Let's Talk Death! ... a HealGrief® program

In this episode, Ta'Shay shares her memories back to when she was a nine-year-old little girl and experienced grief after her father's death. She shares about the impact suppressing her emotions had through her adult life, and as a mature woman, she is finally facing her grief. 

Ta’Shay Mason, a Texas native, served sixteen years in the U.S. Army, obtained her master’s degree in social work from University of Texas at Arlington, and is a licensed social worker.  She currently works at a Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Center as a social worker helping Veterans with mental health and substance use issues. She is also a volunteer group facilitator at a grief counseling center for children whose parent(s) has died.

Ta’Shay started writing to share inspirational stories with others and she began with the most painful event in her life, the death of her father. With the help of her family (including her military family), therapy, volunteering, and dealing with her emotions, Ta’Shay was finally able to say goodbye and wrote her first children’s book, But I don’t want to say GOODBYE! which was released this year.

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In this episode, Ken shares how he inadvertently ended up working with children with cancer and how that experience shaped his career and life's work. Ken also speaks about his research with disenfranchised grief.

Ken Doka is a Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle and Senior Consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America. He is one of the authors of the text, Dying & Death: Life & Living. A prolific author of dozens of books, including Grief is a Journey: Finding Your Path Through Loss, Ken has published over 100 articles and chapters and is the editor of both Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying and Journeys: A newsletter to Help in Bereavement. Ken also has an ongoing blog in Psychology Today entitled, Good Mourning. 

Ken has served on numerous boards, received numerous awards, and has keynoted conferences throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He participates in the annual Hospice Foundation of America Teleconference and has appeared on CNN and Nightline. 

Ken has served as a consultant to medical, nursing, funeral service, hospice organizations, educational and social service agencies, and businesses too. Dr. Doka is an ordained Lutheran minister.

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In this episode, Ken shares his journey caring for his mother in the last years of her life and what it was like to be Elizabeth Kubler Ross's son. Ken also speaks about his passion as a photographer.

Ken Ross, son of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, is the President & Founder of the EKR Foundation and is a former board member of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Center. His responsibilities include:

• Handling over 80 publishers of Dr. Ross' work in 41 languages.
• Public relations.
• Copyright & trademark issues.
• Website maintenance.
• Developing foreign Kübler-Ross chapters.
• Developing strategic partnerships.
• Preserving her archives.

While growing up, Ken traveled with his mother extensively while she was on her numerous foreign trips. He witnessed her lectures and workshops, consultations with dying patients.

Ken was the principal care provider for his mother in the last nine years of her life until her passing in 2004.

Ken has lectured on his mother's legacy for hospices and various conferences in South America, Asia, and Europe and is consulting on a motion picture, a television series, and multiple documentaries, both foreign and domestic, honoring his mother's life and work.

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In this episode, Joanne reflects on her experience after the death of her husband and how that experience inadvertently shaped her career and the work she know does.

Joanne Steen the founder of Grief Solutions, a training company that provides practical training and resources on grief, loss, and resilience to professional assistance providers who work with the bereaved.

Joanne has worked with more than forty diverse organizations. Her clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense; the Canadian Military Forces; Army Survivor Outreach Services and Navy Gold Star Program, plus a host of federal, state, corporate, and non-profit organizations. Joanne is a past Chair of the Surviving Spouse Advisory Council, Military Officers Association of America (MOAA).

Joanne holds an MSEd in counseling from Old Dominion University and a BS in engineering from Rutgers University. Honors and awards include the 2010 Chairman’s Award, Military Officers Association of America; 2009 Alumni Fellow, Old Dominion University, Darden College of Education & Professional Studies, and 2007 Distinguished Author of the Year, United States Naval Institute. 

Joanne is the author of We Regret To Inform You: A Survival Guide for Gold Star Parents and Those Who Support Them. She is coauthor of the award-winning Military Widow: A Survival Guide. Joanne is also a contributing author of numerous works on traumatic grief and military loss.

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In this episode, Guy shares his passion for his work and the inspiration that lead him to co-author, along with his brother, The Dying Art of Leadership: How Leaders Can Help Grieving Employees Excel at Work.

Guy Casablanca is a cofounder of GriefLeaders, a training and consulting organization devoted to educating leaders on helping grieving employees excel at work.

Guy is a dually licensed funeral director and a mortician and has experience facilitating healthy grieving processes. Guy has owned two businesses, consulted for corporations, and led teams of managers. He currently manages a funeral home in Loveland, Colorado.

