Episode 111: A conversation with Jennifer Farmer on healing from grief

As a speaker and spiritual teacher, Jennifer is a recognized leader in personal development and spirituality, and has led signature workshops on intuition, meditation, connecting to the Spirit World, and other spiritual themes. She continues to study new teachings and regularly attends workshops as well, including the Arthur Findlay College in the UK. 

As an author, her healing meditations and new book, A Healing Journey, provide comfort and guidance, like a lighthouse in a storm for those seeking peace and renewal. Jennifer’s gifts of wisdom, insight, and intuition are unparalleled—whether she is teaching a workshop live or leading groups online. 

Episode 110: A conversation with Joanna Wojtkowiak on death rituals and symbolic immortality in contemporary Dutch culture.

Recently, she has been studying existential concerns at the start of life: what does our origin mean to us? What is the meaning of our beginning? What does it mean to bring life into the world? By comparing and contrasting existential concerns at birth and death she tries to unravel processes of meaning, with specific focus on embodiment and relationality. In the past, she has studied concepts of symbolic immortality (notions of a “postself”), ethics of end-of-life decision-making and the role of secular or personal spirituality. Other research interests are: identity theory, relational and narrative perspectives, ritual as intervention/method used in pastoral care, interdisciplinary research and mixed-methods.

Episode 109: A conversation with Anne Francis

Anne teaches pastoral theology in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth and is Visiting Lecturer and Supervisor at the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge, England. She supports ministry colleagues in her Pastoral Supervision practice. Anne is married with three adult children. She loves swimming in the Atlantic at first light, throughout the year. She recently published her book Called: Women in Ministry in Ireland based on interviews with female Christian ministers across the denominations from the four corners of Ireland.

Episode 107: A conversation with Hank Dunn on hard choices at the end of life.

A Florida native, Hank is a graduate of the University of Florida with a degree in history and was on football scholarship. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

After serving for five years right after seminary in a very traditional church in Macon, Georgia he moved to the Washington, DC area to be a part of the very nontraditional Church of the Saviour. For a year following the move to DC, Hank worked as a carpenter and then for four years directed an inner-city ministry for hard-to-employ people. In 1983 Chaplain Dunn began his healthcare work as a nursing home chaplain. He has served as a hospice chaplain and volunteered nights and weekends as an on-call chaplain at a community hospital.

He is a past president of the Northern Virginia Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and has served on several ethics committees. Hank is a frequent speaker nationally on the topic of making end-of-life decisions and spirituality and healthcare.

To help him explain end-of-life decisions to patients and families, he wrote a booklet to hand to them so they could reflect on the issues discussed. As an afterthought, he sent the book out to other institutions to see if they would be interested in purchasing it for their clients. First published in 1990, Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures, and the Patient with a Serious Illness is now in its Sixth Edition, with over 3.9 million copies sold, and it is being used in more than 5,000 hospitals, nursing homes, faith communities and hospice programs nationwide. His second book, Light in the Shadows: Meditations While Living with a Life-Threatening Illness, is a collection of reflections on the emotional and spiritual concerns at the end of life. Besides speaking on topics related to his books, Chaplain Dunn has also been a leader of silent retreats. Hank has recently moved to Oxford, Mississippi after 39 years living in the DC suburbs of Virginia. He enjoys fly fishing, wilderness camping, hiking, kayaking and life in general.

Episode 106: A conversation with Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman on their book, “What to do when I am gone.”

Suzy Hopkins is a retired journalist who worked for four Northern California newspapers, then founded and ran a community magazine in the Sierra foothills for 10 years. 

Hallie Bateman is a writer and illustrator based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzzfeed and many others. Together Suzy and Hallie created the book: What to Do When I’m Gone: A Mother’s Wisdom to Her Daughter.

Episode 104: Part two of the conversation with Thomas Attig on his book, “Catching your breath in grief.”

Tom is also a well-known speaker, having offered conference programs across the United States, Canada, and Japan and in England, Australia, Israel, and Germany as well as innumerable talks and workshops for nurses, physicians, funeral directors, clinical psychologists, social service providers, gerontologists, hospice workers, bereavement coordinators, clergy, educators, civic organizations and the general public.

He taught philosophy at Bowling Green State University for nearly twenty-five years, serving as Department Chair for eleven years and leading efforts to establish the first Ph.D. in Applied Philosophy in the world in 1987. Tom left as Professor Emeritus in Philosophy in 1995 to become an independent applied philosopher. A Past President of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, he also served as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement.

Episode 101: A Conversation with Katie Duncan

Katie is a practicing adult-gerontology primary care nurse practitioner. She is also the founder and CEO of Death Care Coach, a company offering end-of-life guidance, consulting, education, and coaching to families, caregivers, and healthcare providers. Before founding Death Care Coach, she taught full-time as a Professor at Drexel University in the College of Nursing and Health Professions Undergraduate Program, and an adjunct Professor in the Nurse Practitioner Program. 

Duncan has been working in healthcare for over 10 years in various roles and various specialties. She has spent time in hospital and intensive care settings. She has also worked in home-care and community settings, navigating her way into diverse homes while developing strong, trusting relationships with her patients and their families. In addition, Duncan has spent time in sub-acute rehab, assisted living, independent living, nursing home, and long-term care facilities. She continues to be an everlasting student continuously learning from those who allow her the privilege of being at their bedside, especially as they journey through their dying process.

Of all the places Duncan has worked, her greatest love has always been end-of-life hospice care. It has been her honor to be at the bedside of irreplaceable fellow humans as they take their last breaths in their physical bodies. Their journeys have taught her that life is a precious gift, and there is an opportunity to find beauty even at the very end. As a result, Duncan has made it her mission to educate, coach, and provide holistic services focusing on end-of-life matters. 

Episode 99: A conversation with Dr. Linita Eapen Mathew on grief

She received the Canadian Association of Teacher Education (2021) thesis and dissertation award for her work’s contribution to teacher education. Using her skills and expertise for service, she created and led numerous Grief and Writing Through Grief workshops for educators and bereavement support centers across North America. Apart from being an educator, she is a writer at heart and has released two books based on her doctoral dissertation: Life: To Be Given Back Again to Whence It Came and the companion stories The Revelations of Eapen.

 

Links:

 

Book 1: “Life: To Be Given Back Again to Whence It Came” – A dissection of prolonged grief, cultural grief illiteracy, the healing power of rituals and communal grieving, and an analysis of the impact of expressive storytelling on bereavement can be viewed here: http://www.diopress.com/life

 

Book 2: “The Revelations of Eapen” – The author’s intimate exploration of eastern and western cultural interactions with the phenomenon of grief before, during, and after her father’s death can be viewed here: http://www.diopress.com/revelations-of-eapen

 

Academic Article: “Braiding western and eastern cultural rituals in bereavement: An autoethnography of healing the pain of prolonged grief” – https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2021.1983158