Grief, Gratitude & The Gray in Between

It was never in Sarah Vosburgh’s plan to be an author or to write a memoir. As a busy mom, wife, and psychologist, she always saw her life as full (sometimes overfull). But in the dark of night, memories knocked on her brain, compelling her to commit them first to paper, then to bits and bytes. Sarah is a member of the International Memoir Writers Association and San Diego Writers, Ink. Her work has been published in A Year in Ink and numerous volumes of Shaking the Tree: brazen. short. memoir. A native New Englander, she now lives in San Diego with her husband, her daughter, her granddog, and a most extraordinary feline.

Website: www.SarahVosburgh.com

Reach Kendra Rinaldi on her website for questions about being a guest https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/

Episode Highlights:

• Growing Up as an Only Child: Sarah reflects on her New England upbringing and her complex relationship with her mother—a brilliant, intellectually attentive, yet physically distant and anxious woman whose anxiety was largely managed by Sarah's father until his passing.
• Late-Twenties Loss & Red Flags: Losing her father in her late 20s, followed by her mother's quick remarriage two years later to a partner where subtle signs of neglect and unexplained physical injuries began surfacing alongside early cognitive decline.
• Systemic Roadblocks: The immense isolation of trying to intervene when her mother was driving dangerously on the left side of the road, only to encounter dismissive responses from physicians, the DMV, and local social workers.
• The Car Key Breakthrough: A brilliant compromise suggested by Sarah's husband: disconnecting the car battery and placing a note inside the compartment for mechanics, while allowing her mother to keep her keys in her nightstand drawer so she retained her feeling of autonomy .
• The Glass Nightstand "Hack": How Sarah's husband helped her process nocturnal grief ruminations by placing a custom glass top on her nightstand with a Sharpie so she could write down late-night memories without turning on the lights.
• A Family Audiobook Collaboration: Crafting her memoir through San Diego Writers Inc. and recording the audiobook alongside her daughters—with her older daughter reading the "younger Sarah" passages, her younger daughter reading the poetry, and Sarah reading the present-day caregiving chapters.
• The Snow Incident & Memory Care: The heartbreaking turning point when her mother wandered out into the memory care gardens in her pajamas and bare feet on a December morning to watch the snow fall, leading to an abrupt transfer to a locked psych unit.
• "Who Will Name the Bees?": The origin of the book's title from their final Mother's Day visit, where her mother remembered Sarah's plans to start beekeeping with 40,000–50,000 bees and innocently asked in childlike wonder, "How will you find names for them all?" .
• A Message of Solidarity: Sarah's core encouragement to anyone caretaking a parent with dementia: "You are not alone" in navigating this amateur, isolating business

Kate Saint Clair is a Human Intuition Expert, Psychic Medium, and Intuitive Advocate who has been teaching intuition as a practical, embodied skill since 2007. Born highly intuitive, Kate found strength through her challenging childhood with her connection to the spiritual world.

Kate devotes her work to normalizing intuition and helping people trust their inner guidance with clarity and confidence. Through her books, live programs, and communities, Kate supports individuals in understanding how intuition communicates.

Known for her grounded, validating approach and direct insight, Kate empowers people to move from self-doubt to self-trust and live guided from the inside out.

Contact Kate: https://www.katesaintclair.com/

Contact Kendra Rinaldi: https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/

Episode Highlights: 

• Survival Intuition in Montana: Growing up in the open landscape of Great Falls, Montana, naturally developed her baseline survival intuition to read people and energy for safety.
• The Four Main "Clairs": Breaking down the mechanics of intuition—clairvoyance (clear seeing), clairsentience (clear feeling), clairaudience (clear hearing), and claircognizance (clear knowing).
• Spirit Guides & Childhood Experiences: Seeing spirits as a young child and coming to realize her childhood sightings of "black cougars" were spirit guides preparing her for independence.
• The Colorado Park Turning Point: Hearing clear inner guidance to pick up her two-year-old daughter when followed by a stranger, prompting her to seek formal intuitive mentorship.
• Generational Intuition & Lineage: "Coming out of the closet" to her father about her work as a medium, only to discover he had experienced intuitive guidance his whole life—proving we all come from intuitive lineages.
• Active Dialogue with Guidance: Learning to train your intuition to hold an active, conscious dialogue with your birth guide rather than reacting passively or out of fear.
• Energetic Protection in Grief: Understanding that deep grief shrinks the aura, making energetic hygiene, firm boundaries, and asking angels or God for protection vital self-care tools.
• End-of-Life Family Harmony: How each family member brought a unique, embodied role during her grandmother's 5-day end-of-life transition.
• Normalizing Intuition for Children: Validating children's night terrors or spiritual sightings with curious, calm questions and establishing clear energetic boundaries in the home

