Drawing on her book, What Will They Say? A Liberating Guide for Latinas, filmmaker, author, and speaker ,Denise Soler Cox, shares how the rules we inherit about family, belonging, and worthiness can shape the way we live, work, grieve, and show up for ourselves.

After her documentary Being Eñye gained attention, Denise spent more than a decade speaking about identity and belonging. At hundreds of events, women began confiding secrets they had never told anyone. Those conversations became the foundation for her book, which explores ten recurring taboos, including childhood experiences of sexual assault and witnessing domestic violence... SHOW ME MORE

How can hope and heartbreak can coexist? And what does that look like when navigating stage 4 breast cancer?

Nina Rodriguez talks with Lindsy Matthews, a coach, mother, and public speaking instructor at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. 

After a stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis in 2018, Lindsy was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in 2022. Now living with what is currently an incurable illness and an uncertain future, she describes her life as really good, even when it feels really hard. Lindsy calls this "the split screen life," where hope and heartache coexist... SHOW ME MORE

What if facing death honestly is how we learn to live more fully?

In this episode of Grief and Light™, Nina Rodriguez sits down with Alexander Aldarondo Jiménez, an end-of-life doula, educator, and founder of AMORir, Puerto Rico's first end-of-life doula collective. Joining from Puerto Rico, Alex explains what a death doula does, why dying has become so medicalized and transactional, and how communities can reclaim it as something we hold together.

Nina brings her own lens. She recently lost her grandfather in Puerto Rico after he spent time in hospice, and she lost her 32-year-old brother suddenly. Together, they explore what grief-literate, death-literate care could look like... SHOW ME MORE

What happens when grief meets music, community, and the question of what we might do with the pain we carry?

Nina sits down with singer-songwriter, community activist, and Reimagine co-founder Brad Wolfe for a conversation about loss, meaning-making, mortality, and what can become possible when we stop trying to turn away from what hurts.

Twenty years ago, Brad was playing music at the bedside of his friend Sarah, who was dying from a rare pediatric bone cancer. What began as an intimate act of care became something much larger, eventually inspiring the Sunbeam Foundation and shaping the work Brad would go on to do with Reimagine, a platform and national movement helping people turn toward loss in community and channel that experience into... SHOW ME MORE

SUMMER SHIFTS SERIES | PART 3

What happens when life has already surprised you in the worst possible way?

After loss, staying open to possibility can feel complicated. When you’ve experienced something you never imagined could happen, the instinct to control what comes next can become a form of protection. But what if possibility doesn’t require optimism, certainty, or believing that everything will work out?

In the final conversation of our three-part Summer Shifts Series, Lisa Keefauver and Nina Rodriguez explore what it means to meet life differently after loss. Together, we look at the space between what happened and ... SHOW ME MORE

Grief has a way of convincing us that loss must mean we did something wrong.

That if we had prayed harder, loved better, been more vigilant, or been more faithful, our person would still be here.

One of the most common questions I hear from grieving people is some version of:

“We didn’t do anything to deserve this. Why did this happen to us?”

Behind that question is often something heavier than grief: guilt, self-blame, and the belief that we should have been able to prevent the loss. But grief is not karma. Loss is not punishment. Tragedy is not a moral verdict. And your loss does not mean you did something to deserve it.... SHOW ME MORE