Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson Podcast

About Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson Podcast

Grace & Grit Letters is a podcast of gentle, honest reflections on grief, midlife, friendship, faith, and rebuilding life after it changes shape. These are quiet conversations for tender seasons—meant to be listened to slowly and returned to often. angiehanson.substack.com (https://angiehanson.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

23 Jan 2026

Latest episode

23 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

39 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Sept 2026

   I’m Not the Expert on Your Grief. You Are.

   Lately, I’ve been thinking about the word “expert.” More specifically, I’ve been thinking about what it means when someone calls themselves a grief expert. I understand why the term exists. There are people who have spent years studying grief, supporting grieving families, conducting research, counseling clients, and learning how loss affects us emotionally, physically, spiritually, and relationally. That knowledge matters. Training matters. Lived experience matters too. But the longer I spend in the grief space, the less comfortable I become with the idea that any one person can be an expert on grief as a whole. Because whose grief are we talking about? The mother whose child died? The widow who lost the person she had built her entire adult life beside? The adult child who had a complicated relationship with the parent who died? The sibling who suddenly became the only person left carrying certain childhood memories? The person grieving someone who is still alive but no longer safe, available, or part of their life? Even two people who have experienced the same kind of loss can grieve in completely different ways. Two mothers can lose children and still have very different stories. Two widows can lose husbands and need entirely different kinds of support. Even our own grief changes over time. The grief we carry in the first weeks is not the same grief we carry ten years later. It may have the same name, but it lives differently inside us. How, then, could one person possibly be the expert on all of it? I have lived through the deaths of my son, my late husband, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I’ve walked through anticipatory grief, traumatic loss, caregiving, widowhood, child loss, sibling loss, and the strange work of rebuilding a beautiful life after so much of the first one disappeared. I’ve studied grief. I became a certified grief coach. I’ve written about loss, spoken about it, created cards for grieving people, and spent years listening to people tell me the parts of their stories they don’t always feel safe sharing elsewhere. All of that has given me experience. It has given me knowledge. It has not made me the expert on someone else’s grief. I think the healthiest people working in this space understand that distinction. They can say, “Here is what I know,” without assuming it must also be true for you. They can offer tools without presenting them as instructions. They can share what helped them without promising that it will heal everyone else. And perhaps most importantly, they can recognize when someone needs a kind of care they are not qualified to provide. Grief can overlap with trauma, depression, anxiety, substance use, complicated family dynamics, and serious mental health concerns. Those situations deserve thoughtful, qualified care. Caring about someone does not automatically qualify us to treat everything they may be carrying. Sometimes the most responsible thing we can say is, “This is beyond my scope, but I want to help you find someone who is equipped to support you.” If these honest conversations about grief, life after loss, and finding our way forward resonate with you, I’d love to have you join me here. That is not failure. That is care with humility. I’ve been asking myself some hard questions about where I fit into all of this. When I became certified as a grief coach, I thought one-on-one coaching would become an important part of my work. It seemed like the natural next step. But if I’m honest, the traditional one-on-one coaching atmosphere has never felt completely aligned with me. I can do it. But I’m beginning to understand that being capable of doing something doesn’t always mean it is where I’m meant to stay. What continues to feel right to me is gathering people together. I love group settings. I love what happens when one person says something honest and another person’s face changes because, finally, someone has put words to what they have been feeling. There is relief in discovering, “It isn’t only me.” There is something deeply meaningful about creating a room where no one has to perform healing, meet a timeline, or pretend to be doing better than they are. In those spaces, I don’t need to be the person with all the answers. Honestly, thank goodness, because I don’t have them. My role is to help hold the conversation. To