What Now? On the threshold of life, death, and grief‪.‬ Julie Brown, David Kennedy, Red Keating

A diagnosis of a potentially life threatening illness throws us into a world of hard questions and a myriad of decisions that need to be made.  Our decisions can find us ruminating on issues and double guessing ourselves and if we don’t achieve the desired results we are often left feeling responsible and guilty about the outcome. In this episode we examine some of the questions that arise and decisions that need to be made from the moment of a new diagnosis onward. 

Poets and writers often capture the experiences, thoughts,  and emotions we may struggle to express or put into words. In this episode, we do something a little different and indulge in our collective love of the written word.   We share and discuss some of our favourite poems, quotes and song lyrics that address what it means to be alive yet wrestle and dance with our mortality. 

In this episode, we speak with two experts in dementia healthcare. Dr. Sarah Brisbin and Jill MacPhee help us understand the complexity of dementia both for individuals diagnosed and living with dementia and their families and care partners. Our guests bring their expansive medical knowledge in this area, but it's their humanity and genuine caring for their patients and families that shine through in this conversation. Dementia is a disease that will affect most of us in some way in our ...

We have the honour of speaking with meditation teacher Vinny Ferraro who leads Spirit Rock's program: A Year to Live, which focuses on waking up and living life more fully through the exploration of death as spiritual practice. In this conversation, Vinny shares his personal perspectives, interwoven with Buddhist teachings on how turning toward the present moment and the natural inevitability of death, teaches us about life and provides us a guide for living. He also walks us throu...

In this episode we address the task of what to do with the belongings and “stuff” we accumulate throughout a lifetime. Often as a person approaches death, or a person has died, family and close friends need to make decisions about how to disseminate a lifetime's worth of stuff. This can be an overwhelming undertaking during an already emotionally exhausting time. To support those engaged in this difficult task the co-hosts provide strategies and ways to think about our attachment to things, p...

In this fascinating conversation with author, psychologist and neuroscience researcher, Mary-Frances O’Connor, we learn what happens in the brain when we experience loss and grief. She expands the understanding of grief by sharing her discoveries of how our brain participates and responds to our loss. Dr. O’Connor explains, both here and in her book, information that is “power enabling,” because her research shows why we must be patient with ourselves (and our brains) during the g...