Season TWO! Every relationship ends. Dr. Paige Toller says that to her students, and it stops them for a second. Paige is a professor in the UNO School of Communication who studies interpersonal communication, which looks at how our closest relationships form, hold together, and end. In this episode she talks about the part we usually avoid, grief and loss, and why she treats it as a real part of how relationships work, not a footnote. Paige explains that grief is both internal and external, the private emotion and the way we reach for other people. She talks about the little deaths we rarely name, a lost job, a breakup, the loss of your health, a kid leaving for college, and how each one asks us to build a new normal. She shares research she did on how people talked about suicide online, and what it revealed about how poorly we support the people left behind. And she talks about her dissertation work with parents who lost a child, and the resilience she did not expect to find. She has one thing she wishes faculty and students understood: grief is all-consuming, especially right after a loss, and a grieving student cannot just set it aside for class. Building a new normal takes time, sometimes years. Her point is simple and hard. There is no love without loss. If you are dealing with grief or loss, UNO counseling services are there for students, faculty, and staff, and community counseling is an option too. Watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to Comm in Ten. Once a Maverick, always a Maverick. Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=mavradio Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XfRvLxttVvUFvvPEIyOSP UNO School of Communication: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CommUNO/ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uno_schoolofcomm/ #CommInTen #Grief #InterpersonalCommunication #UNOCommunication