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In this episode, Dale shares his experience after his brother's death and grief journey and how his brother's death may have led him to his work.

Dale Larson is a Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University. A clinician and researcher, he is a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, and a member of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement.

His publications on end-of-life issues, the stress in professional caregivers, grief and grief counseling, and the health effects of secret-keeping are widely cited, both in the scientific literature and in the popular media.

Dale was Senior Editor and a contributing author for the Finding Our Way: Living with Dying in America national newspaper series that reached 7 million Americans.

He is the author of The Helper's Journey: Empathy, Compassion, and the Challenge of Caring (2020, Research Press) and received the Association for Death Education and Counseling Death Educator Award in 2016 and in 2018 was honored as an Innovator of Hospice and Palliative Care by the National Hospice Foundation.

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In this episode, John talks about his work with Choice and Dignity, a right to die nonprofit organization offering end-of-life advocacy to enable everyone to have a "good death."

John Abraham, Episcopal Priest, and Certified Fellow in Thanatology has 40+ years working in death education as a counselor, therapist, patient-care advocate, and health care administrator. He is the author of How To Get the Death You Want: A Practical And Moral Guide (2017) and of many articles in OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying and numerous journals, newsletters, magazines, and newspapers, reflecting his commitment to the disciplines of death, dying, and bereavement. Mr. Abraham approaches these topics with a holistic perspective, taking into account the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of these challenging issues. He speaks and presents to doctors, nurses, general medical staff, assisted-living workers, educators, hospices, community and religious groups, emergency caregivers, etc.

John is the founder and president of Choice and Dignity, Inc. Their website provides support and information about life’s end and how to avoid the “bad death” that many people experience, enabling everyone to obtain a “good death.” He is a graduate of The Peddie School, Colgate University, and Virginia Theological Seminary, committed to continuing education through various venues. He has taught Death Education to undergraduates and presently teaches adults through the University of Arizona’s Adult Education Program.

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In this episode, Hope shares her story about her grief after her mother lost her battle to cancer and how the "dark ages" of grief left her with no support. Now decades later, she writes the AfterGrief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss.

Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, and the memoir The Possibility of Everything. Her essays have appeared in many anthologies, including The Bitch in the House, Behind the Bedroom Door, and Goodbye to All That. Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction.

Her newest book, AfterGrief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss, offers a new way of looking at grief, utilizing anecdotal data from one of the only studies ever to look at the effect of loss over a long period of time. The book explains how grief is an unaddressed public health crisis and points to how history, gender, and cultural norms influence how we grieve today. Edelman also shares how we can reframe grief and begin to address it in new ways —because while grief is a lifelong process, it doesn't have to be a lifelong struggle.

The recipient of the 2020 Community Educator Award from the Association for Death Education and Counseling, she facilitates Motherless Daughters retreats and workshops all over the world. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Iowa City.

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In this episode, Chloe shares her grief experience as a young adult and the reckoning that we can all die at any moment. How that awareness brought sadness, rage, and also wisdom and a deepening for her own story.

Chloe Zelkha is an educator, organizer, and spiritual caregiver. She's spent the last ten years designing and facilitating immersive, transformative programs for young people and adults.

After her dad died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm in 2017, she felt called to grief work and trained as a chaplain at UCSF Hospital, where she journeyed alongside folks who were ill and dying and their families. She currently works with a team of organizers, chaplains, and young adults who have experienced significant losses to run the COVID Grief Network, a mutual aid initiative connecting young adults grieving the illness or death of someone to COVID-19 to free grief support and a community that knows what it's like.

She holds an Ed.M in Specialized Studies--focusing on Transformative Experiences--from Harvard University and a B.A. in Religion from Carleton College. She is currently studying towards rabbinic ordination.

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In this episode, Noah shares their grief experience of being an adolescent when their father died and then a young adult when their mother died. Living in a world as a young person without parents “with big grief and big love” led them to their work.

Noah Cochron holds a Master of Social Work degree from the Smith College School for Social Work. They are guided by a deep belief in the healing power of relationships, community, and “undoing aloneness.”

For the last six years, Noah has primarily fostered relationships with young folks, most recently as a therapist for high school students in the Bay Area, and as a traveling facilitator for college students studying abroad. Noah co-founder of the COVID Grief Network. This volunteer-run organization provides short-term grief support and longer-term community building for young adults grieving amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Noah believes in ritual, laughter alongside mourning, and being with big questions about being in the right relationship to each other and our world. Noah is a flower farmer, a book enthusiast, and a fledgling woodworker when not working in the grief world.

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