Ginna Roe lost her wife Candy to colon cancer after a six-year illness. The two had been together for 23 years and raised six children. Eight months later, Ginna's youngest son Jeremy died by suicide. In this episode, Emily sits down with Ginna, a former client who she helped move through years of pain and trauma. Today Ginna is the Founder of Sunflower Print Works KC, a veterans-for-peace advocate, and a public speaker. As she puts it, none of it would have happened without DEATH.

Ginna talks about the early days of her grief, when everything felt "dark and blurry," she dealt with it by drinking whiskey, and anger was the only emotion she knew how to feel. Things began to shift when a TikTok video led her to Emily's holiday grief program. She describes holding Candy as she died, watching the last heartbeat in her neck, and hearing a wail she later realized was her own. She also describes going from "a we for almost 24 years to suddenly just a me." Ginna deleted a dating app within an hour of downloading it because she couldn't answer a single profile question about herself. Then she spent the next year or so dating herself, taking herself to fancy restaurants and sitting in the middle of the damn room.

From there, the conversation turns to rebirth. A diving injury forced Ginna out of her job as a college custodian. Emily's deathbed ceremony showed her a vision of screen printing screens on a wall. The sunflowers she and Candy grew every year became the symbol for her new company. Ginna and Emily also talk about inner child work, EMDR, and making peace with the parts of us that once kept us safe. The episode closes with Ginna's move into activism with Veterans For Peace and her practical advice for anyone who wants to get involved during a collective DEATH of old systems. Her belief is that rugged individualism got us into this mess and collectivism will get us out.

Key Takeaways

● Grief needs community. When Ginna lost Jeremy, she wanted to isolate, drink, and avoid. She chose to reach out to her group instead, and that choice kept her from losing another year of her LIFE.

● Loving your grief isn't crazy. Ginna once thought Emily was "batshit crazy" for saying she loved her grief. Now Ginna loves hers too, because it keeps her connected to Candy and Jeremy.

● Loss can erase the self you built as part of a couple. Dating yourself is one way to find out who you are when you're no longer part of a "we."

● When one door closes, look for the redirect. A diving injury, a hospital bed, and a deathbed visualization led Ginna to the creative work that had been waiting in her all along.

● Your protective parts aren't the enemy. Patterns labeled "maladaptive" kept you safe once, and healing starts when you acknowledge them, care for them, and let them rest.

● You don't have to be political to show up. Existing is a political statement. Find a local group, a community garden, or a coalition of neighbors, and look out for each other.

Connect

● Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/

● Book a Wake-Up Call: https://iamemilybingham.com/wake-up-call

● Join The Bucket LIFE https://iamemilybingham.com/bucket-life

● Ginna Roe on Instagram: Ginna Is Enough - https://www.instagram.com/ginna_is_enough/

● Sunflower Print Works KC on Instagram: Sunflower Print Works KC - https://www.instagram.com/sunflowerprintworkskc/

#DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #GriefAndLoss #SuicideLossSurvivor #WidowLife #VeteransForPeace #PostTraumaticGrowth #InnerChildHealing #CommunityCare

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This week Emily sits down with Jeppe Ogard, a mindset mentor, coach, and author based in the Danish countryside who has spent 13 years helping people dissolve suffering and cultivate confidence, inner peace, and fulfillment. His work is rooted in neuroscience, human psychology, and philosophies including Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, delivered through global stages, workshops, and books. Emily found him the way most of us find our teachers now, through a scroll, when he said the thing nobody wants to hear: the root of your suffering is not your circumstance. It is you.

Jeppe built his acceptance muscle the hard way, through years of near daily panic and anxiety attacks in which the real torment was not the anxiety itself but the constant, exhausting fight against it. Fourteen months ago that muscle got tested at a scale he never asked for. Mid summer, feeling flu symptoms nobody else in his house had, he pushed for a second round of tests. The results were not burnout. They were severe kidney failure, a serious autoimmune disease, blood pressure so high it had caused small strokes and stolen his sight, and a stretch of hospitalization where the doctors ran cancer panels and no one could tell him what was happening. He thought he had a year to live. He is now stabilized on medication and looking toward a kidney transplant, which is not a finish line but another door.

What he describes from that hospital wheelchair is the whole episode: the thoughts still came, the pain was excruciating, the uncertainty was total, and yet none of it got to him the way it once had. Emily and Jeppe go deep on metaphorical DEATH and the ending of a version of yourself, on why what you resist persists, on treating yourself as your own best friend when grief arrives, and on the kinky cosmic joke that surrender only feels like defeat to the ego. "On paper, my life has never been more challenging. But internally, I feel like it's never been more easy and more simple than it is right now." No one makes it out alive. The only real question is what you let these moments show you.

