I Swear on My Mother’s Grave Dana Black

Welcome to 2024! I miss you and even though the podcast has officially ended, I still have so much great content you haven’t heard. So how about a little bonus episode to kick off the year!

Jesse Moss is the rockstar Director of Marketing at Experience Camps, an award-winning national nonprofit that transforms the lives of grieving children through summer camp programs and year-round initiatives. She’s in charge of developing strategies and content to create a more grief-sensitive culture and advocate for grieving children. She's also the voice and creator behind the Experience Camps TikTok (over 45 million views and counting!). 

In this episode, we talk about the death of Jesse’s brother Jordan to suicide when she was just 22. You’ll also hear how Jesse’s complicated relationship with her mother eventually turned into deep love (and funny emoji's!) for the last five years of her mom’s life.

We also talk about Experience Camps’ free summer youth programs, and how working there has turned Jesse’s “loss into leadership.” (Don’t steal her tagline!)

Have you signed up for the podcast newsletter yet? Sign up on our website, and make sure to follow us on Instagram. 

Links mentioned in the episode:

Experience Camps Homepage
Experience Camps TikTok
GRIEF SUCKS Homepage
GRIEF SUCKS Instagram and TikTok
Experience Camps is in Vogue!
Daisy's episode on this podcast

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Welcome to I Swear on My Mother’s Grave and the finale episode of Season 3. Yay! 3 seasons, baby!



I don’t want to bury the lead…so, I also want to welcome you to the end of my podcast journey with all of you. This is it, friends. I am turning off the mic after this episode, but I might release a special compilation of conversations you haven’t heard yet at some point…so don’t unsubscribe forever!



It’s hard for me to say goodbye to you all, and to this show because it has changed my life, AND this is the best community of listeners and now friends, in the world.



But sometimes things end. Naturally. And that’s how this feels, it feels like the right time. And the right moment in MY grief journey to step away.



So, since goodbyes are hard, it just felt fitting to end this journey talking about preparing to say goodbye to those we love, and to share with you all what I learned about sitting with the dying as I approached my Nana’s death this past summer.



In this episode, you are going to get to hear an excerpt of a conversation I had with Uma Girish, a spiritual mentor and author, who helped me prepare to say goodbye to my 96 year old Nana. I will tell you what those 4 days sitting bedside with her were like as Uma’s advice kept rumbling thru my mind, and childhood memories of both my mother, and my Nana resurfaced…and how maybe this entire podcast journey was leading me to this moment.



Sign up for all the latest news around this podcast, yearly retreats and see behind the scenes content on our website. Follow us on Instagram. 



Links mentioned in the episode:


Uma Girish is a Spiritual Mentor and Author: https://umagirish.com/
 

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Today’s guest is a friend I met on TikTok. Yep! Mary McGreevy, hosts the Tips from Dead People page on TikTok, where she earnestly, and respectfully curates and personally reads unique obituaries from submissions she receives from all over the world. She has collected stacks of obituaries for years, and has now built quite an online following!



Mary and I connected this summer around the time my beloved 96 year old Nana, my mom’s mom, was dying. Through our conversations on and off the mic, Mary helped me write my Nana’s obituary by providing some beautiful examples of other obituaries she has loved, and reminding me to focus on the little things in life.



And you will get to hear me read my Nana's obituary live on the mic. :)



Like me, Mary believes “That a well-told story never fails to deliver wisdom, humor, and even a bit of advice on how to live the good life.”



Sign up for all the latest news around this podcast, yearly retreats and see behind the scenes content on our website. Follow us on Instagram. 



Links From This Episode:


Mary McGreevy's TikTok account “Tips from Dead People” 
Obituary Tips 

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Mitchell Fain was born a natural storyteller. He is an incredible actor/comedian/circus performer who grew up in a Jewish home in Rhode Island and now lives in Chicago.



In this episode, we will talk about how his bingo-gambling mother never cleaned her stove, lived on Winston cigarettes and Oreo cookies, and taught her children to lie to the electric company when bills were due. She also married an alcoholic, Mitchell’s father.



We will talk about how his mother lived with undiagnosed depression for most of her life, and how everything wrong with us IS our parent’s fault … but it is OUR responsibility to fix it.



Oh, and Katharine Hepburn will make an appearance as well!



Sign up for all the latest news around this podcast, yearly retreats and see behind the scenes content on our website. Follow us on Instagram.



And thank you to Chloe Baldwin for the social media support.



Links mentioned in the episode:


Mitchell will want you to listen to “Guilty” with Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibbs after listening to this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phh9B1-4EYs 

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Jessica Guthrie is a millennial, only child of a single mother living with Alzheimer’s. She likes to say that she has made an active, conscious choice to care for her mother in the last 8 years, at first commuting from Texas to Virginia, but now living with her mother as her full-time caregiver since 2019.



In this episode, Jessica and I talk about the definition of caregiving and what it means to her now. We also chat about how Jessica always thinks, “What would my mom have done for me?” if their roles were reversed, how hard dating is as a caregiver, advocating for good care for our loved ones, and how dignity in caregiving isn’t about you—it’s all about the other person.



As Jessica likes to say to her mom, “I got you!” And I hope after listening today, and following Jessica on Instagram at Career & Caregiving Collide, you will feel like she has you too, as she spends a lot of her life now educating others about what she has learned caring for her own mother living with dementia.



Sign up for all the latest news around this podcast, yearly retreats and see behind the scenes content on our website. Follow us on Instagram. 



And thank you to Chloe Baldwin for the social media support.



Links mentioned in the episode:


Follow Jessica on Instagram @CareerCaregivingCollide 
Jessica Guthrie’s homepage 






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The one and only, Barri Leiner Grant is here. Barri is the Chief Grief Officer and a Certified Grief Coach with The Memory Circle, a space and place to be with your grief.



When Barri’s own beautiful mother died in 1993, there were no resources available to help her family through the pain. Nobody said grief or grieving. She knew motherless daughters deserved better. So, she created and opened a door where there wasn't one before and eventually started The Memory Circle. 



Barri said “I want grief to be normalized. It needs a better place to live in modern day society. Let’s work on becoming more grief literate in our daily lives.”



In this episode, we chat about her mother’s final days in a beach chair eating plums, writing to the dead, how to reframe big milestones in our lives, and menopause.



Sign up for all the latest news around this podcast, yearly retreats and see behind the scenes content on our website. Follow us on Instagram. 



And thank you to Chloe Baldwin for the social media support.



Links mentioned in the episode 


The Memory Circle - Barri’s organization 
Purchase Barri’s “Remember and Reflect” Deck 
David Kessler’s book “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief”  
Claire Bidwell Smith’s book “Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief” 
Steve Leder’s book “The Beauty of What Remains” 
Hope Edelman’s book “Motherless Daughters” and others


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