Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss

What happens when grief isn’t as heavy as it once was?

This candid, multi-voice conversation explores what it means to live fully after loss. 

While much of the grief space centers on surviving, this roundtable makes space for what comes after the initial heaviness, when life begins to expand again, often in unexpected ways. Together, grief and resilience leaders, podcasters, and grief-informed creators explore meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and the nuanced reality of carrying grief while also reclaiming joy, purpose, and possibility.

This is the conversation for everyone who needed to know it gets lighter, that joy and aliveness are possible, and for everyone who's arrived at lighter and isn't sure what to do with that.

PURPOSE:

Rather than framing this as “moving on,” the conversation centers the complexity of living in the both/and, where grief remains, but no longer defines every moment. 

Speakers will share personal and professional insights on post-traumatic growth, identity reconstruction, and the ways life can expand after loss without abandoning love for who or what was lost.

The discussion challenges the idea that grief must remain all-consuming to be valid, while offering language, permission, and perspective for those who are beginning to feel moments of lightness again, or long to believe that’s possible.

GRIEF AND RESILIENCE SPEAKERS:

Nina Rodriguez | GRIEF AND LIGHT™ | griefandlight.com/about | @griefandlight

Nina Rodriguez is an award-winning indie podcaster, speaker, writer, and grief-informed guide who creates spaces where loss, reflection, and resilience meet. After the sudden passing of her only sibling in 2019, she turned grief into a calling, and has been building toward a more grief-fluent, hopeful world through honest conversations about life after loss, post-traumatic growth, and the many ways humans make meaning ever since. That calling became the GRIEF AND LIGHT™ podcast in 2023, now 100+ episodes strong, featured in Forbes, and recognized by Ear Worthy, TalkDeath People’s Choice Award, a Women Who Podcast Awards recipient, and Podground.io's Editor's Pick. As a speaker, she has presented on sibling loss, grief literacy, resilience, and post-traumatic growth at universities, summits, and live events co-created with Reimagine. As a writer, she authors the Resting Grief Face Substack, contributes to Get Griefy Magazine and Women Who Podcast Magazine, and co-authored Resilient A.F., Vol. 2 (2025). She leads the Get Griefy Small Business Collective Podcasters Network, holds a Grief Care Professional Certificate, and believes deeply that grief is not something to fix, but something to tend and integrate into who we are becoming.

Kera Sanchez | Get Griefy Magazine x MILSPO Social Co. | getgriefymagazine.com x milsposocialcomagazine.com | @getgriefymagazine x @milsposocialco

Kera Sanchez is the editor-in-chief of Get Griefy Magazine and MILSPO Social Co. Magazine. A military spouse with more than 13 years of experience in secondary education, she is a trauma-informed educator, certified Grief and Resilience Expert, and a dedicated advocate for grief awareness and military families.

In 2025, she was honored with The Talk Death People’s Choice Award for Grief Educator of the Year. Kera has appeared on Daytime Chicago and Good Morning Washington, sharing her expertise with broader audiences. Based in the Washington, DC area, she regularly advocates on Capitol Hill, championing support and visibility for the communities she serves.

Blair Kaplan Venables | The Global Resilience Project x Resilient A.F. Stories of Resilience book series | theglobalresilienceproject.com | @blairfromblairland x @globalresiliencecommunity

Blair Kaplan Venables is a British Columbia-based grief and resilience expert and coach, motivational speaker and the Founder of The Global Resilience Project. Her expertise has been featured on media platforms like Psychology Today, Forbes, TEDx, CBC Radio, Entrepreneur, and Thrive Global. She is named the Top Grief and Resilience Expert of the Year 2024 by IAOTP. USA Today listed Blair as one of the top 10 conscious female leaders to watch, and she empowers others to be resilient from stages around the world. 'MyStory,’ which is a television show available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and Google Play, showcases Blair's life story. She is the cohost of the RESILIENT A.F. with Blair and Alana podcast and specializes in helping people strengthen their resilience muscle using scientifically proven methods and guides grieving high performers with her Navigating Grief Framework. The Global Resilience Project’s award-winning books are international bestsellers. In her free time, you can find Blair writing, in nature, travelling the world and helping people to strengthen their resilience muscles. 

Tara Accardo | Life with Grief x Losses Become Gains | @lifewithgriefpodcast  x @lossesbecomegains 

Tara Accardo is a Grief and Soul Purpose Coach and host of the Life With Grief Podcast. But more than that, she's someone who truly gets it and sees you in your grief. After losing both parents to cancer within six months of each other and navigating a traumatic birth experience, Tara channeled her own grief into something that could hold others through theirs. She founded Losses Become Gains as a community for fellow grievers—a safe space full of tools, resources, and guidance for navigating loss and creating a joyful, fulfilling life after loss. Through her podcast, one-on-one coaching, and other modalities of support, her commitment to uplifting and empowering grievers is as personal as it gets.

Imogen Carn | Heal With Im x Good Mourning podcast | @healwithim x @goodmourningpodcast

Imogen Carn is an author, speaker, breathwork facilitator and co-founder of Good Mourning – a podcast with over a million listeners built from the wreckage of loss. Having walked through the darkest period of her life and rebuilt herself from the ground up, Imogen knows firsthand what it takes to survive devastating loss and find your way back to yourself. Her healing journey, spanning grief, complex PTSD, anxiety and trauma from her mother's suicide, led her to breathwork and somatic healing, modalities that gave her what years of talk therapy never could. Imogen has spoken at events across Australia, been featured in leading media publications and interviewed some of the world's most respected experts in grief, trauma and resilience including Dr Bessel van der Kolk, Dr Edith Eger and Dr Mary-Frances O'Connor. Now a certified breathwork facilitator, Imogen is passionate about helping others find safety in their bodies and peace in their lives after loss, grief and trauma. Her work sits at the intersection of science and lived experience – honest, evidence backed and deeply human.