The funeral industry does not always respond to the unique traditions and practices of their clients. What is important to the grieving person? Can the industry support grievers as they navigate their losses? Joél Simone Anthony brings her well cultivated spiritual outlook to these questions. Realizing how important her own traditions are to her she actively responds to the people who come to her, discovering what is meaningful to them and doing her best as a mortician to create ritual that incorporates those needs. She sees herself not only to helping with funerals and burials but also holding the griever in traditions that matter. And in that, she shares what comforts most; that grieving people are heard in their own experience and context.

Joél Simone Anthony. Joel is a licensed funeral director, insurance agent and sacred grief practitioner. She specializes in guiding individuals, families, businesses and governmental agencies to navigate uncomfortable and difficult conversations about death, dying, end of life, funeral and burial planning. Joél was born in Europe and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, the heart of Gullah and Geechee culture. Spirituality, the sacredness of death, caring for those in transition, the deceased and supporting her community through grief have always been a huge part of her life. Her professional approach is deeply rooted in ancient and ancestral wisdom passed down generation to generation. Her unique experience and training helps her to guide her clients through their journeys of grief. It is her life's work to educate everyone –regardless of faith, race, age, or status – that death, dying and grief are sacred and transformative to our journeys as human beings.

In light of the recent added restrictions on reproductive health access, we are sharing an episode with Kassi Underwood, whose book is a thoughtful memoir on the subject.

The war between so-called pro-choice and pro-life forces in America seem divided beyond repair. But where does that leave women who have made the often painful and important decision to have an abortion? As Kassi Underwood says, they are left with a choice between regret and relief, with few opportunities to talk about the experience and feel supported in their personal struggles. Kassi knows from personal experience that needing to hide all the sometimes complex feelings left after an abortion has a greater chance of fracturing women than the abortion itself. For even necessary losses are still losses, deserving our ear and calling for our attention. With great humor and fierce honesty, Kassi Underwood takes us along on her own search for answers and, in the process, helps us to think more deeply about this important subject.

Kassi Underwood's work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic online, The Rumpus, and Refinery29. She holds an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, where she taught on the faculty of the Undergraduate Writing Program. In 2012, she won Exhale's Pro-Voice Storyteller Award in recognition of her personal essays on abortion; in 2013, she traveled across the United States, sharing her journey after abortion in an effort to bring peace to the abortion war. Described by audiences as "part-storyteller, part-public speaker, and part performance artist," Kassi gives talks on the spirituality of abortion, addiction recovery, personal transformation, and social justice nationwide. She has addressed Christian churches and liberal arts colleges, shared a stage with standup comedians Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, and appeared as a guest on MSNBC and HuffPost Live. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a student at Harvard Divinity School and cohost of the podcast, Spiritually Blonde.

When hospice is the best possible choice, families are often lost in a sea of confusion, not even sure what hospice is. At the same time, reading long descriptions of the services and goals is sometimes beyond them. After years of work in chaplaincy and hospice (and his own personal experiences of loss), Larry Patten thought he could help. What resulted was a clear, readable guide to what hospice is, and isn't, written with the uninformed in mind. Taking a light tone and sharing short chapters, A Companion for the Hospice Journey demystifies and informs while maintaining a supportive and sometimes humorous tone. Join Larry Patten on Good Grief as he shares how he came to write it and where and how it is being used.

When playwright and actor Ann Randolph faced difficulties and losses, she applied her art to them and created comedy. Being able to laugh at what we cry about is a soothing balm for our difficulties and griefs. Creating characters that touch everyone who meets them with their humanity and depth while bringing laughter is Ann's true gift. How do we take a humorous view of our life stories while taking them seriously? Ann has taught countless people across the U.S. and the world how to do just that. She inspires us to dive into our own losses because she is willing to dive into hers and come up laughing. Join us for a deep and funny hour.

