What is grief?

I met Ann Faison earlier this fall through Transforming Family, where I facilitate a monthly peer support group for parents of autistic trans and non-binary children.

Ann hosts a podcast, Are we there yet?, where she explores adolescent grief, and she invited me to be a guest. The episode we recorded, which she aptly titled What is grief?, came out on Friday and you can find it here (Spotify, Apple Podcasts).

Here’s how Ann summarized the interview:

When I started to interview Peter Rukavina for this episode, I had no idea we were going to be exploring such overarching questions about grief. The story of raising his daughter Olivia after her mother died is extraordinary because of Olivia’s intersectionality. Olivia is autistic and came out as trans in the wake of her mother’s death, so her experience of grief, and Peter’s, were multi-layered and complicated in ways I had never considered previously. Listening to Peter talk about raising Olivia throughout the many years of his wife’s illness, I was struck by his clarity and even-handed thinking around grief. He is careful not to make assumptions about Olivia’s emotional life and is mindful of the opportunities as well as the challenges that loss and grief have afforded him.

Ann was a kind and patient interviewer, and I learned a lot from the experience.