They do not promise a quick way to “get over” grief, nor do they offer ten-step solutions for fixing it. Instead, they may help us understand our own feelings more clearly, or simply allow us to listen to someone who has travelled a similar road.
The promise of a rapid, three-session workshop may sound appealing, but it is far removed from the true nature of grief - and solving grief quickly does not necessarily serve us well. During a crisis or tragedy in an already difficult period of life, a short workshop may help us stay afloat for a while. We may also feel that we cannot face the whole loss at once, and that we need time to gather strength before opening the door to our grief and everything we feel. Even so, it is worth remembering that grief cannot simply be bypassed. Sooner or later, it may meet us again in unexpected places and at unexpected times.
Podcasts, Channels, and Online Resources
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
All There Is grew out of Anderson Cooper’s own experience of grief. In the podcast, he speaks about his losses and invites both well-known and everyday guests to share theirs. Over the years, his guests have included Nick Cave, Andrea Gibson, Andrew Garfield, Laurie Anderson, and Sharon Stone. The programme’s central question is how life changes when we lose someone we love, and how we might learn to live with their absence.
The podcast draws its strength from its honesty and intimacy. It does not offer ready-made prescriptions for grief, but reveals its many forms through stories, conversations, and shared experience.
Who is it for?
Those living with their own grief, as well as anyone wishing to understand the nature of loss through the stories of others.
What can you expect?
Deeply personal conversations about loss, remembrance, and the ways in which someone’s absence can transform a life.
Podcast playlist here.
See website here.
The Red Hand Files (Nick Cave, available in English)
The Red Hand Files is Nick Cave’s remarkable and continually expanding correspondence with his readers. People write to him with deeply personal questions about love, faith, death, grief, loneliness, relationships, parenthood, and the meaning of life. Cave responds with long, candid, and often unexpectedly poetic reflections.
Launched in 2018, the project has grown into an unusually intimate communal space. Grief and spirituality are especially prominent, as Cave’s own relationship with loss, faith, and life changed profoundly after the death of his son Arthur in 2015. What makes The Red Hand Files distinctive is that Cave does not speak as an infallible spiritual teacher. He allows room for uncertainty, doubt, and mystery. When writing about death, an afterlife, signs, or a possible connection with those we have lost, he offers no simple certainties; instead, he remains with the questions alongside his readers.
Among the grief-related entries are letters from parents, partners, siblings, and friends asking how it is possible to live after someone’s death, what to do with absence, guilt, or anger, and how to understand dreams or unusual experiences in which the person who died seems still to be near. Cave answers not as an observer, but as someone who knows the disorientation of devastating loss.
Who is it for?
Primarily those who are grieving or passing through another difficult season of life, as well as anyone wishing to think more deeply about love, loss, faith, and how we continue living in a changed world.
What can you expect?
Not definitive answers, but letters that think alongside the reader and often permit the very thing grief makes most difficult: not having to find an immediate solution. Cave does not try to remove pain; he makes room for it. Again and again, he shows how grief and love belong together, and how joy, beauty, and connection may gradually find a place beside loss.
See website here.
Forgiveness Is Freeing (Eckhart Tolle)
Eckhart Tolle’s official YouTube channel explores conscious presence, inner peace, and self-knowledge. In accessible language, he discusses how we might step back from incessant thought, respond differently to stress and anxiety, live more fully in the present, and begin again with a clearer inner space after hardship.
Who is it for?
Those wishing to slow down, become more present in everyday life, or approach inner difficulties from a new perspective. It may appeal to people interested in meditation and mindfulness, as well as readers of Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth.
What can you expect?
Short teachings, longer talks, guided meditations, question-and-answer sessions, and recordings from retreats. In his calm, contemplative style, Tolle examines the ego, identification with thought, relationship conflict, fear, and the acceptance of change. Most of the material is in English.
Teaching: https://teachings.eckharttolle.com/forgiveness-is-freeing/
See YouTube channel here.
See website here.
Griefcast
Cariad Lloyd’s British podcast offers conversations about grief in an unusually direct, candid, and often humorous form. Well-known guests and people with everyday stories speak about the death of someone they loved and what happened in their lives afterwards.
One of Griefcast’s central messages is that there is no single “correct” way to grieve. Grief may contain tears and anger, emptiness and confusion - and sometimes laughter too. Humour does not diminish the loss; it can make it possible to speak about feelings that might otherwise remain unspoken.