Joanne Redding grew up in Brooklyn and eventually made her way to Manhattan, then the suburbs of Westchester County, and finally Greenwich, CT. She holds a bachelor’s degree in French and a master’s in finance from New York University and is a certified Master Gardener with a degree in landscape design. Over her career, she has worked at an airport and an engineering firm, spent over fifteen years on Wall Street, and run her own landscape design business. The proud mom of two amazing young adults, Joanne shares her home in the New York City area with her two elderly but endlessly loved dogs. For more information, visit https://joannereddingauthor.com/

Checkout https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/ for more  information on coaching with Kendra Rinaldi or being a guest on the show.

Show Highlights & Themes:

• Childhood Loss & Hidden Truths: Joanne shares the sudden death of her father when she was six years old, and how the full truth surrounding his passing was kept hidden from her until she reached college. That's when she found out her dad had died by suicide.
• Growing Up in a "House of Pretend": Navigating an environment surrounded by generational family secrets, where grief was buried and unexpressed among family members.
• Intuitive Coping & Wall Street: How books, reading, and later entering the male-dominated world of Wall Street in the 80s and 90s served as intuitive ways to process her loss and seek connection.
• From Wall Street to Landscape Design to Author: Joanne’s multi-faceted journey of lifelong learning—from financial markets to landscape architecture, language study, and ultimately publishing her memoir.
• The Vulnerability of Writing a Memoir: Overcoming the feeling of "walking naked in Times Square" by sharing raw personal memories, letting go of expectations, and managing feedback.
• Parenting & Breaking Generational Cycles: Reflecting on how childhood trauma influenced her approach to motherhood, navigating overcompensation, and later caretaking for her mother.
• Honoring Children in Their Grief: Joanne’s crucial advice for adults to see and acknowledge grieving children, emphasizing that kids experience loss deeply even when they don't express it like adults

Gyani Richards is a grief counselor and uses mindfulness, somatic inquiry, and explorative dialogue to help clients navigate the land of loss. His personal experience into this field began quite early when his father died when he was 13. Shortly thereafter, he began exploring meditation and the great wisdom traditions of the world, practices which have defined the last 40 years of his life. His work is based on the observation that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a life-changing opportunity to be discovered. He has an MA in Counseling Psychology and is a Certified Grief Educator. www.ourgriefpath.com

Episode Highlights:

• Early Loss at 13: Losing his father to cancer at a young age without formal counseling, experiencing a sudden "grief bomb" that left his family unmoored.
• Seeking the "Deathless": Turning to yoga, meditation, and world wisdom traditions at 17 to find spiritual grounding and something that death could not take away.
• The Nuance of Sibling Loss: Facing the "out-of-order loss" of his younger brother Pete 40 years later, using decades of mindfulness to hold a larger container for his grief.
• Aikido & "Relaxing Under Pressure": Applying 20+ years of Japanese martial arts to learn how to turn toward incoming pressure rather than defaulting to fight, flee, or freeze.
• Somatic Inquiry ("Issues in the Tissues"): Working with grief as a visceral, head-to-toe somatic experience held deep within physical tissues and the breath.
• The "Grief Garden": Viewing grief as seeds in a human garden, helping clients clear out old belief "weeds" and tend to what wants to grow.
• Friendly Curiosity: Approaching painful emotions with spacious, kind attention so frozen grief can naturally thaw and transform.
• A Sacred Opportunity: Reclaiming the perspective that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a sacred opportunity to be embraced

En este episodio tu  anfitriona, Kendra Rinaldi, comparte una guía práctica y compasiva sobre cómo navegar el trauma y el duelo colectivo tras el terremoto en Colombia, ofreciendo herramientas de autorregulación del sistema nervioso y validación emocional.

