We’re delighted to highlight Coffee Talk #55 from last February. We hope these fivevphenomenal writers/readers/humans and their stories are just what your heart needs today. If you missed the live Coffee Talk, if you’d like to hear their voices again, we bring you Anne Richardson, Beth Bornstein Dunnington, Blair Hurley, J’aime Morrison, and Mary Mandeville.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

Their next 30day writing group, Write Your Grief Out, is returning in October. Love to have you in our next writing group!

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, is available wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

We love sharing this Coffee Talk from December

If you missed it or want to relisten, here it is. The readers all brought the best heart medicine.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page:

Their next 30day writing group, Write Your Grief Out, is coming in October! It’s a beautiful way to have a new experience with your grief and to be in community with

You can email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir,

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Ashmeeta openly shares about being widowed and having her mom, whom she was close with, die. She talks about supporting her kids through their grief, how she both gave them space to grieve as well as keeping eyes on them, describing herself as an Eagle Mama.

The grief support group Ashmeeta mentions is Grief Share which can be found all over. https://www.griefshare.org/

Ashmeeta Rama Madhav is an educator, resilience and grief support advocate/expert, entrepreneur, author, and lifelong learner. She has been intimately acquainted with grief since her early twenties, having experienced miscarriage, rejection, and the loss of her parents and husband, which exposed her to a range of profound emotions. She is the founder of Growth StoryHub; an organization created to inspire and empower Individuals who have lost a loved one and are feeling stuck, overwhelmed, numb, and vulnerable. At the heart of her book, WHAT’S YOUR STORY is her passion for helping others and sharing her experiences. Ashmeeta's desire is for others to recognize that profound loss need not signify the end of one's story; rather, it can mark the commencement of a new and meaningful chapter. Her story is one of love, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, growth, and self-discovery.

You can connect with Ashmeeta here: https://storyoutellyourself.com/

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duowho talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, is available wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Beth reads a piece about a beloved friend who died by suicide almost four decades ago. She talks about long term grief, the importance of writing our stories, the importance of sharing our stories.

Beth leads the Big Island Writers’ Workshop in Hawai’i and in cities throughout the U.S, and since 2020, also on Zoom. Beth’s mission is to empower women to find their stories and get them out in the world. She likes to think of it as “mining for stories.” A great joy is facilitating writing retreats in Hawaii at the Volcano, and most recently in the Cloud-Forest. In 2025, Beth will be leading a retreat in Scotland. Her writing is published in a number of anthologies, literary journals, and news media sites, including Huff Post, Scary Mommy, iHeart Media, and others. She’s a book editor, a performer, and a stage director, and loves directing writers’ performing their pieces as acting monologues in her “Performing The Story” platform. Beth spent a number of years as a script writer for a dozen animated TV series including Batman, Jem and The Holograms, and Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures (for which she and the writing team won an Emmy). She’s proud to have created the first female Transformer in the “Transformers” cartoon. Find out more about Beth at:bethbornsteindunnigton.com.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, is available wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you for liking and sharing the podcast!

Gina talks about the complexities of grief, how grief is the great equalizer, and how we can be clumsy and awkward together.

She shares how she wrote her book, Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting go: a Modern Guide to Navigating Loss. She wanted to reach more people than she could in her practice and make grief work accessible to many. Her book is an amazing resource that we highly recommend.

Gina is a licensed psychotherapist, mental health educator, and media consultant in New York City. In practice for nearly two decades, she has helped thousands of people seeking treatment for trauma, grief, as well as challenging life experiences and transitions.As a grief therapist, she wanted to find a way to educate people about the grief experience to help the experience to be less debilitating for the long term.  With that intention, she wrote the book, Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss (Hachette), which has been quoted in international publications, such as Forbes and USA Today, as well as NPR. Gina is working on her next book, a book that will explore friendship loss and the importance of sustaining and nurturing friendship.

https://ginamoffa.com

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

Their next 30day writing group, Write Your Grief Out, is coming in October.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, is available wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Robin reads an essay that was published in Narratively about becoming a widow while she was in the process of getting divorced. Her essay opens up questions about how we navigate griefs that don’t fit in any boxes. Robin’s almost ex-husband had a girlfriend and they were planning on getting married, but his unexpected death changed everything. Robin shares how she included the girlfriend in as many decisions as possible, how she acknowledged that the girlfriend’s heart was the broken heart. Robin even bought a burial plot for the girlfriend next to her husband.

Robin Eileen Bernstein is a writer in New York City with bylines in The New York Times (including the Modern Love column), The Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine, Salon, The Daily News, Newsday, Weekly Humorist, Narratively, Next Avenue and more. Several of her pieces explore her unusual experience of being widowed while getting divorced. She's also working on a memoir about growing up 1970s Rockaway, NY, when she was a quiet teen who pursued her unlikely dream of being a drummer in a rock-n-roll band. An excerpt was a shortlisted finalist in Craft Magazine’s 2023 Setting Sketch Challenge.  Robin has read her essays aloud at storytelling events in New York City and beyond, is an award-winning speechwriter, and was twice a first-round judge in the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition. In the visual arts, her figure drawings have been published in Persimmon Tree and Linea.

