Lisa Smart on how to live her best life after her daughter’s death

Therapy Works · 2023-07-12

There are some episodes of this podcast that are more heart-breaking than others. This is one of them. Lisa Smart describes in loving detail the terminal diagnosis, illness, and the death of her beloved 22 year old daughter, Emily. Lisa also shows us how she has learned to live and love again despite the tragedy of her daughter’s death.

In this episode we discuss:

How living with someone who is dying focuses the mind, and helps you recognise the preciousness of time. Things that don’t matter fall away.

Despite her daughter’s inability to move, she guided the whole family through the last 6 months of her life – you will learn what a difference this capacity to plan, prepare and act (e.g. planning her funeral, writing letters) makes to the living after her death.

We discuss the fear around death and how the antidote to that fear is love. Emily loved them all into their future without her.

We discuss how different family members navigated their grief in different ways.

We explore how we are all changed by grief.

We talk about how our relationship with the person we love who has died changes but continues after the death.

How connecting with the person after their death, feeling close to them can help with the loss

Support links:
My Grief Works app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/grief-works-self-care-love/id1558867513
Child Bereavement UK: https://www.childbereavementuk.org/
Cruse Bereavement Support: https://www.cruse.org.uk/

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Therapy Works

Bestselling author and psychotherapist, Julia Samuel, invites us into her therapy room as she talks to both known and unknown voices about some of life’s biggest challenges.

Therapy Works is full of therapeutic conversations which may contain difficult emotions but those that can paradoxically bring light, in all its form.

Listeners will hear what the guests have learnt, failed to learn and how they have grown through their experience. At the end of each episode, Julia reflects on her session with her two psychotherapist daughters who will share their thoughts on the conversation. You’ll quickly discover that not all therapists agree on everything!

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