Giving Grief Grace, a Grief Podcast for the Sandwich Generation

Scott Wiederhold spent 30 years teaching men to close deals, and he came to see that the skills behind great sales (listening, empathy, honest communication) are rarely taught to men at home. In this conversation, the author of Small Town Has Been: F@ck Silence, I Choose Happiness shares what it was like to walk through IVF beside his wife, Teresa, as the support person no one thought to check on; how one honest conversation with his father in Idaho lifted decades of weight; and Scott and Teresa chose, together, to build a full life without children. Shared for Movember...

When a beloved pet is nearing the end of life, it often happens alongside everything else: children, work, and aging parents, with far less support than a human loss would bring. Jenny Gott, founder of Animal Intuition and creator of the Emily’s Path pet hospice program, shares what she learned caring for her own rescue pitbull, Emily, and walking with families through this final chapter. Together we talk about staying present, making room for both guilt and relief, bringing children into the conversation, and honoring a pet after saying goodbye.

Takeaways...

After more than two decades in public education, Jennifer Zona found herself in what she calls "the desert": the old self gone, the new one not yet here, and no one bringing a casserole. In this conversation, she shares what sitting with hospice patients taught her about not waiting to live, how grief hides behind “I’m fine," and the moment she realized the grief she’d carried for her daughter’s imagined future was actually her own. Ask yourself, “Who do you want this for?” In this episode, Lisa also discusses her father's recent Alzheimer's diagnosis and caregiving for him.

Content note: This episode includes an open conversation about medical aid in dying (death with dignity) and the death of Tia’s father. Please listen with care.

When Tia Ma’s father, Richard Powers, was diagnosed with ALS at 82, he chose death with dignity, and then did what he did best: he planned a farewell with music, jokes, and even an intermission. Tia, a resilience coach, grief coach, and Shaolin Qigong instructor, shares the three-week countdown, the goodbye letters, and the strain of a family that grieves in very different ways. At the end of the...

Rebecca Feinglos, certified grief support specialist, founder of Grieve Leave, and host of Grief'd Up podcast, shares how losing both parents and ending her marriage led to a year-long "grief sabbatical" and a movement to make grief a normal part of life and work.

Rebecca was five when her mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma. After treatment and clinical trials, Rebecca's mom passed away when she was 13. In 2020, her dad died suddenly on the first day of COVID lockdowns, and Rebecca got the call while at work. Her...

Nicole Mixdorf spent 15 years chasing a chronic illness through 60+ healing modalities before she found the piece no doctor could give her: the grief she never let herself feel. In this episode, the transformational healer and Akashic Records practitioner shares how losing her dad just months after her premature son's birth became the doorway to her own healing. Nicole discusses how her father's love helped guide her through challenging motherhood moments after his passing. Additionally, Nicole digs into her five layers of healing (physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual), what actually happens in an Akashic Records session, and how ancestral...

This week, Lisa discusses running a half marathon on the anniversary of her mom's death and getting get news at work, and all she wants to do is pick up the phone and call her mom. Instead, she communicates with her mom through what her mom did best: playing solitaire and eating chocolate. This is a solo episode about how grief shows up in life's best moments, not just its hardest ones, and the small rituals that keep our loved ones close. Along the way, a bedtime moment with her five-year-old daughter reveals just how quietly those rituals get...

Grief and life are a marathon, not a sprint. They are full of uphills, downhills, and unexpected turns. In this episode, recorded live on the fourth anniversary of Lisa’s mother Emily's passing (and just hours after finishing a half marathon together), Lisa sits down with her running partner and friend Heather Morrison Mainville to talk about what it really looks like to carry the loss of a mother for a decade and still keep moving forward, both literally and emotionally.

Heather lost her mom, Tammy, to lung cancer ten years ago, in the middle of her ow...

There's a mistake hiding in almost every "we'll buy your house for cash" letter. These sometimes come when a family is most vulnerable as they prepare for or already have a loved one in a continuing care community. It can cost them $200,000 instead of $100,000, often after they've already given everything they have. Ryan Riggins knows this world having spent eight years as a house flipper. Eventually, he switched sides and created Riggins Strategic Solutions to help families know all their options instead of rushing to sell their home. In this episode he walks through the Medicaid five-year look-back trap...

This week, Lisa reflects on Dolly Parton's passing. Dolly was a legend, a woman whose warmth, honesty, and generosity touched millions. Her legacy teaches us about turning personal loss into lasting good. From the origin of the Imagination Library (born from her father's inability to read and write) to a heartwarming family story about a cardboard Dolly cutout that became her grandfather Honky Hartung's "girlfriend" after losing Alice, his wife of over 60 years, this episode is a celebration of how grief can inspire connection, creativity, and community impact.

