Today’s discussion is such an important one. For families who have been touched by suicide losses, for sure – and also for any parents of grieving teens from any death losses. Joanne tells us today about her new film, “Talking Out Loud - Teens & Suicide Loss: A Conversation.” I’ve seen it, and I have to say it’s such a privilege to hear directly from teens about such a sensitive topic. They knew their parents were watching live during the filming, but they apparently all forgot about that and the cameras and they had a really honest, unfiltered discussion. I’d like to thank Joanne and her team for bringing us this incredible film, and also for coming here to speak with us about it this week. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I can’t think of a better way to kick off Children’s Grief Awareness Month than to share my recent discussion with Laurel Braitman, author of the new memoir What Looks Like Bravery. Longtime listeners will recall that I’ve often mentioned what a privilege it is to speak with grown-up grieving kids, and to hear firsthand their experiences and reflections after losing a parent at a young age. What Laurel gives us in this book is an incredibly intimate portrait of her life. She lets us inside, and she allows us to see how grief has affected one now-grown-up grieving child over the decades. Her book and today’s discussion are full of beautiful insights - and I really can’t say enough about how incredible her book is. I don’t usually cry when reading books, but wow, I had a little trouble seeing the words on the last few pages through the tears that were welling up. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Azurae Johnson Redmond for this episode. Azurae is the founder of Young, Black & Widowed Inc and she is also the foreword writer for my new book, out this week: "Widowed Parents Unite: 52 Tips to Get Through the First Year, from One Widowed Parent to Another." I’m thrilled that Azurae and so many other contributing authors are part of this book. Widowed Parents Unite wouldn't be nearly what it is without each and every one of these moms and dads who decided to share their stories with those newer on this widowed parenting path. I know you'll learn so much from Azurae's story, and I hope you check out the resources offered by Young, Black & Widowed. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Mae Yoshikawa for this episode. Mae’s boys were young when her husband died. One was 8 years old, and the other was just 5 months old. Listen in our discussion for the important question Mae asked her older son after her husband died: What if the question right now is not “Why?” This hearkens back to her own experience when her mom became gravely ill when Mae was a young adult. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Gina Moffa for this episode. Gina is a therapist specializing in grief and loss, and she has a brand-new book out this week: Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss. I was honored to read an advance copy and provide an endorsement for her terrific book. Perhaps the best way I can introduce our discussion is to share what I wrote about her new book: “If you don’t have a therapist on speed dial—or even if you do—Gina Moffa’s Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go will walk with you through the disorienting and devastating experience that is grief. Helpfully, she tackles both the inner grief journey and navigating the world at large while grieving. Moffa shares important information on the mind-body connection as it relates to the grief experience, helping us understand how important it is to listen to what our bodies are trying to tell us. An important chapter called ‘Grief’s Sister, Trauma’ is not to be missed. A must-read for those who are grieving the loss of someone close.” -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Phyllis Fagell for this episode. Phyllis just released a brand new book, Middle School Superpowers: Raising Resilient Tweens in Turbulent Times. We haven’t specifically talked about middle schoolers on the show before, and I knew Phyllis would be just the right person to tackle this with. She’s a parenting author and speaker – and I had to laugh when I saw on her website: “Phyllis has lived through middle school three times: first for herself, then with her kids, and now as a counselor.” She’s a school counselor in Washington, DC, and her first book Middle School Matters could be likened to “what to expect when you’re expecting a middle schooler.” -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Chris Buchanan for this episode. Chris has written a graphic novel for grieving teens and kids – something that is unique among the grief literature. She was inspired to write this book because of a death in her community, and she brought her many years of expertise as a speech-language pathologist to the task of writing this book in order to create a different type of resource for parents and professionals working with grieving children and teens. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Lynn Haraldson for this episode. She was widowed 40 years ago, at the age of 19—with an 11-day-old baby at home. I especially appreciated the longer lens she brings to the experience of being a widowed parent. Her journey has included many twists and turns, and she reflects on it all in her new memoir, An Obesity of Grief. Listen especially for Lynn telling us about her daughter’s high school project, when she reached out to the newspaper in their former small town to learn about the father she never knew. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