Who is it for?
Anyone wishing to move beyond rigid ideas about grief and discover, through other people’s stories, how varied our responses to loss can be.
What can you expect?
Honest, personal, and at times unexpectedly funny conversations about death and the many faces of grief.
See podcast here.
Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch
Lisa Keefauver’s podcast draws attention to the fact that grief does not arise only from the death of someone we love. We may grieve a relationship, a way of life, an imagined future, or even a part of our identity.
The podcast speaks directly and compassionately about emotions that often take us by surprise. Its title captures this quality: grief can be stealthy, returning just when we thought we had left it behind.
Who is it for?
Those wishing to understand why feelings connected with loss may reappear even a long time later.
What can you expect?
Personal stories, conversations with specialists, and thoughtful explorations of grief’s less obvious forms.
See podcast here.
Good Mourning
The Good Mourning podcast explores life after loss through personal stories and lived experience. It does not promise to show us how to get over grief quickly. Instead, it asks how we might gradually learn to live alongside it.
The conversations make room for difficult moments, memories, changes in relationships, and the possibility of rediscovering joy without having to forget the person who died.
Who is it for?
Those interested not only in grief’s first and most painful season, but also in what life may look like later, with the loss still present.
What can you expect?
Honest conversations about everyday grief, beginning again, and finding a place for loss within a changed life.
See podcast here.
Refuge in Grief (Megan Devine)
Psychotherapist Megan Devine, author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK, offers a different approach to accepting loss. At the heart of her work is the understanding that grief does not necessarily need to be “solved” or processed quickly. Some losses must simply be learned to be carried.
Her videos and conversations often speak to those who feel that the people around them already expect them to move on. Devine reminds us that grief is neither an illness nor a failure, but a natural human response to the loss of an important relationship.
Who is it for?
Those struggling with their own grief, and those wishing to be more sensitive and understanding in the presence of someone who is bereaved.
What can you expect?
Empathetic, psychologically informed videos and conversations centred not on “moving on,” but on learning to live with loss.
See podcasts and videos here.
See website here.
David Kessler
David Kessler is a widely known writer and specialist in grief and loss. In his YouTube videos and conversations, he discusses different forms of grief, the changes that follow loss, and how we may find meaning and new sources of support.
His work is primarily psychoeducational, helping listeners recognise and understand different grief responses while accepting that there is no single path after loss that suits everyone.
Who is it for?
Those looking for psychological explanations and practical points of orientation alongside personal stories.
What can you expect?
Accessible, professionally informed conversations about grieving, different kinds of loss, and reorganising life afterwards.
See YouTube playlist here.
See website here.
See Tender Hearts community here.
Open to Hope
Open to Hope is a platform offering podcasts, videos, and conversations about grief and loss. People from many different circumstances share their stories, alongside specialists discussing the nature of grief.
A recurring idea throughout the programmes is that finding hope or joy after loss does not mean forgetting the person who died. Remembrance and the creation of a new life can coexist.
Who is it for?
Those who, alongside their grief, are beginning to explore questions of renewal, hope, and reconnecting with life.
What can you expect?
Personal stories, conversations with experts, and content exploring new possibilities in life after loss.
See website here.
TED and TEDx Talks
We Don’t “Move On” from Grief. We Move Forward with It (Nora McInerny)
Writer and podcaster Nora McInerny draws on her own losses to explore what it means to live with grief. Within a short period, she lost her unborn child, her father, and her husband. What she shares is therefore not a distant theory, but knowledge painfully acquired. Her talk is both moving and unexpectedly funny: she speaks honestly about death while showing that laughter and sorrow do not exclude one another.
McInerny questions the expectation that a grieving person should eventually “move on.” We do not leave the people we have lost behind, she suggests. We move forward while carrying their memory and our relationship with them. Smiling again, falling in love, or finding joy does not make a loss insignificant. Pain and happiness can exist in the same life - even in the same moment.
Who is it for?
People who are grieving, their families and friends, and anyone wishing to understand how to be sensitively present with someone who has experienced loss.
What can you expect?