Lisa shares personal family memories tied to Dolly from...

Lisa got the call about her dad this week, and instead of pretending everything's fine, she decided to talk about it because that's what this podcast has always been for.

This is a real-time, in-the-thick-of-it episode about what happens in the first days after a parent's diagnosis: the urge to jump straight into fixing and downsizing and logistics, and why Lisa is learning to slow down and just be with him instead. She talks about honoring what her dad wants (even when it's hard to hear), building out his care team from a distance, getting the legal...

In this solo episode, Lisa tunes in from her family's camp in Maine — a place where her mom's presence still lingers in the woodland gardens, the lake air, and the memories tucked into every corner. Between a midsummer garden party at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, a visit to her mom's memorial bench there, and celebrating her 97-year-old grandfather's "oldest citizen in town" award, Lisa found herself surrounded by generations of family in one place and got choked up saying goodbye, because you never really know if it's the last one.

This episode is a gentle but ho...

What happens when the person you built your life with leaves behind an unfinished manuscript? In this episode, artist and architect Ksenia Merck joins us to talk about turning grief into growth. We learn how she picked up her late husband Bill's final book, Ghost Flower, and finished it through her illustrations, transforming an act of mourning into a lifelong creative collaboration that continues past death.

Ksenia walks us through her caregiving journey. She discusses the heartbreaking loss of her father who was her biggest cheerleader. Ksenia was the primary caregiver for her...

In this solo episode, Lisa opens up about a bittersweet wave of grief triggered by an old photo memory of a day spent with her mom exploring Maine — and turns it into a gentle teaching moment on how to live with grief rather than wait for it to disappear. Leaning on a favorite passage from Melody Beattie's Journey to the Heart, she introduces the idea of grief as a personal "handicap": not something to overcome, but something to carry with grace while still choosing to live a full, joyful life.

Along the way, Lisa shares an intimate ri...

When someone you love receives a terminal diagnosis, time suddenly feels different — heavier, more precious, and impossible to plan around. In this solo episode, Lisa shares what caregiving through her mom's stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis taught her about making the most of uncertain time. She walks listeners through practical logistics like assembling a care team and navigating the shift into hospice, to the small daily choices that turned hard days into meaningful ones: a favorite ice cream, a beloved TV show, a spontaneous stop at a small-town shop. This is the caregiving guidance Lisa wishes she'd had going in, an...

Grief doesn't clock out when the workday starts. In this solo episode, Lisa draws on her own experience as an HR practitioner and a griever, from caregiving for her mother through stage 4 pancreatic cancer to losing her grandmother while sitting alone in an office. She walks through what it actually looks like to navigate grief at work, from every seat at the table.

Lisa breaks down anticipatory grief, caregiving exhaustion, and delayed grief that resurfaces around anniversaries and holidays, and offers concrete guidance for employees on communicating needs, understanding FMLA and bereavement leave, and knowing when to...

There's a particular kind of heartbreak in loving someone whose mind is fading while their body stays. Caroline Shelby, founder of Grief Clarity Labs, lived inside that heartbreak for over a decade as her mother's Alzheimer's progressed. It started with small slips that got explained away until one night at dinner, her mother looked at Caroline's college T-shirt and said, "My daughter Caroline goes to Goucher. Do you know her?"

In this conversation, Caroline and Lisa talk through what it actually felt like to become her mother's caregiver: the "Mom Calendar" her family built to share the...

Writing has been a thread running through Lisa's grief journey long before she had a name for it. In this mini-sode, she introduces "scriptotherapy" — a term coined by Suzette Henke, researched by James Pennebaker — and explores why putting pen (or pencil!) to paper is one of the most accessible, intimate tools we have for processing loss.

Lisa shares why writing is helpful because it externalizes feelings, reduces stress, and brings clarity. She reflects on journaling nightly while caring for her mom, and opens up a toolbox of ways writing can take shape: morning pages, letters, postcards, post-it note...

What does a Zanzibar vacation have in common with a terminal diagnosis? More than you'd think.

In this solo episode, Lisa reflects on a pattern she noticed during her recent trip to Tanzania — every single day for five days, there was one more thing to finish before vacation could really begin. Sound familiar? That "one more thing" mindset doesn't just follow us on trips. It follows us through caregiving, grief, and even into our final days.

When a family friend recently received a difficult prognosis, it brought Lisa back to her mother Emily's stage four pa...

What does it look like to give yourself permission — really, truly, no-guilt permission to rest, restore, and fill your own cup? In this special field note episode, Lisa calls in live from her balcony in Zanzibar, Tanzania. 

In this intimate, meditative episode, Lisa leads listeners through a guided visualization with waves, warm sand, a fancy drink with a little umbrella and gently names what so many in the Sandwich Generation know too well: when the quiet finally comes, sometimes so does the grief.

