Content warning: discussion of addiction.

Jabe Largen grew up on a hillside in Appalachian Virginia surrounded by family, beauty, and loss. By his early teens, drugs had become the only thing that made him feel like himself. By his twenties, he had nothing left. And then, four months clean, standing in a small wooden church by a creek, something shifted.

He is now a United Methodist minister, a husband, a father, and the author of They Call Me Jabe: A Hillbilly Tale of Life, Death, and Grace, a memoir tracing the unlikely thread connecting addiction, death, grief, and grace across a single life.

In this conversation, Jabe talks about what it felt like when OxyContin hit Appalachia and changed everything, what he found on the other side of rock bottom, and what it means to sit with the dying as someone who has spent years staring down his own darkness. He also shares the story of a hospice patient, a Popsicle, and two words that have never left him: for what?

To learn more about Jabe and his memoir, visit thegoodbyepodcast.com.

Vincent Cutino was twenty-three years old, smart, funny, fiercely loyal, just finding his footing, when he collapsed at the gym and never came home. What followed for his father, Chris, was the kind of grief that turns the world upside down and makes everything that came before feel like a different life entirely.

Chris Cutino is a husband, a father, and the author of Vincent's Bookends, a memoir he never intended to write. It began as notes rattling around in his head, a way to make space for whatever healing might eventually mean. It became something much more.

In this conversation, Chris talks about the fog of those first hours, the unexpected loneliness of being surrounded by people, the guilt, jealousy, and comparative grief he didn't expect to feel, and what it means to rebuild when the fairytale you promised your family is no longer possible.

He also talks about what the small things, a cereal bar in the cabinet, a dog looking down the hallway, can do to a person who is trying to survive.

Vincent's Bookends is available now. Learn more at thegoodbyepodcast.com.

Audrey Bellezza had just turned fifty when an ordinary check-in with her hip doctor led to an MRI, a biopsy, and three words that split her life in two: stage four cancer.

A two-time Emmy Award–nominated television producer and novelist, Audrey had spent decades believing in narrative order: that if you did the right things, the story would make sense. ALK-positive lung cancer didn't care about that.

In this conversation, Audrey talks about losing herself in the early weeks after diagnosis, learning to advocate for her own treatment, and how she went from feeling completely helpless to founding Love4Lungs, a nonprofit raising funds for a lung cancer vaccine trial at Johns Hopkins.

She also talks about what fell away after the diagnosis, what came back, and what it means to build a life that's fully present while still inside the hardest thing you've ever faced.

To learn more about Love4Lungs and support ALK-positive lung cancer research, visit love4lungs.org.