An approximately fifteen-minute talk that is personal, direct, and not without humour despite its difficult subject. It offers no formula or quick solution. Instead, it frees listeners from the expectation that grief must one day be permanently closed. It expresses, simply and precisely, something grieving people often struggle to explain: moving forward does not mean forgetting. We can continue living, form new relationships, and experience joy while still loving and missing the person who died.
See TED Talk here.
Grief: What Everyone Should Know (Tanya Villanueva Tepper)
Tanya Villanueva Tepper speaks through her own experience after her fiancé, Sergio, died while saving others at the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
Her central message is that grief does not unfold through five orderly stages and has no deadline. Every person grieves differently and at their own pace. A grieving person should therefore not be rushed, judged, or urged to “move on.” Pain cannot simply be fixed; it needs listening, acceptance, and compassionate presence.
Tepper compares grief to the ocean: it arrives in waves, changes over time, but does not disappear entirely. We do not “get over” the loss of someone we love. We gradually learn to continue living while carrying their love and memory with us. In time, joy and sorrow may exist side by side.
Perhaps the talk’s most beautiful idea is that grief is a continuation of love. Understanding this may help us become gentler and more patient with ourselves and with others who are grieving.
Who is it for?
Anyone who has experienced loss and wishes to understand their grief more fully. It may also be valuable for people wanting to support a grieving relative, friend, or acquaintance with greater compassion.
What can you expect?
A personal, candid, and hopeful talk that dispels common misconceptions about grief in accessible language. It also offers guidance on how to be more patient with ourselves and approach bereaved people without judgement.
See video here.
When Someone You Love Dies, There Is No Such Thing as Moving On (Kelley Lynn)
In this personal TEDx talk, Kelley Lynn speaks about the sudden death of her husband and the life transformed by his absence. She challenges the expectation that, after a certain time, a grieving person should “get over” the death of someone they love. In her view, we do not leave the relationship itself behind. We learn to live with the absence while the person’s love, memory, and influence remain part of our lives.
Through stories, Lynn shows how pain can grow into compassion, community, and support for others. New joys and relationships do not erase an earlier love. Grief and the continuation of life can coexist: we do not move on from the loss, but move forward with it.
Who is it for?
Those who have lost a spouse, partner, or another person close to them and feel burdened by society’s expectation to “move on.” It may also be valuable for anyone wishing to be present with a grieving person more sensitively and without judgement.
What can you expect?
An honest, personal, and deeply moving talk, at times softened by humour. It offers no quick solutions, but affirms the legitimacy of continuing love and remembrance. Despite its painful subject, it offers hope that new relationships, purposes, and joys may gradually find a place beside loss.
See video here.
The Journey of Grieving, Feeling and Healing (Dr. Edith Eva Eger)
In this deeply personal TEDx talk, Holocaust survivor and clinical psychologist Dr. Edith Eva Eger speaks about the losses she endured at Auschwitz, the death of her mother, and her own long process of healing. Her story reminds us that survival and healing are not the same: even after physical liberation, there may be a long inward road towards living fully again.
One of Eger’s central ideas is that we cannot heal what we do not allow ourselves to feel. Grief may therefore include pain, tears, anger, and mourning the future that will never come to pass. These emotions do not need to be suppressed or treated as shameful - nor do we have to remain within them forever.
The talk is also about hope and inner freedom. Through her own life, Eger shows that while we cannot change the past, we may have a choice in how we relate to it. For her, healing does not mean forgetting or diminishing what happened. It means that pain no longer holds us captive, and that life can once again find room beside loss.
Who is it for?
Anyone who has experienced loss or trauma and wishes to draw hope from an extraordinary life story. It may also be valuable for those wishing to reflect more deeply on the relationship between grief, emotional experience, forgiveness, and inner freedom.
What can you expect?
A brief, personal, and deeply affecting yet uplifting TEDx talk. It touches on grave historical events and traumatic life experiences, and may therefore be emotionally demanding. Rather than offering a detailed therapeutic guide, it bears honest witness to how accepting and experiencing our feelings may open a path towards hope and healing.
See video here.
Important to knowThe content on this website is intended to inform and support. It is not a substitute for the presence of mental-health professionals, personal support, specialist psychological or psychiatric care, or medical treatment when needed. If you feel that the pain of your loss has become too difficult to carry alone, please do not remain isolated. Share what you are feeling with someone you trust and consider seeking professional support.
