The losses nobody sends a card about

Keltie Knight spent about a decade not telling anyone how bad it was.

"I've been silently suffering for most of the last decade," she wrote in March 2024, announcing to several hundred thousand people that she was having a hysterectomy the following day. She had spent years being told her exhaustion was normal, or stress, or nothing. She had a rare blood disorder and severe anemia. The surgery was planned, chosen, and by her account a relief.

What surprised her came afterward.

"I wasn't really prepared for the extent of the healing, the emotional component," she told Yahoo Canada two months later. And this, which is the part we invited her to the Summit to talk about:

"Even though I had made the choice not to have children, it still kind of screws with your mind a little."

That sentence contains something most conversations about loss have no slot for. She had decided. It was not a door closing on a plan. And it still did something to her sense of who she was.

Who she is

Keltie Knight is a three-time Emmy Award winner, a television host who covers red carpets for E!, and one third of the LadyGang podcast alongside Becca Tobin and Jac Vanek, which the three of them turned into a New York Times bestselling book and a TV series. Before any of that she was a Radio City Rockette. Her first solo book, The F*ck Them Theory, is out from Blackstone in November 2026.

She is, in other words, someone whose job is to be relentlessly upbeat in public, which is part of why the March 2024 announcement landed the way it did. Her stated reason for making it: "my hope is that as women, we stop feeling like we need to pretend everything is OK when it's not."

Her session

Keltie appears on Every Body: Navigating Illness, Health, and Identity, a Main Stage conversation about the ways the body can rearrange a life.

She is joined by Marisa Renee Lee, an author and advocate who writes about living with Long COVID and the identity shifts that come with chronic illness; and the session is moderated by Lisa Keefauver, a grief educator, breast cancer survivor and host of the podcast Grief is a Sneaky Bitch. Laureen Wysocki, who came to Reimagine during COVID looking for connection and went on to move through our group programs as a caregiver and a widow, closes the session by sharing her own experience in conversation with Reimagine's Dara Kosberg.

The through line is a question that does not get asked enough: what happens to your sense of self when your body stops doing the things it is supposed to?

If this is you

You do not have to have had surgery or long Covid for this hour to be yours.

It is for anyone whose body has changed in a way that changed them. A diagnosis you have not told your friends about. A capability you used to have. A pregnancy carried to term, lost, or the decision not to have one. Treatment that worked and left you someone slightly different. Caring for someone whose body is failing. Having your concerns written off as a consequence of aging.

And it is for the specific, disorienting version of this that Keltie names out loud: grieving the loss of something you never wanted in the first place, and feeling strange about grieving it. Loss of a part of the body and an identity defined by it, regardless of what you had decided about it beforehand. Nobody sends a card for that one. This session is a space to honor losses like this.

Have a look around the schedule · Download the full schedule (PDF)

The Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 10 AM to 3 PM PT · Online · Free to attend, donations welcome