Key Takeaways

● The suffering is in the resistance, not the experience. Jeppe's anxiety loosened its grip only when he stopped trying to outrun it and let it be there.

● Acceptance is a muscle you build before the crisis. The work he did on his panic attacks is what made space for him when the kidney failure and strokes arrived.

● Treat yourself as your own best friend. Most of us give ourselves almost no credit, compassion, or love while we are grieving or in pain.

● Meditation is watching the river flow by without touching the water. You acknowledge the anxiety, the rage, the grief, and you do not attach to it.

● Surrender feels like losing to the ego, but as Jeppe puts it, "we are getting the world in exchange for the ego."

● Mortality comes for everyone, physical or metaphorical. A life well lived, in his words, is listening much more than taking action.

Connect

● Death and Disco Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/

● Emily Bingham on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/

● Emily Bingham on LinkedIn: [LinkedIn TK]

● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist

● Jeppe Ogard on Instagram: [Instagram TK]

● Jeppe Ogard on YouTube: [YouTube TK]

● Jeppe Ogard on LinkedIn: [LinkedIn TK]

#DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #MindsetMentor #Acceptance #Surrender #ChronicIllness #AnxietyRelief #Advaita #Buddhism #ConsciousLiving

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Emily sits down with Lisa Pahl, CEO and Co-creator and owner of the Death Deck, for a conversation about what happens when we finally say the thing out loud. Lisa has spent nearly 20 years in hospice and about eight in the ER, and what she witnessed over and over was the same quiet catastrophe: families forced to make impossible decisions on behalf of someone they love, with no idea what that person actually wanted. So in 2018 she partnered with Lori Lo Cicero, the spouse of a former hospice patient, and built a card game. Multiple choice questions. A friendly little skull. Humor as the way in. Because as Lisa puts it, even though we think we don't want to talk about death and dying, we actually do.

The conversation goes exactly where you'd hope. Lisa reads a question from the deck live, Emily wrestles with it, and both women end up somewhere honest about what it would mean to know your own expiration date. They talk about the difference between mortality awareness and knowing the actual calendar square, about the battle and warrior language we drape over illness that makes it nearly impossible to ask a dying person what they want, and about the clinicians who should be starting these conversations and often don't. Emily shares the regret that still sits with her: Ian dying in front of her while the conversation stayed stuck in the room like an elephant nobody would name. Lisa shares her own humbling, caring for her mother-in-law in hospice and realizing she could not give anyone the perfect death, because it was never hers to give.

They also get practical, which is rare in this genre. How do you bring this up with parents who just turned 70? Complete your own advance directive first, then use it as the doorway. Use a TV show. Use a podcast episode. Use whatever medium the person you love already speaks. Lisa walks through her three decks, The Death Deck for mortality awareness, the EOL Deck for people living with serious illness, and the Dementia Deck for advance planning around the most feared diagnosis in the country. And she names the secondary gain nobody expects from a game about dying: when people talk about real things, they stop performing, and connection shows up. As Lisa says near the end, this felt really good, so go out and talk about real stuff.

Key Takeaways

● Peace at the end starts with the conversations we're willing to have right now, not the ones we hope to have later.

● Humor is not disrespect. Lisa built The Death Deck with multiple choice questions and a friendly skull specifically to make the topic approachable, and found that once people start, they rarely want to stop.

● Warrior and fighter language around illness can make it nearly impossible to ask someone what they'd want if the fight doesn't go their way, which is exactly why timing and receptivity matter so much.

● The burden should not fall on the family alone. Lisa argues end-of-life professionals need more courage to directly initiate advance directive and planning conversations with patients.

● Grief support is hard for most people because supporting a griever means acknowledging that we too will die.

● If a goodbye didn't happen the way you needed, it isn't closed forever. Emily talks openly about returning to that moment through healing work and rewriting the story in her heart.

Host, Emily Bingham

● Podcast Website: https://iamemilybingham.com/

● Emily on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/

● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist

● Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/i-am-emily-bingham/

Connect with Lisa Pahl

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedeathdeck/

● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedeathdeck/

● TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thedeathdeck

● The Death Deck: https://thedeathdeck.com/

● The Death Deck on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0aktSuXG

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#DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #TheDeathDeck #LisaPahl #HospiceCare #AdvanceCarePlanning #DeathPositive #MortalityAwareness #GriefSupport #EndOfLifeConversations #DementiaAwareness

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