Articles

Podcasts to Help with Grief

This article was updated on May 3, 2023.

Everyone’s doing a podcast these days and I for one love them. You can listen to them while walking the dog, in the car or on your daily commute. And let’s face it, listening to the hosts can feel like being with the besties you didn’t know you needed, as they share their grief experiences and in turn help you process your own. No matter what stage of grief you are in you are guaranteed to find something of use so to save you time here are my favourites.

First up, my best series recommendation is Good Mourning Podcast by Sal and Im, two Aussie women, in their early thirties who coincidentally both lost their mothers during lockdown. When they couldn’t find resources that spoke specifically to their age bracket, they decided to start a podcast sharing real and inspiring conversations with honesty and humour to provide comfort to others.

With short and sharp episode lengths, starting at just twelve minutes to episodes running over an hour, you can squeeze in a listen almost anywhere. I recommend starting with ‘Locked Up and Griefy’, all about how to cope with grief in lockdown. Both Sal and Im are super funny, real and sweary as they record this episode for the seventeenth time due to an annoying jack hammer.

Podcasts to help with grief - photo Elice Moore - Unsplash
Podcasts to help with grief – photo Elice Moore – Unsplash

Moving on to individual episodes out there in podcast land Mamamia’s The Well podcast offers listeners something for everyone in The Grief Episode. Hosts Rebecca Sparrow and Robin Bailey acknowledge grief as the elephant in the room and say this was a topic they always knew they would have to discuss. Rebecca’s second child was stillborn at 36.5 weeks and ten days off delivery.

While Rob has had two life experiences of grief that were both from unexpected deaths. The first one experienced at eleven was when her father died of heart attack and the second was two years ago when her husband suicided, and she was left with three children to raise. As tough as it sounds, and it is, people who listen to this episode will have a feeling of hope and hear some practical and useful advice and strategies to help someone who is grieving.

Maya Roffler’s series The Surviving Siblings Podcast, gives a great insight into the grief of siblings, which she says is often overlooked.

Here’s the episode featuring none other than Good Grief founder Margaret Rice-Understanding death and grief from a different perspective.

And my final podcast recommendations for helping with grief are available through ABC Listen podcast. Be ready to be inspired and positive by the first which is an episode of  Hillary Harper and Michael McKenzie’s Life Matters featuring Tom Windsor, who lost his father to suicide at age twenty three. Tom has managed to turn his life’s largest shock into something extremely positive. He now works on men’s mental health projects and was named Tassies’ 2020 Local Hero of the Year.

Lastly Cassie McCullagh from ABC’s Focus helps us not put our foot in it by sharing some insight into How to Better Respond to Friend Who is Grieving, loss or deep mourning.

For something perhaps, a little more light-hearted, the ABC’s Pat Abboud on Days Like These interviews an adventurous mortician for his episode Sex and Death. Mortician Emma J. Holmes discusses engaging with families through to getting the body preparation right at the mortuary. In doing so she hopes to take away some of the stigma from death. She says, ‘When you consider your own mortality you know it’s going to end so make this day count.’

Revisit one of our recent articles on Funerals and Lockdown. Basically, they suck but there are ways to make them manageable as I learned when I my father died two months ago.  

We also reported on other funerals during lockdown. See Funerals Without Hugs – Our 2020 Moment. When that story was published we didn’t imagine it would still be the way of life a year later.