of that moment, and out of a conversation between Mona and Jessica on the phone afterward, La Luz de Isaiah Foundation was born. Their Dragonfly Wishes program helps grieving parents bring to life the tributes and memorials they have dreamed of but could not carry alone. A bench in a park. A community art fair. A clinic in Honduras. Whatever honors the child, in whatever size fits the family. Jessica does the logistics, the phone calls, the fundraising, the advocacy. Mona holds the heart of it.

Because what they both want, more than anything, is for every grieving parent to feel what Mona felt in that clinic.

Seen. Remembered. Not forgotten.

You can learn more and apply for a Dragonfly Wish at laluzdeisaiah.org.

Becky has spent her entire life adapting to a world that was not built for her.

As a woman with dwarfism who stands four feet tall, she has learned to problem solve, improvise, and push forward in spaces that were never designed with her in mind. She has built the confidence and strength to ignore the stares and the laughs. She has figured out children's recliners and gaming chairs and car beds and oxygen tanks and every other logistical puzzle that life has thrown at her.

And then she lost Jackson. And something unexpected happened.

The fear went away.

Jackson Robert was born on August 9th, 2021, a perfect baby who arrived after 39 weeks, a NICU stay, 20 days of sleep studies, a car bed, oxygen for sleeping, and a yellow sheet of paper with 20 specialist appointments waiting on the other side of discharge day. He also had dwarfism, just like his mama, and Becky will tell you that getting that news was the best news she had ever received. He was her boy. He was going to be like her.

He was six months and twenty-one days old when he died, following a catastrophic loss of oxygen during a routine sleep study at the hospital. He had not been breathing for thirty minutes before anyone noticed. The code team took four minutes to arrive. Becky was thrown out of the room. His father came back from the hotel not even having had enough time to remove his shoes.

Twelve days in the ICU followed. Twelve days of fighting to understand what had happened while simultaneously fighting to give Jackson the best possible care. Twelve days of MRIs and heart rate changes and a physical therapist who came once, lifted his leg, watched it fall, and never came back. Twelve days of Becky going to the hotel every night to sleep, so she could be fully present for him every morning. And at 8:09 PM on March 2nd, 2022, Jackson passed away in her arms. 8:09. August 9th. His birthday.

In this conversation, Becky speaks with remarkable honesty about everything that has come since. The IVF journey that stretched across two years and three states before falling apart. The massive spinal surgery that left her hospitalized for 72 days and still requiring care today. The layers of grief she has carried all at once, the loss of her son, the loss of her mobility, the loss of her marriage, and the grief that began even before Jackson was born, in every diagnosis and every appointment and every moment of bracing for what might come next.

And through all of it, she has kept going. She has written. She has sought therapy. She has found her people, slowly and imperfectly, in support groups and retreats and monthly meetings with parents who lost children around Jackson's age. She has put his photo on her hospital room walls and his picture with Santa in the family Christmas photos and his image on her phone so that every new nurse who walks into her room asks about him.

She says she used to wake up in the middle of the night consumed by a fear of death. The moment Jackson died in her arms, that fear disappeared.

She is in no rush. She has a lot to do here on Earth. But she knows she will get to see him again.

And part of what she has to do is make sure Jackson is never just a blip. She is working on a book. She is doing inclusivity advocacy so that the world he never got to grow up in becomes the world she would have wanted for him. She is telling anyone who will listen about her boy and his giggles and his determination during tummy time and the way he was, as she puts it simply and perfectly, the brightest light.

Jackson made Becky a mama. And in the end, he made her fearless too.

For more on Becky, visit beckymotivates.com

Darius made Kelly a mama at eighteen years old.

Then he made her a nurse.

And years later, after he was gone, he made her something else entirely, a certified grief counselor, an entrepreneur, and the founder of something beautiful that would not exist without him.

That is the thread running through this entire conversation. Our children become our purpose. And when we find that purpose, they are wrapped up inside it completely.

Darius Anthony was Kelly's oldest, born on Christmas Day, a gift announced to the world on the day the world was already celebrating. He was a class clown, a party in a person, a young man who dreamed of making a dent in the universe, not just for himself, but for other people. He became a realtor working specifically with first-time homebuyers, bought his own first home, and was preparing to flip it for someone just like them. He was 28 years old, thriving, and full of plans.

On January 3rd, 2023, he died in his sleep from SUDEP, Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. He had been diagnosed with epilepsy at eighteen, managed it well, and was living his life fully. Kelly and her husband were on a cruise ship in Mexico when the call came.

Before January 3rd, 2023 and after. That is how Kelly divides her life now.

In this conversation, Kelly speaks honestly about the grief journey. The permission a dear friend gave her to simply stop and just be. The Visionary Dreamer Award at his college that his colleagues announced at his funeral they were renaming in his honor. The autopsy report that arrived without warning on her second day back at work, and the ashes returned in what she can only describe as a biohazard container. Two moments that made her think: the death care industry has to do better.

So she built something better.

Timely Presence sends heirloom quality gifts on the predictable hard days, the birthday, the holiday season, the anniversary of the death, so that the people who love grieving families can show up right on time. Gifts that are not sad, Kelly says. Gifts that are reminders of love. Learn more at thetimelypresence.com.

And perhaps the most beautiful moment in this conversation is near the end, when Kelly tells the story of Darius's best friend, who brought a framed photo of Darius to his own house closing. Because there was no way to do that moment without him.

That is what it looks like when a life leaves a mark so deep that the people who loved him carry him forward into every milestone he never got to have.

Darius made Kelly a mama, a nurse, and now a purpose.

He is wrapped up in all of it.