Finding Light in the Darkness with Maryanne O'Hara
Life, Death & The Space Between with Dr. Amy Robbins
Dr. Amy Robbins
4.8 • 585 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2021
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Finding Light in the Darkness – Surviving Devastating Grief -- with Maryanne O’Hara
“The miracle of human beings is that we are all able to go on living despite the certainty that we will die.” -- Caitlin O’Hara (1983-2016)
“You think it is all important, but all that matters is loving people and being kind.” -- Caitlin O’Hara (1983-2016)
Episode Summary:
How do you make sense of life after you lose someone you love madly? Can you even imagine it? How would you survive that kind of devastating loss?
In this episode, Author Maryanne O’Hara shares her story – experiencing overwhelming grief after the death of her too young daughter – surviving loss and celebrating life. Maryanne’s way out of the darkness was blogging, writing, and talking about her experiences.
While writing a book was not on her to-do list, Maryanne realized how healing sharing her experiences with the world could be, and wrote in her emotionally moving book “Little Matches, A Memoir of Grief and Light”. PEOPLE Magazine immediately chose it as their Book of the Week, calling it “bracingly honest and deeply comforting.”
Listen in to how Maryanne found light in the darkness.
Topics We Discuss:
- How Maryanne objectively pursued answers to what she calls “The Big Life Questions”, and settled into a belief of knowing “there is something more”.
- Living with her daughter’s long term chronic illness, and the impact on her marriage -- which managed to survive their ordeal.
- Exploring reiki, and end of life services, energy work, reincarnation, synchronicities. How her exploration and her experiences shaped her current beliefs.
- Her calling to help people write their legacy stories.
Get Your Copy of Little Matches, A Memoir of Grief and Light”:
You can learn more about book “Little Matches, A Memoir of Grief and Light”.
and purchase your copy here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Amy Robbins and welcome to life, death, and the Space Between |
| 0:08.0 | Podcast. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and medium. And here we explore life, death, |
| 0:15.9 | consciousness, and what it all means. I am so excited to have this conversation today with Marianne O'Hara. |
| 0:24.5 | Marianne has written books and published short stories before publishing Cascade, |
| 0:30.0 | a novel that explores what lasts. |
| 0:32.3 | It was the Boston Globe Book Club's inaugural pick, |
| 0:36.9 | a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, and |
| 0:41.8 | a People magazine book of the week. Little Matches, her new book, is inspired by nine livenotes.com, |
| 0:49.8 | a blog that Marianne kept while her daughter Caitlin was waiting for a lung transplant. |
| 0:56.5 | Since Caitlin's passing, she has been certified by the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine as an end-of-life dula, |
| 1:05.4 | so that she may better speak to the state of end-of-life care in our culture. |
| 1:11.8 | Harper Collins published Little Matches, a memoir of grief and life in April. |
| 1:17.3 | People Magazine has selected it as its book of the week and called it bracingly honest and |
| 1:23.0 | deeply comforting. |
| 1:25.2 | Marianne, welcome to the show. |
| 1:27.5 | Thank you so much. |
| 1:29.7 | I'm happy to be here. |
| 1:33.8 | Hi there. |
| 1:34.9 | I'm going to run through the public service announcements, hopefully quicker than you can |
| 1:39.2 | fast forward through this part of the show, which is my guess of what many of you probably do. |
| 1:45.0 | So if you have not subscribed to my newsletter yet, I have not been super great about sending |
| 1:51.4 | it out, but I am recommitting to it for the fall. |
... |
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