En este episodio aprenderás sobre:

• La ciencia de la meditación y la presencia: Kendra comparte su experiencia tras meditar 61 días continuos y asistir al taller sobre la ciencia de la meditación ipor la especialista Natalia Varela con los sistemas de Neurochange solution de Dr. Joe Dispenza
• Un momento de presencia guiado: Una práctica inicial centrada en escuchar, sentir el suelo y colocar la mano izquierda sobre el corazón para conectar con la respiración.
• Procesar el dolor y trauma a la distancia: Kendra reflexiona sobre el terremoto del 10 de agosto en Colombia y el impacto emocional de presenciar la tragedia de su país natal desde el exterior.
• Diferencia entre duelo y trauma: Cómo distinguir la pérdida de la cotidianidad, de la tranquilidad y de las vidas humanas (duelo) frente a la hipervigilancia, el insomnio y las memorias intrusivas (trauma).
• Validación sin límites de tiempo: La importancia de recordar que no existe una "forma correcta" o un tiempo límite para procesar el duelo.
• Herramientas prácticas de presencia y autorregulación:Respiración consciente: La herramienta más rápida y efectiva para retornar al presente.
  Grounding (Conexión a tierra): Hacer contacto físico con el suelo, pasto o cemento para nivelar el sistema nervioso y recordar que la tierra nos sostiene.
  Movimiento corporal: Caminar, estirarse o bailar para liberar las emociones y el trauma que quedan atrapados en el cuerpo.
  Meditación y silencio consciente: Prácticas para calmar el estado de alerta constante.
  Nombrar las emociones: Escribir o decir en voz alta lo que sientes (miedo, tristeza, alivio) sin juzgarlo, para quitarle el control sobre ti.
• Acompañamiento profesional: Cuándo y por qué es fundamental acudir a terapia, tanatólogos o acompañantes de duelo cuando el trauma interfiere con la vida cotidiana.
• La dualidad de las emociones: La capacidad de sostener dos emociones opuestas a la vez (como gratitud y duelo, o alegría y tristeza) sin sentir culpa.

Glenn Sturm is a 17-year survivor, a 4-time bestselling author with 30+ years military service. He is a law graduate from University of Florida (honors) (Order of the Coif) and a compelling storyteller who connects with audiences in crisis. Glenn was diagnosed with Advanced T-Cell Lymphoma on January 21, 2009. He has been on continuous oral and IV chemotherapy since then, and his treatment has spanned more than 6,000 days. He has assembled his own Integrated Cancer Team.

He is a best-selling author of Cancer Set Me Free, and a photographer. His first novel, The Green Murphy Succession, is scheduled for release in April. It is a multigenerational, multifamily historical fiction series of six books. He is also an umbraphile, chasing and photographing eclipses worldwide. He has published two eclipse photography books, Syzygies and The Great American Eclipse (2017), both part of the Syzygies series. His next eclipse photography book is scheduled to release in February in both English and Spanish.

Visit him online at www.glennsturm.com

Contact Kendra Rinaldi for coaching information or to be a guest on the podcast.

https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/

Episode Highlights and Themes:

• A Terminal Diagnosis Turned Life Sentence to Live: In 2009, high-powered corporate attorney and military veteran Glenn Sturm received an advanced T-cell lymphoma diagnosis and was given just two to three years to live. Seventeen years and over 6,000 days of continuous chemotherapy later, he shares how facing mortality transformed his relationship with time and ambition.
• The Turning Point — Stepping Away from the Grind: How stepping off the corporate treadmill and surviving an early post-diagnosis fall forced Glenn to realize that while we cannot change yesterday, we have complete agency over how we meet today.
• Why He Refuses to "Bring Cancer Home": Glenn discusses the intentional boundary he established between his medical treatments and his personal life. While the hospital and oncology clinic are for fighting the disease, his home remains a sanctuary for love, family, dinner conversations, and genuine presence—not an extension of the clinic.
• Building an Integrated Care Team: Glenn’s advice for patients and caregivers on approaching healthcare as proactive collaborators, assembling multidisciplinary support, and maintaining mental and emotional ownership of the healing process.
• Finding Wonder in the Dark: How turning to creative passions—authoring four bestselling books and traveling the globe as an astrophotographer chasing solar eclipses—helped him reconnect with the vastness of life and put suffering into perspective.
• Holding Both Fear and Gratitude: How living in the shadow of chronic illness doesn't mean life pauses; instead, it invites us to live honestly in "the gray in between," cherishing small, everyday moments.

MIHAELA (MIA) GODFREY is a certified life coach, Bible counselor, EME (Emotions,Mind and Energy) practitioner,public speaker, and author of Buried, Not Broken: A Memoir of Survival, Sisterhood, and Starting Over. With more than 17 years of leadership experience at Cellular Sales, where she serves as talent acquisition operations manager, Mia brings authenticity and compassion to every area of her work.

Her professional success is matched by her lifelong devotion to helping others find healing, strength, and renewed purpose. Mia has built a career on showing empathy, upholding integrity, and helping others rise to their potential. Beyond the boardroom, she is a guiding voice for women navigating grief, trauma, and life transitions, offering practical tools for rebuilding confidence and rediscovering purpose through faith.

