Mary-Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona where she studies the impact of grief on the brain. Her work helps explain things like why we still expect our dead loved one to walk into the living room and why grief can feel so disorienting. As Mary-Frances explains, grief is a hormonal event, and understanding how it shows up in our brains can help us make sense of our own grief experience. In this episode, we cover how grief is really the brain learning to imagine a life with the absence of a loved one. Our brains know how to grieve. In fact, resilience is the most typical brain pattern of grieving.

You can learn more about Mary-Frances’ work and find her book, “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss,” at https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/

This podcast is produced by Larj Media.

After a terminal brain cancer diagnosis, Cynthia Clark’s husband chose to have a medically assisted death when his treatment stopped working. Cynthia shares all about the grief of losing your partner while being his primary caregiver, how she parented young children who were also grieving and the nuance that comes with scheduling your death. In our last episode, we talked to Dr. Stefanie Green about her work as a MAID practitioner. My conversation with Cynthia is about what it’s like to experience MAID as a family member. She’s an advocate for families going through the MAID process and has a blueprint for how you can show up for a loved one who’s dying.

You can Cynthia’s advocacy work and find her book, “The Many Faces of MAID: What to Expect When Someone You Know Chooses Medical Assistance in Dying” here: https://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/blog/the-many-faces-of-maid/

This podcast is produced by Larj Media.

Stefanie Green, MD, was one of the first providers of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada, when it became legal in 2016. Her book, This Is Assisted Dying: A Doctor's Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life, chronicles her first year working in the field of MAID. In our conversation, Stefanie reflects on what has changed in her work in the past eight years, the people she’s met and how she created a national organization for physicians working in this field. She also shares how this work has shaped her own life and thoughts about death.

You can learn more about Stefanie’s work and her book at https://www.stefaniegreen.com/