offer education and tools. To share what I’ve learned. To ask thoughtful questions. To remind people that their responses to loss are human, even when those responses feel messy, contradictory, or impossible to explain. The wisdom does not flow from one person at the front of the room. It moves around the room. That feels like the kind of grief work I want to keep doing. So I’ve decided to step away from offering one-on-one grief coaching and focus more intentionally on my monthly group sessions, grief education, writing, speaking, and the work I do through Butterflies + Halos. This isn’t me leaving grief work. It is me becoming more honest about where I belong within it. And maybe that is part of grief too. Ironically, my word for this year is pivot. At the time I chose it, I didn’t know exactly what I would be pivoting toward, or what I might need to pivot away from. I’m learning that a pivot doesn’t always require a dramatic ending or a completely new beginning. Sometimes it is simply an honest adjustment. A willingness to acknowledge that something served its purpose, taught you what you needed to learn, and helped point you toward the work that fits you better. Apparently, pivot wasn’t merely my word for the year. It was preparing me for it. We try something. We listen to ourselves. We notice what feels life-giving and what quietly drains us. We give ourselves permission to change direction when the path no longer feels true. A certification does not have to become a lifelong business model to have been worthwhile. What I learned through that training continues to shape how I write, speak, facilitate conversations, and support grieving people. Nothing was wasted. It simply led me somewhere slightly different than I expected. I have also had to ask myself another uncomfortable question: Am I bothered by some of the people who call themselves grief experts because I disagree with how they approach this work? Or am I jealous because they appear to be further along than I am? The honest answer may occasionally be both. There are people doing beautiful, responsible work in the grief space. There are also moments when grief begins to look more like a marketing opportunity than a human experience. Someone’s tragedy becomes content. Their pain becomes an opening for another person to be noticed. Support quietly turns into self-promotion. That makes me uncomfortable. But I also know I have to examine my own heart before I point at anyone else’s motives. I don’t always know what is happening behind someone’s social media post, just as they don’t know everything behind mine. What I can do is decide how I want to show up. I want to speak with confidence about what I know and honesty about what I don’t. I want to share my experiences without turning them into rules for someone else. I want to support grieving people without making them feel like a project to complete. I want to remain teachable. And I never want someone to believe that I understand their loss better than they do simply because I have credentials, a book, a business, or a collection of losses of my own. My grief gives me a place from which to speak. It does not give me authority over yours. This matters for those of us who are simply writing our way through loss too. You don’t have to be a coach, counselor, or “expert” to share what grief has taught you. You are allowed to tell your story. You are allowed to write the truths you had to learn the hard way. You are allowed to say, “This is what helped me,” or “This is what I wish someone had understood.” Your experience may become a light for someone else. The difference is remembering that a light helps another person see their own path. It does not demand that they follow yours. Perhaps that is the posture I want to carry into this next chapter: I’m not the expert on your grief. You are. I bring lived experience, education, compassionate conversation, and tools that may help you understand and carry it. I can sit beside you. I can listen. I can remind you that you are not broken because grief continues to change shape. I can help create spaces where we tell the truth and feel a little less alone. But I will never know your person, your history, your heart, or the full weight of what you lost in exactly the way you do. And I don’t need to claim that I do in order to offer something meaningful. Maybe the people we trust most with our grief are not the ones who announce that they understand it all. Maybe they are the ones who come close, stay curious, and gently say: “Tell me what this has been like for you.” That may not sound especially expert. But it sounds a whole lot like care. Grace & Grit Letters is a place for honest conversations about grief, resilience, and rebuilding a life you didn’t expect to live. Subscribe to receive the next letter. Get full access to Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson at angiehanson.substack.com/subscribe (https://angiehanson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   26 Aug 2026