Born in Romania as the youngest of 10 children, Mia learned resilience and faith early. After earning her bachelor of science in education, she immigrated to the United States at 27, carrying with her an unwavering belief that every challenge holds the seed of growth. She has since earned multiple leadership and public speaking awards through Toastmasters International and is an active member of the AACC World Counselors.

Now based in Knoxville, Tennessee, Mia is a proud wife and mother to two grown children, Alli and Isaac. Outside her professional life, she finds joy in mentoring others, connecting through faith, and helping people see hope where they once saw only hardship.

Her life’s purpose is to remind others that healing is possible, growth is continuous, and purpose is always within reach.

Learn more or connect with Mia at www.miagodfrey.com.

Contact Kendra Rinaldi https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/

Epis:ode Highlights:

• Survival Under Communism: Growing up as the youngest of 10 in survival-mode poverty in Romania, and how writing her memoir finally freed her family from decades of shared fear .
• Escaping Addiction at 18: Running 300 miles from home after her father’s sudden death to escape a path of addiction and protect her family from shame.
• The 800-Letter Love Story: Writing hundreds of letters using a physical paper dictionary to communicate with her late husband, Robert, before she even knew English .
• Coping Through Exhaustion: Surviving the sudden loss of Robert by working three intense jobs just to keep herself too exhausted to face the grief .
• Losing Her "Lifeline": Serving as the primary caregiver for her beloved sister Mona during her 11-month battle with ovarian cancer.
• Fulfilling a Deathbed Promise: Breaking childhood vows of secrecy by starting a journal that fulfilled Mona's final, healing wish to tell their stories .
• The "Silent Napkin Friend": Why the best support in grief isn’t unsolicited advice or preachiness, but simply holding a quiet, loving presence.
• Buried, Not Broken: Shifting our perspective from feeling broken by trauma to realizing we are whole and simply growing strong roots under the soil.

Christopher Papadopoulos holds Bachelor degrees in education and history from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and has served as both a primary and secondary school teacher. Based on his desire to help create a better world, in 1993 he ran for Parliament in the Canadian federal elections. Realizing that a world of peace and harmony begins within the individual he then embarked on an inner journey toward greater self-awareness. In 2003 he experienced a permanent shift in consciousness from identification with thoughts to the spacious presence that contains all forms. Since this spiritual awakening he has worked with individuals and groups guiding others to experience peace, clarity, and love through the process of their own self discovery.

Connect with Chris: https://www.youtube.com/@chrispeacenow/shorts

https://www.instagram.com/uarepeace

https://www.tiktok.com/@you.are.peace

Connect with Kendra Rinaldi https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/

Show themes:

• 1. Object vs. Space Consciousness We often suffer because we focus entirely on "forms" (like thoughts, emotions, and physical events) rather than the space they occupy. Shifting our attention to "space consciousness" takes the pressure off our suffering and allows us to safely experience and sit with our grief.
• 2. Shifting Nouns to Verbs (Identity) Deep loss often triggers an identity crisis because we wrap our entire sense of self in rigid "noun" labels like wife, parent, or career title. Shifting these rigid nouns to active verbs (focusing on "mothering" or "relating" in the moment) allows us to view our personalities as temporary "skins" or "avatars" we can put on and take off.
• 3. The Default Mode Network & Egoic Survival The brain's "default mode network" is an ancient tribal survival mechanism that relies on compulsive, self-referential thinking to keep us predictable and safe. However, over-identifying with this loop causes toxic rumination and anxiety, which forces us back into a primitive survival brain and suppresses our naturally empathetic, collaborative selves.
• 4. "Marching Forth": Moving Grief Through the Body When we are frozen by grief, our natural instinct is to collapse into sedentary comfort. Physically getting up to move contracts our muscles and prompts our endocrine system to release myokines (the "happiness molecules"), helping us process and carry our grief so it literally feels lighter.
• 5. Unconditional Love as an Integrative Healing Force Much like gratitude, unconditional love physically expands and opens the chest area. While life's traumas psychologically, emotionally, and physically fragment us, love acts as an intelligent, integrative energy that pulls our fragmented pieces back into wholeness.