We’re trying something a little different today. Or actually: a lot different. We’ve got our first non-human guest on the show. No, I’m not interviewing either of my dogs, Daisy and Penny, although that could get interesting. Today I’m interviewing the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. What is ChatGPT, you ask? I asked it to describe itself briefly, in a non-technical way, and this is what it said: “ChatGPT is like a digital helper that can talk and write in a human-like way. It's powered by a type of artificial intelligence, and it can help answer your questions, write emails, tutor in a variety of subjects, translate languages, and even write poetry. It's like having a very knowledgeable friend to help you out with all sorts of tasks. This tool was created by OpenAI, a research group focused on making AI technology that benefits everyone. ChatGPT was first made available to the public in 2021.” So I got to wondering recently whether ChatGPT might have anything useful to say to those of us who are widowed parents. Because if you’re anything like me, you’re trying to figure out how to raise kids after their other parent has died – and you’re realizing this is hard. And – it’s hard to know who can help us figure that out. This idea came up because a family member of mine has a podcast on a totally different topic, and she interviewed ChatGPT on her show. And my dad spotted it and said to me, hey, maybe there’s something interesting here in relation to your show, too. So I listened to the discussion my aunt, Jo Ann Barefoot, had with ChatGPT on her show, which is called Barefoot Innovation – and it was fascinating. If you’re at all interested in the banking industry, and especially in FinTech and financial regulation, I highly encourage you to listen to her interview with ChatGPT, and to her many other interviews as well. Anyway, I started to wonder: what would ChatGPT say to my listeners? If I asked it to suggest resources for widowed parents, would it have any? Would those resources be any good? Would it have advice on planning for Father’s Day, for example, since that is right around the corner? Would it be well-versed on kids’ understanding of grief at various ages and developmental stages? Perhaps most importantly: If I posed a bunch of questions, and I shared them on the show, would I have to interject over and over and let you know where its answers were unhelpful, or even incorrect or dangerous? I played around a little first, to get a sense of how to use it. And because I was sitting next to my dog when I signed up, my very first question to ChatGPT was: “can you tell me about Tibetan spaniels?” I asked a few more questions about topics that were top-of-mind: recovery from the type of shoulder surgery I recently had, and how to clean my new Trex decking. Then, it was time to think about what to ask ChatGPT about widowed parenting, and give it a go. Have a listen for yourself, and let me know what you think about how it answers. A note about the methodology and technology used in this interview. I used the most up-to-date version of ChatGPT, called GPT-4. Because it only takes text input, and answers with text replies, I conducted the interview by typing my questions and reading the answers as they came back. In order to share it with you today, I went back and recorded myself reading my questions out loud, and also fed ChatGPT’s answers into a text-to-speech tool called NaturalReader (the commercial version). I picked a voice named “Aria” and chose the “friendly” option for her tone. I used another AI tool called DALL-E to generate a “headshot” for today’s guest. I had to experiment quite a lot with what type of prompts to give the tool, in plain English, and get the type of image I wanted, and that was fun. As someone who spent 20 years in the tech world in my prior life, I have to say, this experiment was super interesting. I was blown away with how accurate and useful the answers were to the questions that I posed. I don’t think that’s necessarily always the case with AI tools, even this one. One criticism I hear is that these tools can create great-sounding answers that are entirely wrong. In this case, I’m able to review the answers before sharing them with you, and if any of the answers had been wrong or even dangerous, I would have addressed that. As AI tools become more and more widespread, I think it’s important for those of us working in the grief world to realize that the grieving people we serve may begin turning to them for answers. I think it’s important that we understand what’s out there, what may be coming, and what the possibilities and limitations are. We can’t afford to ignore AI – for better or worse, it will likely change the way we do our work in the world, and how grieving people are supported in the years to come. I hope you enjoy my interview with ChatGPT. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-

I had such a great discussion with Talia Kovacs for this episode. We talked about an important topic: building resilience in our kids. Listen for Talia explaining what she means when she says resilience is learned, but it can’t be taught. It’s an important nuance that I hadn’t thought about before, and Talia explains to us what this means for us as parents. -=-=-=-=- Thank you sponsors & partners: Help Texts - Grief support text messaging service. Tips and support delivered all year long, personalized based on your loss. Listeners get $10 off: https://helptexts.com/jennylisk BetterHelp - Talk with a licensed, professional therapist online. Get 10% off your first month: betterhelp.com/widowedparent Support the show - Buy Me a Coffee -=-=-=-=-