More at robineileenbernstein.com.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community. If you’d like to learn more about their grief writing group that happens in October, please go to: https://writeyourgriefout.thinkific.com/

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love is available wherever you buy your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, or if you read it from the library, you can review it on those sites. We deeply appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you for liking and sharing the podcast!

Kelly talks about her range of grief from divorce, to the death of her kids’ father, her dad’s death and more. In this engaging, funny, tender conversation Kelly offers fabulous suggestions, like instead of asking someone “How are you?” she asks, “How are you right this second?”

After 22 years of fulltime freelancing, Kelly K. James made the decision to go “in-house” at a small company — and wrote about the transition from freelancer to corporate employee. The Book That (Almost) Got Me Fired: How I (Barely) Survived a Year in Corporate America is Kelly’s first memoir, an entertaining, honest account what to do (and what not) when you make that corporate leap in midlife.

A former attorney, she has been writing for a living, as a fulltime freelancer, and more recently, a corporate content writer, for more than 20 years. Currently she writes legal content by day and health/wellness, fitness, psychology, and career-related articles by night. Her freelance work has appeared in more than 65 major online and print publications including Huffington Post, The Girlfriend, NextTribe, Next Avenue,  Chicago Health, Vibrant Life, and many other markets.

You can find out more about Kelly at http://www.kellykjames.net, https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/kellykjames/https://kellykjames.contently.com, https://kellykjames.contently.com

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community.

Their next 30day writing group, Write Your Grief Out, is coming in October. More here: https://writeyourgriefout.thinkific.com

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, is available wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

We’re delighted to share our recent Coffee Talk with these phenomenal writers/readers: Robert McBride, Lucy Filppu, Ona Gritz, Heather Morris, and Anne Gudger.

If you missed it or want to relisten, here it is. The readers all brought the best heart medicine.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page:

Coffee and Grief Community.

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love, is available wherever you get your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, you can review it on those sites. We so appreciate you taking the time to review Anne’s memoir.

We’d love you to like and share the podcast!

Lisa Keefauver shares insights and compassion along with humor. She talks about the importance of sharing her husband’s life, not just his death. She encourages grief supporters to keep showing up for our grievers and to remember it’s not anyone’s job to fix them. Grievers aren’t broken. There’s nothing to fix.

Her fabulous book: GRIEF IS A SNEAKY BITCH: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss is out today! It’s one to own and gift. We love it as a grief resource.

Lisa Keefauver is a grief activist. Her wisdom on the topic of grief and loss are rooted in the decades she spent as a social worker, narrative therapist, non-profit co-founder, clinical supervisor and more. Her insights on grief are also embodied from personal losses, including the death of her husband when she was just 40 years old. Lisa's grief advocacy has inspired her to create and host the top-rated podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch; serve as an adjunct professor of Loss and Grief at the University of Texas at Austin; act as an organizational consultant to facilitate grief-smart organizations; write/appear as a thought leader across media platforms and as a keynote speaker. Watch her popular TEDx Talk, Why Knowing More About Grief Can Make it Suck Less. You can pre-order her heavily anticipated book, Grief Is A Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss now. It arrives in bookstores today, June 4.

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page:

Coffee and Grief Community. If you’d like to learn more about their grief writing group that happens in October, please go to: https://writeyourgriefout.thinkific.com/

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love is available wherever you buy your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, or if you read it from the library, you can review it on those sites. We deeply appreciate you taking the time.

Please like and share the podcast!

Helen shares her wisdom and heart in this deep and wide conversation where she reminds us to have compassion for ourselves and others, where she reminds us that healing can come from holding each other with the same vulnerability we’d like to be held, where she reminds us everyone can make a difference.

Helen Marie is a registered integrative therapist in the UK with a Post Graduate Diploma in Psychotherapy and Counseling from Regent’s University, London and a member of the BACP. She also holds a certificate as a Clinical Trauma Practitioner. Her new book Choose You: gentle words to help you heal and grow is just out. It’s a gorgeous book we hope you’ll buy. You can read more about her book on her website, and follow her on Instagram.

https://www.helenmariepsychotherapy.com/

https://www.instagram.com/h.e.l.e.n.m.a.r.i.e/

Thank you for letting us be in your ears.

Coffee, Grief and Gratitude is a created by Anne Gudger and Maria Gibson, a mom/daughter duo who talk about grief.

You can find them on Facebook at Coffee and Grief. Please join their private Facebook page: Coffee and Grief Community. If you’d like to learn more about their grief writing group that happens in October, please go to: https://writeyourgriefout.thinkific.com/

You can also email Anne and Maria at: [email protected]

Anne’s memoir, THE FIFTH CHAMBER, a memoir of loss and love is available wherever you buy your books.

Please review THE FIFTH CHAMBER on Amazon and Goodreads. No matter where you bought your copy, or if you read it from the library, you can review it on those sites. We deeply appreciate you taking the time.

Please like and share the podcast!