Grief 2 Growth

You’ve been there. Someone you care about has just lost a person they love, and you freeze. You want to say the right thing, so you say “I’m sorry for your loss,” or you say nothing at all.

In this episode, pediatric thanatologist Emilio Parga gives you something better. After 24 years of guiding children, teens, families, schools, workplaces, and athletic teams through loss, he shares simple, practical words...

What if nothing is wrong with you because your grief hasn't "resolved"? 🌱

Autism and grief is a conversation that rarely gets space, and in this episode Christopher Carazas gives it room. Chris was diagnosed as autistic in 2020, after he had already built the life he thought he was supposed to want. Soon after, he lost his marriage, his home, and his sense of who he was. Later, he lost Katie, the woman who helped him begin to heal.

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What if grief isn’t only something we survive—but something that reveals how deeply we’ve loved?

In this episode of Grief 2 Growth, I sit down with Carl Manlan, author of I Can Breathe, for a powerful conversation about grief, fatherhood, emotional healing, identity, and legacy.

Carl lost his father as a young man. Years later, becoming a father himself brought some of that grief back to the surface and raised a pro...

What if the memories of someone you love had a real place to live, and you could walk through them whenever you needed to?

In this episode, I talk with architect Alexander Josephson about how to preserve memories of a loved one, and why grief may be something you move through rather than something you get over.

Alexander is the founder of Partisans, an award-winning design studio in Toronto. While sitting in a hospita...

What if your body isn't broken — it's trying to tell you something?

In this episode of Grief 2 Growth, Brian sits down with Dr. Karyn Shanks, a physician who spent over 40 years learning what medical school never taught her — including from her own chronic illness journey. Together, they explore why grief and trauma get physically stored in the body, why our medical system struggles to treat chronic illness, and why feel...

What happens when the person you used to be doesn't exist anymore — not because they died, but because a diagnosis, a surgery, or a health crisis rewrote who you are? In this episode, Loni Fagel joins me to talk about a grief almost nobody names: the grief of losing yourself while you're still here.

Loni knows this from both sides of the therapy room. A genetic cancer mutation, a mysterious chronic illness, and a health crisis...

What if the "guardian angel" you've prayed to and the "spirit guide" you've been told to fear are the exact same presence, just described through a different lens?

In this episode, Brian sits down with Michael McAdams — a man raised in a family soaked in Pentecostal conviction who discovered he had the gift of psychometry, the ability to receive information simply by holding an object. Michael shares the story of his mother, W...

What if the strangest moments at the end of life are actually the most meaningful?

In this episode, Alexandra Grabbe joins Brian to talk about the seven months she spent caring for her 96-year-old mother, Bea, at home — and the deathbed visions that changed how she understands what happens when we die. Alexandra shares the exhaustion, the tenderness, and the moments of unexpected grace that shaped her new memoir, Seeing Joy. I...

What does an ICU doctor see when he's present at the exact moment someone dies?

Dr. Adam Rizvi has spent his career in critical care medicine, standing at hundreds of bedsides during life's most sacred transitions. Trained as a physician but grounded early in comparative religion, Adam has watched patients return from clinical death with vivid experiences medicine can't explain, felt rooms fill with light, and even witnessed a whirl...

Miist was five years old when her parents removed themselves from her life. Not through death — through choice. As she tells me in this episode, that distinction made the wound deeper, not shallower. She knew they could come back. They simply didn't.

By 28, she had a terminal cancer diagnosis and doctors telling her she had a month, maybe three. And here's the part that stopped me: she still doesn't hold any bad feeling toward...

At 18, Maya Tiwari was given a death sentence — six months to live. Instead, she spent six months alone in the Vermont woods, and came back a different person entirely. That single decision set her on a path that led through 25 years as a Vedic monk, a pioneering role bringing Ayurveda to North America, and now, a new book calling women — and men — back to a power she says we've forgotten how to hold.

In this conve...

Within two weeks of meeting John, Marcie Dean received a message she hoped was only fear: enjoy this, it's real, but he's going to die. He'd been getting the same feeling before they ever met. He was 38, healthy, five years younger than her. They chased down every explanation, found nothing, and made a different choice. They decided to love each other completely, and they made a plan. If anything happened, he would come through in ...

When someone passes by suicide, the casseroles don't come. Neither do the cards or the phone calls. Jayne Madigan's sister lives in a neighborhood with a meal train for every birth and every death. When her 24-year-old son Brandon passed, she got nothing.

That silence is its own second loss, and it's what this conversation is about.

Jayne has been living inside suicide loss for 33 years. Her uncle Ray, who was also her godfather and ...

What if the grief you're carrying reaches back further than this one lifetime? In this episode, I talk with Michelle Brock, a past life regression specialist, psychic medium, and spiritual life coach based in New York City. This one got personal. Michelle recently guided me through my own past life regression, and we open up what that experience was like, what surfaced, and what it healed. 

Michelle's path into this work began ...

You walk into a room and you know who is upset before anyone opens their mouth. You come home from a store you were only in for forty minutes and you have nothing left. Your friends bring you their pain because you are the one who can hold it, and afterward you are the one lying on the couch.

If any of that sounds like your life, this conversation is for you.

Lisa Campion has spent a career helping sensitive people stop drowning in w...

Barbra Banner didn't set out to become a medium. It found her — through flying clocks, flickering lights, and orbs that showed up in her audition tapes, all within the span of a few days. What she didn't know then was that she was stepping into a gift that had quietly run through her family for generations.

But before any of that, Barbra spent 35 years showing up for people in the worst moments of their lives — o...

This week, we lost one of the true pioneers of near-death research. PMH Atwater passed away, and as a tribute to her, I'm re-releasing the very first interview I ever recorded with her back in 2019 — before she knew who I was, before I knew what I was doing, and before I understood what a gift those three conversations would turn out to be.

If you've ever wondered what death actually feels like, whether thoughts are things, or...

What if the word "coach" isn't big enough for what grief actually needs?

In this conversation, Dina Bell-Laroche walks me through the journey that took her from a devastated 29-year-old — grieving her younger sister Tracy, who passed from a rare cancer while pregnant with her first child — to becoming one of the clearest voices in grief and loss literacy today. We talk about why she moved away from calling herself a "gri...

What if the worst day of your life is also the doorway to who you were always meant to be?

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Nico Martens for one of the most personal conversations I've had on the show. Nico and I met about 11 years ago, right after my daughter Shayna passed. Our mutual friend Gini was coming to Shayna's service, and Nico told her Shayna had already visited him. That's how our friendship began, and Nico wal...