Lisa opens up about her own struggle to fully receive rest without her...

In this field-recorded episode, Lisa broadcasts live from rural Tanzania during a work trip with her day job with a water nonprofit. Visiting communities at different stages of clean water access, she finds an unexpected throughline: grief, love, and motherhood look remarkably similar across cultures and continents — and joy and grief can coexist in the very same moment.

What You'll Hear:

Grief doesn't wait for a convenient moment. Sometimes it finds you mid-walk, while packing for a trip, or when you are stressed, missing the woman who would have been your first call.

In this solo episode, Lisa shares what she's learned about grieving her mother, Emily, while still choosing to live fully. She discusses the tradition she's not ready to bring back yet, the ordinary moments where absence hits hardest, and the quiet, unexpected way her mom showed up while unpacking her work bag.

If you've lost your mom and wondered why her absence feels...

What do you do when grief meets a house full of craft supplies? For Kenya McCarthy, creator of @chronicallykenya and @k.carthydesigns, the answer was to start making things, sharing the process online, and building a strong grief community so people wouldn't feel alone. 

Kenya's story is layered: she was already navigating a multiple sclerosis diagnosis when her mom Nikki suffered a sudden stroke. Kenya traveled cross-country from California to Virginia to spend the last nine days of her mom's life by her side. When it came time to pack up Nikki's home — a woman who could, as...

She feels 45. She has been all around the US. She planned a month-long trip through England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1971 with no cell phones, no credit cards, and a 9-year-old in tow, and she thought nothing of it. She lost her first husband Vincent to lung cancer when he was just 41, raised her daughter Tammy on her own, and kept going. She still walks the halls of her building every day, still does puzzles, and loves Maine lobster.

Lucy DeRoche of Yarmouth, Maine turned 100 on May 20, 2026 and she is here to show us what a fully lived...

Have you ever carried grief you didn't have a name for? Today's guest, Dawn Michele Jackson, a registered nurse, bestselling author, and Advanced Grief Recovery Method Specialist, spent decades watching patients' unprocessed emotions show up as physical illness. When her own life was fraught with an alcoholic father, an abusive boyfriend, and she later experienced a painful divorce, and the eventual loss of her dad, Dawn knew life didn't have to be so challenging. She learned how to process her grief through an action-based program that didn't just take the edge off, it changed how she viewed the earlier...

What if the most profound life lessons you ever received came from the dead? In this episode of Giving Grief Grace, Lisa sits down with Mary McGreevy, the creator of @tipsfromdeadpeople and author of an upcoming HarperCollins book (August 2027), to explore what over 10,000 obituaries have taught her about grief, imperfection, and what it means to live a life well-lived.

Mary shares the origin story behind her viral social media account, born from her mother's brief career as an obituary editor and Mary's own childhood fascination with the stories hiding in the back pages of the newspaper. Now...

One year. 52 episodes. 62 countries and territories. 454 cities. Thank you for a year of grace, gratitude, and being part of this grief journey. 

In this special solo anniversary episode, Lisa Hartung pauses to celebrate what Giving Grief Grace has become. She reflects honestly on the time commitment, what it gave back, and who the show supports.

Lisa shares the origin story behind the podcast: the week her firstborn arrived was the same week her mother, Emily, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a year to live. What followed was a year of caring for a n...

What if the simplest thing you did today — curling up the corners of your mouth — could make you feel even 1% better? In this solo episode, host Lisa Hartung laces up her running shoes and shares a reflection born from the road: smiles are free, they cost nothing, and they might be exactly what a stranger needs today.

Lisa talks about the science behind smiling, how the physical act of smiling, even a forced one, can shift your emotional state. She shares her personal mission to make at least one TSA agent smile every time she passes through airp...

According to A Haven, one in five children will experience the death of someone close to them before they graduate high school. That means grief is already in your classroom, your neighborhood, and your faith/athletic/artistic community, whether you can see it or not. Many well-meaning people surrounding that grieving child have no idea how to show up.

In this final episode of our A Haven mini-series, Lisa sits down with Carrie Silver, Clinical Director of A Haven, a free child and family grief center in Exton, Pennsylvania, to talk about the village it...

Grief doesn't arrive at the door of a family and touch everyone the same way. One child draws. Another runs. Another goes silent. And somewhere in the middle of it all is a caregiver trying to hold everyone together while barely holding it together themselves.

In this episode, Lisa sits down again with Carrie Silver of A Haven, a free child and family grief center in Exton, Pennsylvania, to talk about what it really looks like when a whole family grieves. We explore why siblings can experience the same loss so differently, and why research shows that...

