Grief spoken plainly, tenderly, and at length.
Good Grief treats grief as a lived experience rather than a problem to solve. Cheryl Jones and Cheryl Espinosa-Jones guide steady conversations with guests who describe what loss changed in them.
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Good Grief is a long-running interview show about loss, care, and the changes that follow when grief is allowed to be real. It is quiet in its approach. The episodes show Cheryl Jones and Cheryl Espinosa-Jones speaking with people whose lives or work have brought them close to death, illness, grief support, bereavement, and repair. A conversation with Larry Patton frames hospice as a place of information, choice, and fear that can be named. Phyllis Schachter’s episode moves into voluntary stopping eating and drinking, Alzheimer’s, partnership, preparation, and the difficult question of choosing how an ending is faced. Emily McDowell brings a different angle: the search for words and gestures that do not flatten another person’s pain. Naomi Shihab Nye’s appearance connects loss with poetry, memory, and the short forms that can hold large feeling. Anita Sanchez brings Indigenous teachings, gratitude, unity, and right relationship into a discussion of suffering and separation. Myra Sack’s story of her daughter Javi centers child loss, community, and the painful way other people’s discomfort can overtake the primary griever. Darnell Lamont-Walker’s conversation carries grief into children’s media, representation, joy, and the need to help children make room for their feelings early. Across these episodes, the show keeps returning to the same emotional ground from different doors. What happens when people are not left alone inside loss? What language helps? What kind of support harms, even when it means well? The interviews are measured, sympathetic, and direct enough to sit with illness, death, and family devastation without turning them into neat inspiration. Guests are given room to explain, correct, remember, and search for better words. The show’s power comes from that patience. It treats grief as personal, relational, practical, spiritual, and cultural all at once. It suits listeners who need company in hard subjects and who prefer depth over quick comfort.
Made for: For listeners living with bereavement, supporting someone in loss, working around end-of-life care, or trying to find better language for pain. It also suits people drawn to reflective personal interviews about meaning after profound change.
What sets it apart: Good Grief stands apart by letting guests carry detailed, emotionally specific stories instead of compressing loss into advice. Its conversations are compassionate, practical, and willing to stay with complexity.
On Good Grief we explore the losses that define our lives. Each week, we talk with people who have transformed themselves through the profound act of grieving. Why settle for surviving? Say yes to the many experiences that embody loss! Grief can teach you where your strengths are and ignite your courage. It can heighten your awareness of what is important to you and help you let go of what is not.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Cheryl Jones traces how bereavement reshapes family life, creative work and the care grieving people build for others.
Good Grief turns loss into a sustained interview question: what changes in a life after death, illness or caregiving rearranges it? Cheryl Jones gives guests room to connect private experience with the work that followed, including memoir, theater, bereavement care and support…
Cheryl Espinosa-Jones gives grief a chair, not a stopwatch, when you need conversation after condolences end.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Grief, unity, and the practice of staying in right relationship.
Good Grief uses Anita Sanchez's visit to present grief as a way toward unity, right relationship, and a deeper life. Cheryl Jones, speaking with Sanchez as a PhD Aztec and Mexican American, keeps the focus on how the four sacred gifts can move from Indigenous teachings into…
A patient grief conversation about support, discomfort, and the language people use around loss.
Cheryl Espinosa-Jones hosts a patient Good Grief conversation with Myra Sack, identified as a certified compassionate bereavement care provider through the Miss Foundation and the founder of eMotion Incorporated.
A warm, patient conversation about helping children make room for grief, feeling, and the wider world around them.
Grief is treated here as something children learn to carry, not something adults can neatly explain away. Cheryl Espinosa-Jones speaks with Darnell Lamont-Walker, an Emmy-nominated children's television writer and death doula, about representation, joy, and the need for spaces…
A Montana journey turns grief into motion, and an old promise into something that can still be kept.
Good Grief follows Cheryl Crowder as she talks through Odyssey of Ashes and the Montana trip at the heart of the memoir. Crowder remembers getting a call while she was with people close to her, then understanding, five months after John's death, that the moment carried a story…
A live conversation about caregiving, family distance, and the duties that can follow love.
Good Grief frames a live conversation as a close look at caregiving and the way it can reshape a life. At Mission Hospice and Home Care in San Mateo, Cheryl Jones speaks with a guest who recalls growing up with few boundaries while trying to stay connected to a mother whose work…
An airplane-window image opens a thoughtful conversation about grief, memory, and national parks.
Good Grief gives grief a clean dramatic shape through the image of looking from an airplane window toward a national park. The conversation follows a writer who had been journaling about her parents while stuck on another project, then began hearing Franny Potts and found a…
Cheryl Jones hosts a live episode of Good Grief at Mission Hospice in San Mateo, California, as part of the Reimagined End of Life Festival.
Cheryl Jones interviews playwright and performer Anne Randolph on Good Grief.
Host Cheryl Jones interviews author and artist Jonathan Santlofer about his memoir 'The Widower's Notebook' and how grief can lead to personal transformation.
Cheryl Jones interviews Sue William Silverman about How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, a 2020 essay collection centered on death, grief, danger, and identity.
Host Cheryl Jones interviews retired pastor and hospice chaplain Larry Patton about his experiences with hospice care, grief support, and end-of-life decisions.
Host Cheryl Jones interviews Phyllis Schachter about her book 'Choosing to Die,' which explores voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (V.S.E.D.) as an end-of-life choice, particularly in the context of Alzheimer's disease.
Host Cheryl Jones interviews Emily McDowell, creator of Empathy Cards and a cancer survivor, about her work in transforming how people support others through difficult times like grief and illness.
This episode of Good Grief features an interview with poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye, exploring how loss can lead to personal transformation and deeper meaning in life.
Cheryl Jones opens Good Grief with loss and meaning in view.
Cheryl Espinosa-Jones welcomes Myra Sack to Good Grief.
Good Grief host Cheryl Espinosa-Jones interviews Darnell Lamont-Walker about the connection between children's television, filmmaking, death-doula work, and joy.
Good Grief host Cheryl Jones interviews marriage and family therapist Cheryl Crowder about Odyssey of Ashes, a memoir shaped by her husband John’s sudden death and her earlier cancer experience.
This episode of Good Grief features a live audience at the Reimagined End of Life Festival, exploring how facing death and grief can lead to personal transformation and a more meaningful life.
This episode features an interview with author Leslie Gray Streeter about her memoir 'Black Widow,' exploring grief, loss, and personal transformation.
Host Sheryl Espinosa-Jones interviews author Casey Mulligan Walsh about her book 'The Full Catastrophe', exploring how early loss shapes later experiences and personal choices.
Host Sheryl Espinosa-Jones interviews Kim Kenton about her memoir 'Where Yellow Flowers Bloom,' which details her journey of healing and resilience after surviving the 2018 Montecito mudslides that killed her husband and son.