   The Problem with Grief Is That Everyone Remembers the Ending Differently

   There is a strange thing that happens when a family loses someone. We all walk out of the same hospital room, funeral home, church, or cemetery believing we have lived through the same ending. But we haven’t. Not exactly. We each carry away our own version. One person remembers the final conversation. Another remembers the phone call. Someone else remembers who arrived first, who didn’t come at all, what the doctor said, or what the minister forgot to mention. One person remembers peace. Another remembers panic. One remembers the casseroles lining the counter and the way the community showed up. Another remembers standing in a crowded room and feeling completely alone. The person we loved may have died only once, but the ending keeps living in many different minds. And sometimes those memories do not agree. We think shared loss means shared memory After someone dies, families often speak in collective language. We went through this. We lost him. We were there. All of that can be true. But grief is deeply individual, even when the death belongs to an entire family. The wife did not lose the same person the daughter lost. The mother did not lose the same person the sibling lost. The friend who knew the younger, wilder version of them is not mourning the exact same person as the neighbor who knew them later in life. Every relationship held a different piece of who they were. So, of course, every person also holds a different piece of how they left. That doesn’t mean anyone is lying. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone has remembered it wrong. Trauma can blur some details and sharpen others until they feel carved in stone. Love has its own camera angle, too. We remember what our hearts were able to notice while they were breaking. My memories belong to me There are moments from Garret’s death that I will carry for the rest of my life. There are details Jack and I shared because we were his parents, standing inside the same nightmare. But even Jack and I did not experience every moment in the same way. We were a mother and a father. We had different relationships with our son, different fears, and different ways of trying to survive what should never have happened. Then, when Jack died, I held another ending from a place no one else could fully stand. Other people lost Jack, too. Graci lost her dad. His parents lost their son. Friends lost someone they loved. But I lost my husband. I remember lying beside him in his hospice bed. I remember telling him I loved him forever. I remember telling him I would be brave, even though I had no idea how. I remember giving him permission to go be with Garret and asking him to tell our boy that his mommy loved him and missed him. That is part of Jack’s ending as I lived it. Someone else may remember the medical details. Someone may remember a conversation from days earlier. Someone may remember arriving, leaving, praying, waiting, or watching the clock. Those memories belong to them. Mine belong to me. Grief becomes especially lonely when someone tries to correct the part of the story that lives inside your bones. Families sometimes argue over facts when they are really protecting pain After a death, the smallest details can suddenly feel enormous. Who was in the room? What were the last words? Did they know they were dying? Were they peaceful? Who made the decision? Why wasn’t I called sooner? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Sometimes these are questions looking for facts. But often, underneath them, there is something much more tender: * Did I matter? * Was I loved? * Did I do enough? * Did they leave knowing how much I cared? That is why conversations about the ending can become so charged. We are not simply comparing memories. We are defending our place in the life of someone who can no longer reassure us. Grief is already painful enough without turning it into a courtroom where everyone must prove their version. There may be facts that matter, of course. But there are also emotional truths that can sit beside one another without canceling each other out. You can remember peace while I remember fear. You can be grateful for the care they received while I remain angry about what happened. You can cherish the final days while I can barely speak about them. We can both love the same person fiercely and still tell the ending differently. If you’ve ever felt alone inside your version of a loss, Grace & Grit Letters is a place where your truth doesn’t need to be defended. Subscribe to receive new letters about grief, healing, and the beautiful life we continue building. The ending is not the whole story One of grief’s cruel little tricks is how easily the final chapter can begin to overshadow the entire book. The diagnosis becomes bigger than the birthdays. The hospital room becomes clearer than the family vacations. The last breath grows louder than all the laughter that came before it. I understand why. Endings are heavy. They demand attention. They divide life into before and after without asking anyone’s permission—which is frankly very rude of them. But the way someone died is not the sum of the way they lived. Our memories of the ending may never match perfectly. Maybe they aren’t supposed to. Perhaps our work is not to force every memory into one approved family version. Perhaps it is to make room around the table for each person’s piece of the story. To listen without correcting. To become curious instead of defensive. To say, “I didn’t experience it that way, but I believe that is how it felt to you.” And then, when we can, to remember something beyond the ending. The way they laughed. The stories they told more than once. The meal they always ordered. The music they loved. The ordinary ways they made a life. Because the ending matters. It changed us. It deserves to be spoken about honestly. But it does not get to claim every page. Maybe remembering differently is another way of remembering completely No single person holds the whole story of someone else’s life. We each carry a chapter, a handful of scenes, a version of the ending, and a love shaped by the relationship we had. Together, those memories may be messy. They may contradict one another. They may occasionally make Thanksgiving dinner feel like an emotional hostage situation. But they also reveal something beautiful. This person mattered in more than one way. They were known from more than one angle. They left fingerprints on many different lives. So perhaps the goal isn’t to decide who remembers the ending correctly. Perhaps the goal is to honor that each of us walked away carrying something different because each of us loved something different about the same person. The ending may never become one neat, agreed-upon story. Neither will grief. But we can still hold our separate memories with tenderness. We can let one another tell the truth as we lived it. And we can remember that before there was an ending, there was an entire life. That is the story worth continuing to tell. Get full access to Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson at angiehanson.substack.com/subscribe (https://angiehanson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   12 Aug 2026

