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Grief doesn't end, it transforms.
The Carried Forward Podcast is a conversation-driven show about what happens after loss. Not the moment of loss itself, but the long, slow, often invisible work of rebuilding identity, meaning, and purpose on the other side of it.
Host Robert DelFave is a grief coach, author, and someone who lost both parents young. He sits down with grief professionals, researchers, therapists, authors, and thought leaders to ask the questions his clients are living with every day. What does carrying grief forward actually look like? How do you rebuild who you are on the other side of this?
Hey, I'm Robert DelFave, and this is the Carried Forward Podcast. I wanna start with something someone said on the internet recently that stopped me cold. I asked a simple question on threads. What's the grief milestone nobody prepares you for? Not the funeral, not the first year, the weird specific one that nobody talks about.
Over 900 people answered. Someone said removing them as your emergency contact. Someone said the first time their shirt lost its smell. I lost him again that day. Someone said, I butt dialed my dad's phone and waited for the, did you just call me return call? That never came. Someone said 20 years on, and sometimes I still wake up forgetting they died just for a fraction of a second.
And then I remember in a pallet of bricks, lands on my chest, 900 people in two days answering a question about grief that nobody in their actual life was asking them that told me everything I needed to know about why the show exists. Here's what I've noticed, and maybe you felt this too. Grief is one of the most universal human experiences there is.
Every single person on earth will lose someone they love. Most of them will lose a parent, and yet we are spectacularly bad at talking about it. We get pretty good at the funeral. We show up with food. We send flowers. We say, I'm so sorry for your loss, and then about four months later, everyone expects you to be back to normal.
The check-ins stop work stops being understanding, and you're left standing there thinking, wait, this is real, and nobody's talking about it anymore. So people carry it alone. They carry it into their marriages, their parenting, their careers, their sense of who they are. They carry into the grocery store when they see their person's favorite brand of food and can't explain why they're suddenly crying in the cereal aisle.
They carry it for years, sometimes for decades, and a lot of them, a lot of us have never had anyone really sit with them in it, not to fix it, not to rush it, just to actually be there with them in it. That's what the show is trying to be. My name is Robert DelFave. I'm a grief coach. And I'm David Kessler certified.
I am writing a book called The Other Side of This. It's about grief for teenagers because the 14-year-old version of me needed it and nobody had written it yet. I lost my dad when I was 14 and my mom at 26 for about 20 years after that I carried those losses quietly. I got busy. I made my parents' death just a fact about me. Yeah, my parents are gone and I stopped seeing it as something that was still affecting me. Every single day because it was, it absolutely was. When I finally let someone sit with me in it, when I finally stopped carrying it alone, everything started to shift. Not overnight, not even in a straight line, but slowly something changed.
I stopped being someone grief was happening to, and I started being someone who was choosing what to do with it. That's the whole idea behind the show. Grief doesn't end. It transforms. And the goal isn't to get over it. The goal is to carry it forward to honor who or what you lost by living differently because of it.
So what is the Carried Forward podcast exactly? Well, it's a, it's a conversation show. I'm gonna be sitting down with grief professionals, researchers, therapists. Authors, hospice workers, coaches, people who've spent their careers studying what loss does to people and how to help them carry it forward. I'm also gonna be talking with people who have lived it, who've been through profound loss and come out the other side, not unscathed, not unchanged, but standing, building something, carrying it forward.
I'm not the expert in the room and I want to be really clear about that. I am a practitioner. I'm someone who has lived this and is now helping others through it, but I learn something new about grief every single week, and that's what you're going to hear on this. Show me learning alongside you. Every episode is going to come back to one question.
It's the question I ask every client. It's the question that 900 people on the internet were trying to answer when they described the grief milestone, nobody prepared them for. What does carrying grief forward actually look like? What does it look like to integrate a loss instead of just surviving it?
What does it look like to rebuild your identity when the person who helped you know who you were is gone? What does it look like to show up for your own kids while you're still carrying grief yourself? Those are the questions. Every episode is an attempt to answer them. Here's what you can expect.
Practically, episodes will drop regularly. Some of them will be conversations with guests. Some will be me solo teaching something specific about grief, about the framework I use with clients about what I'm learning. I'm not going to be polished. This show is not going to be NPR. It's going to be honest and a little unfiltered, and sometimes I'm probably going to stumble over my words.
Or go somewhere completely unexpected, and that's okay because grief isn't polished either. I'll always close every episode with the same question, the one I ask every guest, the one I want you to sit with too. If someone is listening to the show right now and they're in the middle of their grief, what's the one thing I'd want them to know?
Here's my answer for this first episode. You are not carrying it wrong. Whatever it looks like, however long it's been, however messy or inconvenient or embarrassing, your grief feels you are not doing it wrong, and you don't have to figure out where to take it alone. That's why the show exists. I'm Robert Delve.
This is the Carried Forward Podcast, and if this resonated with you. Share it with someone who's carrying something. Subscribe wherever you listen, and if you wanna go deeper, you can find me at robertdelfave.com. New episodes are coming soon, and I'll see you there.