Easter has a way of cracking grief wide open. In this solo episode, Lisa shares a raw and vulnerable reflection on how the season of resurrection intersects with loss.

From waking up before dawn in a small Maine town to sing "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today" on a hillside with her mom, to attending Duke Chapel's sunrise service the year after her mother Emily passed, Lisa walks us through the traditions that keep her mother's memory alive. She also shares about the moment a hymn lyric brought her to her knees, and the friend who held...

What happens when a man is diagnosed with a disease the world has decided belongs to women? Jake Messier, known as @theguywithstage4breastcancer, is living that answer every single day. After a stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis in 2023 progressed to metastatic disease in August 2025, Jake turned his 30-year marketing career into a mission: building the largest male breast cancer community in the world and refusing to let men suffer in silence.

In this conversation, Jake opens up about finding a lump while putting on deodorant and brushing it off because no one had ever...

What do you do with your grief when you've spent 25 years as a nurse helping families through their hardest moments and then overnight, you become the family in need? That's the journey Kelly Edmondson found herself on three years ago when she lost her oldest son, Darius, to epilepsy in his sleep. Kelly shares how that loss became the catalyst for Timely Presence, a year-long grief support service built on the belief that grief outlasts sympathy, and so should the support.

Drawing on her nursing background in trauma, ICU, and the ER, her...

What do you say when a child asks, "Is Mommy coming back?" This week, Lisa sits down with Carrie Silver, Clinical Director of A Haven, a nonprofit child and family grief center in Exton, Pennsylvania, to explore one of the most important and often-avoided conversations we can have with the children in our lives: talking honestly about death. 

Carrie brings both professional expertise and compassion as she walks us through why using real language like the words died, death, dead, is one of the greatest gifts we can give a grieving child. Softer p...

In this episode, Lisa sits down with her grandfather, Alton "Honky" Hartung who recently turned 97 and is still living alone and driving! Honky is a living piece of American history who has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

Born and raised on a farm in Manchester, Maine, Honky takes us back to a simpler time, describing what it was like working as a meat cutter at the local market. He shares stories of traveling around the US with his wife of 66 years, Alice Williams Hartung. His most prized possession is his 1929 Model A Ford - tune...

This week, we welcome back Melanie Ezell — writer, mother, yogi, and surfer from the North Shore of Oʻahu — to celebrate the release of her new book, INHERITED: A Life Without a Cure. Diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer at a young age, Melanie has shared honestly and been a luminous voice on grief, mortality, and the art of being present.

Melanie unpacks the layered meaning behind the title INHERITED. From the BRCA1 mutation passed down from her father to the cultural and spiritual messages she absorbed about shame, worthiness, and produ...

In this bittersweet finale of the Ash Rose Project series, host Lisa Hartung and artist/Executive Director of the Ash Rose Foundation, Ian McCartor close out their 30-day grief journey with a conversation full of hope, whimsy, and renewal. The conversation was recorded, fittingly, on Ash Wednesday.

Week 4's theme is Looking Toward the Future: Continuing the Legacy and Embracing Hope. As Ian puts the finishing touches on a one-of-a-kind portrait made with Emily Hartung's ashes, Lisa reflects on what this project has meant for her healing and what she hopes it will mean for others.

In Week 3 of the Ash Rose Project mini-series, host Lisa Hartung continues her 30-day grief journey with Ian McCartor of the Ash Rose Foundation.

This week centers on finding meaning in the present moment. Lisa and Ian discuss integrating remembrance and creative exploration from the first two weeks into a grounded sense of healing, hope, and transformation.

Lisa reflects on what it has felt like to send her mother’s ashes to be incorporated into a memorial portrait, and how the guided journaling and weekly conversations have helped her feel closer to her mom. Allowing he...

In Week 2 of the Ash Rose Project mini-series, Lisa continues her personal grief journey with Ian McCartor, Founder of the Ash Rose Foundation. They move from honoring the past in Week 1 to processing grief in the present through creativity.

As Ian begins sketching the portrait in her mother’s honor using her ashes, this week’s conversation explores what it means to actively create while grieving.

Lisa reflects on the emotions that have surfaced since beginning the project: sadness, gratitude, loneliness, and the tension between letting go and holding on. Together, she and Ian discuss how...

In Week 1 of the Ash Rose Project mini-series, Ian McCartor of the Ash Rose Foundation and Lisa Hartung begin the most emotionally intense part of the journey: honoring the past.

This episode centers on reflection. Of memories, values, rituals, and the everyday moments that continue to shape us after loss. As Ian begins the artistic process of creating an ash portrait, Lisa walks through the first week of journaling prompts designed to deepen connection with her mother and gently “till the soil” of grief.

Through vivid storytelling, Lisa shares cherished memories of painting with her moth...