   The Problem With Grief Is That Someone Still Has to Handle Everything

   When my husband Jack died, I didn’t stop being part of his family. Technically, I suppose the words changed. I became the widowed daughter-in-law. Later, when I remarried, the labels became even more complicated. But love doesn’t pay much attention to technicalities. Neither does responsibility. Life continued after Jack died because life has the audacity to do that. It keeps moving, keeps changing, and occasionally keeps throwing more crap at people who have already had more than their fair share. Jack’s sister died. Then his father died. And suddenly, my mother-in-law, Suzanne, was living in a world where her husband and both of her children were gone. Her entire immediate family—except for me and her only living grandchild, my daughter, Graci. She has extended family. There are cousins and people who care about her. But the circle that once made up her everyday life has significantly dwindled. And that kind of loss changes a person. It changes how you see the future. It changes how much energy you have to care for a house, open the mail, make decisions, manage appointments, and keep participating in a life that no longer looks anything like the one you were supposed to have. Suzanne lives alone in a large house filled with the evidence of a family that used to be there. That sentence alone carries more grief than I know how to explain. Someone still has to handle everything Grief can stop a person in their tracks, but the bills don’t stop. The house still needs to be maintained. Appointments still need to be scheduled. Paperwork still arrives. Financial decisions still have to be made. Groceries must be bought. Prescriptions need to be filled. Repairs happen. Forms need signatures. Life continues to produce passwords, phone calls, insurance questions, and envelopes marked IMPORTANT—because apparently grief wasn’t already providing enough paperwork. Someone has to take care of it all. For Suzanne, that someone has largely been me. I help manage her finances and her living needs. I keep track of the things she either cannot manage alone or no longer has the emotional energy to care about. I step in because Graci is 24. She loves her grandmother deeply, but she doesn’t yet know how to handle all the complicated, grown-up pieces of someone else’s life. Honestly, I’m not sure any of us truly know how. We simply learn because there is no one else standing in line to volunteer. Sometimes I have wondered: Is this really my responsibility? I was Jack’s wife. I am no longer her daughter-in-law in the traditional sense. I have remarried. I have a husband, a home, a business, a daughter, and a life that continued growing after Jack died. But Suzanne is still family. I love her. So yes, it is my responsibility—not because a rulebook assigned it to me, but because love did. That doesn’t mean it is easy. Love and burden can exist in the same room. So can devotion and exhaustion. Caregiving can be something you willingly choose and something that completely overwhelms you. Both can be true. If you’re carrying grief, caregiving, or both, you don’t have to carry the words alone. Grief can look like not caring anymore We are now reaching another milestone. We are moving Suzanne into an assisted living community. It isn’t because she is completely unable to take care of herself. It is because, in many ways, she has stopped caring whether she does. I don’t say that with judgment. I understand it. When you have lost your husband and both of your children, it becomes difficult to believe there is anything left to build toward. Her grief has been deeply traumatic. She has survived loss after loss, but survival and living are not always the same thing. She needs people. She needs community. She needs to hear voices in the hallway and see familiar faces at meals. She needs activities she can choose to attend and someone nearby if she needs help. She needs a life that doesn’t require her to maintain a huge house while surrounded by the quiet absence of everyone who once filled it. The house has become too much for her. The cleaning has become too much. The upkeep has become too much. The loneliness has become too much. And watching it happen has become too much for me. I know moving will bring another layer of grief for her. She isn’t simply moving from a house into an apartment. She is leaving a life. She is leaving rooms where her family gathered. She is sorting through objects