A native Houstonian and a graduate of Texas Tech University, Amy W. Daughters has been a freelance writer for more than a decade — mostly covering college football and sometimes talking about her feelings. Her debut novel, You Cannot Mess This Up: A True Story That Never Happened (She Writes Press), was selected as the Silver Winner for Humor in the 2019 Foreword INDIES and the Overall Winner for Humor/Comedy in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Awards. Her second book, Dear Dana: That time I went crazy and wrote all 580 of my Facebook friends a handwritten letter (She Writes Press, 2022), has won several awards, including the 2023 Reader’s Favorite Gold Medal for NonFiction Relationships, and caught the attention of Kelly Clarkson! An amateur historian, hack golfer, charlatan fashion model, and regular on the ribbon dancing circuit, Amy — a proud former resident of Blackwell, England, and Dayton, Ohio, currently lives in Tomball, Texas, a suburb of Houston. She is married to a foxy computer person, Willie, and is the lucky mother of two amazing sons, Will and Matthew.

https://www.amydaughters.com/ https://www.instagram.com/smokinhotamys/

Connect with Kendra Rinaldi https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/

In this episode, you will learn about:

• The Unexpected Grief of Empty Nesting: Amy opening up about entering her second year of empty nesting, validating that major life transitions—even happy ones—often carry shades of grief as we say goodbye to old identities and readjust to a new rhythm of life.
• The "Dear Dana" Story: How reconnecting with a camp friend from 1986 whose 15-year-old son was battling cancer at St. Jude sparked an intensive, two-year pen-pal relationship. Amy discusses the "free space" created by writing letters, where two relative strangers could share their deepest thoughts without fear or expectation of an immediate response.
• Writing Letters to 580 Facebook Friends: The massive, 18-month experiment where Amy set out to test the boundaries of social media friendships by writing handwritten letters to all 580 of her Facebook connections—yielding an incredible 78% response rate and proving how deeply people crave authentic, high-effort connection.
• When the Casseroles Stop Coming: Amy shares a powerful story from a neighbor who lost his father in middle school, recalling how "the casseroles just stopped coming" after a few weeks. This heartbreaking realization became Amy's motivation to keep sending "casseroles in the form of cards" to her grieving friend long after the initial wave of support faded.
• Time Traveling to Heal the Inner Child: A look into Amy’s memoir, You Cannot Mess This Up: A True Story That Never Happened, where she writes herself back to 1978 to spend 36 hours in her childhood home as an adult. She explains how this creative exercise allowed her to let her parents, her siblings, and most importantly, her own childhood self "off the hook".
• Bridging Divides Through High-Effort Love: How stripping away the curated perfection and political divisiveness of social media through tactile letters reminds us of our shared humanity, showing us that love and relationship can exist beautifully even when we don't agree on everything.

In this raw, vulnerable, and deeply personal solo episode, host Kendra Rinaldi shares straight from her heart about the intense transitions she has been navigating lately. From her daughter Mila preparing to move away to college [1] to facing complex personal medical decisions. Kendra opens up about how these major life shifts cracked open an unexpected wave of grief for her mother, who passed away nearly ten years ago.

Kendra breaks down the myth of the "linear grief timeline" . introduces her concept of feeling "griefy" , and maps out the common "doorways" that can trigger sudden waves of grief to resurface years or even decades after a loss [5, 6]. If you have ever felt overwhelmed by a sudden heaviness of heart out of nowhere, this episode is a gentle reminder that you are not broken, you are not failing, and you are navigating your healing exactly as you should .

Kendra shares that when grief unexpectedly returns, it often enters through specific doorways in our lives. Recognizing these triggers can help us navigate them with more grace and self-compassion:

1. Transitions that mirror a past loss (e.g., a child leaving for college  mirroring when you first left home).
2. Major  milestones (such as weddings, graduations, and birthdays) where a   loved one's physical presence is deeply missed.
3. Reaching  a milestone age (such as turning the age your loved one was when  they passed, or seeing a child reach that age).
4. Sensory  triggers (a specific smell, perfume, taste, or hearing a familiar  sound).
5. Reading      old physical items (like looking at birthday cards or letters    they once wrote you).
6. Health  scares and medical decisions that you are forced to navigate without their support.
7. Watching  someone else go through grief.
8. Experiencing  milestones they never got to experience (such as getting married,  building a career, or raising children).
9. Anniversaries  and birthdays .

10. Seasons of layered high stress (at work or in your family life) that leave your emotional      reserves low.

• Subscribe to the Newsletter: Stay updated on Kendra's upcoming Grief & Gratitude Journal and Self-Guided Course by signing up on her website: Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between .
• Follow on Instagram: Connect with Kendra daily @GriefGratitudePodcast .
• Work with Kendra: If you are looking for a compassionate guide to walk alongside you on your transition or grief journey, learn more about Kendra's 1-on-1 grief coaching offerings .