Phyllis Shacter's husband made a series of radical choices about how his life would end. When he received two life limiting diagnoses within six weeks of each other, Alzheimers and cancer, he refused cancer treatment and employed natural methods instead. He planned and participated in his own funeral and followed what he believed was best for him, choosing to stop eating and drinking before he was unable to consciously decide how his life would end. Throughout all of these experiences and decisions, he had a supporter and advocate in his wife Phyllis. Understanding the choices he was making, she stood as a pillar to his right to end life in the way that was right for him. He left her with a mission; by sharing his story, she would contribute to the conversation on end of life options. Powered by her love of him and the peace and beauty he felt at the end of his life, she speaks powerfully for taking our lives in our own hands and fully exploring what is best for each of us.

Phyllis Shacter has been a teacher, business consultant, life coach and public speaker. Today she uses her skills to share her personal story as a platform to educate others about expanding end of life choices. Her book, Choosing to Die, is both a memoir and a guidebook and is the first personal story ever written about VSED (Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking).

Phyllis' husband decided to VSED rather than live into the late stages of Alzheimer's. Choosing to Die is their love story. It is a book about their partnership and the brave territory they traversed, including how they prepared themselves with proper medical and legal guidance.

It is available on Amazon.com. She is a frequent speaker and educator about this topic. Her TEDx talk, "Not Here By Choice" is on the Home Page of her informative website, www.PhyllisShacter.com.

When our friends and loved ones face a crisis, we often don't know what to say. Do we say anything at all? What if we say the wrong thing? Nearly everyone who has faced a hard time has heard things that weren't so helpful. But worse yet is silence, saying nothing. Emily McDowell faced such a time and, as a graphic designer, she chose to respond by doing what she loved- creating cards that say what is most helpful in bad times. Her empathy cards not only helped people reach out; by sharing she also helped people in similar circumstances feel heard and seen! Her tremendous success with the cards inevitably led to a book, There Is No Good Card for This: What To Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love.

What does a poet do when she suffers the loss of her father? She writes. Exploring the depths of her relationship with her dad, Naomi Shihab Nye writes with the beauty of love, loss and continuing relationship. Her father wanted them to write a book together, and though this didn't quite happen before his death, he jumps off of every page. His particular viewpoint as an immigrant informs her outlook too and so we are offered a rare poetic view of our culture and the danger of imposing our politics on other peoples. Personal and political, Transfer is most deeply a love poem to the father who raised her, schooled her and loved her. She gives us inspiration towards our own expression of the losses in our lives, making something exquisitely beautiful out of pain and loss. In this hour, we will talk about the loss and what it was like to write about her father after his death.

Naomi Shihab Nye lives in old downtown San Antonio, Texas, a block from the sleepy river. She has written or edited 30 previous books including Red Suitcase, Fuel, and You and Yours with BOA Editions, Ltd. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her collection Honeybee was awarded an Arab-American Book Award. Her poetry anthologies include Time You Let Me In, What Have You Lost?, and This Same Sky. She is also the author of the novels Habibi and Going. Her book of short-short fiction from Greenwillow books is called There is No Distance Now. She is the two-time winner of the Jane Addams Book Award for Peace & Justice, and four-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, as well as the recipient of several fellowships, including a Lannan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. She is currently serving on the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets.

How has modern life disconnected us from our wisdom? Anita Sanchez shares the prophecies of indigenous elders who see a path towards reconnection and understanding.Join us to learn how to embody these principles; the power to forgive the unforgivable, the power to heal, the power of unity and the power of hope. These four gifts applied to our problems of living can change the way we operate as a society. They can even change boardrooms and businesses, bringing human understanding back to our fundamental human experience. And perhaps most important, they can heal our broken hearts.

Anita Sanchez, PhD is a transformational leadership consultant, speaker, coach and author of the international bestselling book, "The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times," available in paperback Nov. 13, 2018 from Simon & Schuster. She bridges indigenous teachings with the latest science to inspire and equip women and men to enjoy meaningful, empowered lives and careers. With four decades of experience coaching and training executives and their teams in dozens of Fortune 500 companies, governmental groups and non-governmental agencies, Anita is an established leader in global organizational change initiatives. She is a member of the Transformational Leadership Council with luminaries such as Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson and John Gray, as well as the Association of Transformational Leaders, the Evolutionary Business Council, and serves on the Boards of the Bioneers organization and the Pachamama Alliance. Anita resides in the mountains outside of Boulder, CO with her husband and youngest son. For more information and to download the free song that is based on the book, visit www.FourSacredGifts.com.