that belonged to people she loved. She is closing the door on a chapter she never wanted to end. A smaller space can feel like a smaller life, even when it may actually allow life to expand again. I know this transition will be painful. But I also believe it is necessary. The relief no one wants to admit Honestly, this move is also taking a tremendous weight off me. And admitting that brings its own guilt. I feel relieved knowing there will be people around her. I feel relieved knowing someone else may notice if she hasn’t come to breakfast, isn’t feeling well, or needs help. I feel relieved knowing the house will no longer be silently declining around her while I worry about what needs to be repaired, cleaned, handled, or prevented next. I feel relieved that I will not be carrying all of this alone. My husband, Chantz, has helped me. He has stepped into a situation he never created and accepted responsibilities that did not come from his own family. That kind of love deserves to be named. Still, much of the mental and emotional weight has been mine. The phone calls. The decisions. The worrying. The constant awareness that if something needs to be handled, I am likely the person who will have to handle it. So yes, I am relieved. That does not mean I love Suzanne any less. It does not mean I am abandoning her. It means I have been carrying something heavy for a very long time, and someone has finally offered to hold one end. Relief is not rejection. Relief is not selfishness. Relief is what happens when a caregiver realizes help may finally be coming. Caregiving has its own grief We often talk about caregiving as though it is made entirely of noble moments. We talk about love, sacrifice, and showing up. We don’t always talk about resentment, fatigue, guilt, fear, or the quiet wish that someone else would make the decision for once. We don’t talk enough about what it feels like to take responsibility for a person whose needs are growing while you are also trying to live your own life. And we rarely talk about the grief of watching someone slowly lose interest in the life they still have. Caregiving is grief in motion. It is grieving what someone used to be able to do. It is grieving the home they can no longer manage. It is grieving the independence they are afraid to lose. It is grieving the family members who should have been here to help. Sometimes I think about how different this would be if Jack were alive. Or if his sister were still here. Or if Suzanne’s husband were beside her. There should be more people at this table. But there aren’t. That absence becomes its own kind of responsibility. For those carrying what loss left behind Maybe you are caring for an aging parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or someone connected to a person you lost. Maybe you became the responsible one without ever agreeing to the job. Maybe everyone assumes you will handle things because you always have. Maybe you love the person deeply and are still tired of being the one who remembers every appointment, pays every bill, answers every call, and solves every problem. You are allowed to admit that it is hard. You are allowed to need help. You are allowed to feel relieved when help finally arrives. You are allowed to grieve the changes even when you know they are necessary. And you are allowed to love someone without being able to carry every part of their life by yourself. We are moving Suzanne because we love her. Because she deserves more than sitting alone inside a house filled with ghosts. Because community cannot replace her husband or her children, but it may remind her that she is still part of the living. And because caregiving should not require one person to slowly disappear beneath the weight of keeping another person afloat. This next chapter will be hard. It will be sad. It may also be good. That is the strange thing about grief: sometimes the right decision still breaks your heart. And sometimes the sound of help arriving feels a lot like guilt—until you finally recognize it as relief. If this letter made you think of someone carrying more than most people realize, please share it with them. Sometimes being seen is its own kind of help. Are you caring for someone while grieving, too? What part has been hardest to say out loud? Get full access to Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson at angiehanson.substack.com/subscribe (https://angiehanson.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)