When you’ve experienced loss it can be helpful to seek out others who have been through it too. Even though no one’s experience of grief is the same, it can help to connect to other’s stories of loss. In this article, we’ve listed some inspiring TED talks on grief and death. We hope you find something you can relate to or connect with.
Content warning: this article shares some TED talks that deal with subjects including child loss and suicide.
Grief TED talks
We don't "move on" from grief. We move forward with it - Nora McInerny
"A grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again. They're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on."
Nora McInerny’s TED talk on grief shares how she experienced a miscarriage, lost her father and lost her husband within the space of two months.
She doesn’t just use this opportunity to discuss her personal experience of loss. She also shares some of the most valuable information she’s learned by speaking to others in the communities she’s built through her blog (“My Husband’s Tumor”), hosting a grief podcast called “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” and creating a community called the “Hot Young Window’s Club”.
She takes a candid approach to death, reminding us that it’s something that all of us will face at some point and sharing her belief that we don’t move on from grief. Instead, it’s something that we’ll feel forever and that will impact our lives in many ways, including positive ones.
The journey through loss and grief – Jason B. Rosenthal
“I really am sad a lot of the time. I often feel like I’m kind of a mess... In the early months following Amy’s death though, I was sure that the feeling of despair would be ever present. That it would be all consuming. Soon I was fortunate to receive some promising advice… ‘You will find joy.’”
Jason B. Rosenthal was married to Amy Krouse Rosenthal. 10 days before her death, the New York Times published an article she wrote for its modern love column. It was called You May Want to Marry My Husband and was read by over 5 million people worldwide. The piece was a creative play on a personal ad for Jason. She lists how he looks, his hobbies, that he’s a good cook. She rounds it off, “All I can hope for is that the right person reads this, finds Jason, and another love story begins.” This TED talk on death discusses end-of-life care, the importance of support from loved ones and unexpected support you might receive from strangers.
Navigating the world of grief – Laura Thomas
“We all know grief. We all have our own experiences and our own ways of walking with our grief. None of which are wrong. Because we don’t only experience grief in the loss of a loved one. We also experience grief when life doesn’t go the way we wanted.”
After losing her brother to suicide, Laura Thomas found herself navigating the world of grief – a world that she initially felt completely unfamiliar with. This is a TED talk that almost argues we don’t need a “How to cope with grief” TED talk. She talks about how she realised that grief was actually something that she’d faced before and something that we all experience more regularly than we realise. When we lose a friendship, a job, a dream. She highlights how in big and small ways, grief is a part of our collective experience. She argues that rather than looking at how to cope with grief, “stuffing it inside”, we should learn to talk about more openly about it instead, normalising it and breaking down taboos surrounding it. Laura did this in her own way, writing a one-woman play that she produced and performed in. She also hosted post-show discussions to open the conversation around grief.
What makes life worth living in the face of death – Lucy Kalanithi
“Resilience does not mean bouncing back to where you were before, or pretending that the hard stuff isn’t hard. ”
Lucy Kalanithi and her husband Paul were both doctors who witnessed illness and death as part of their day to day lives. When Paul was diagnosed with a terminal illness, they had to learn how to face death on a more personal level.
This isn’t just a TED talk about grief. It’s a TED talk about death and dying in a more general sense. Lucy talks about how things will ultimately be okay. But that we need to learn that things “being okay” doesn’t necessarily mean survival or curing illnesses. She encourages us to reframe our perspective, accepting that death is inevitable for all of us, but also remembering that life can still be filled with “beauty and purpose”. She shares some beautiful lines, finishing on the note that “our job isn’t to fight fate, but to help each other through”.
A video game to cope with grief – Amy Green
“We’d all prefer to win, but when you discover that you can’t win, what do you value instead?”
Amy Green gives a personal and insightful TED talk on how to deal with grief. One of her sons, Joel, was diagnosed with an aggressive and rare brain tumour and the family were told that he had roughly 4 months to live. Amy had to explain to her two other sons what was happening and chose to tell them a bedtime story where baby Joel was a brave knight fighting a terrible dragon called Cancer. Joel responded well to palliative treatment and the family spent years together, rather than only having those 4 months. During this time, the family developed a grief video game called That Dragon, Cancer. It’s a memorial to Joel and aims to take families on a “journey of hope in the shadow of death”. The game encourages players to put themselves in the family’s shoes. There’s nothing that you can do in the game to save Joel, but it encourages you to focus on what you got to experience along the way instead.
How my son's short life made a lasting difference – Sarah Gray
“While there was nothing we could do to prevent the tragedy, I wanted to find a way for Thomas’ brief life to have some kind of positive impact… he’d be a good candidate to donate for research.”
Sarah Gray was three months pregnant when she found out that one of her twins wouldn’t survive. Thomas had a fatal birth defect called anencephaly, which meant he would be born without parts of the brain and skull.
In this grief and loss TED talk, Sarah speaks about how she coped with her grief by making sure that Thomas’ short life had a positive impact. When he passed away at six days old, she donated his body for research. She speaks of her experience at a grief retreat where she spent time with other families who’d donated their loved one’s bodies for transplant and research. She also talks about her journey in learning what Thomas’ donation did for scientific research and how it helped to bring peace to her family.
"Everything happens for a reason" -- and other lies I've loved – Kate Bowler
“It is a hard thought to accept that we are all a breath away from a problem that could destroy something irreplaceable or alter our life completely.”
This grief TED talk isn’t from the point of view of someone who’s lost a loved one. Instead, Kate Bowler is an academic living with stage 4 cancer. She speaks openly about her grief at the loss of her health and the grief her loved ones have faced in potentially losing her. After noticing that people often said, “everything happens for a reason”, she discusses her feelings on the quote.
“People are certain that it’s a test of my character or proof of something terrible I’ve done. They want me to know that without a doubt there is a logic to this seeming chaos.” She talks about how we want reasons and formulas for reassurance and to feel that nothing is lost, but this is a part of life we don’t have answers for. She encourages us to focus on what she believes is actually important instead – supporting each other through difficult times and appreciating the good that exists around the bad.
How loss helped one artist find beauty in imperfection – Alyssa Monks
“We're all going to have big losses in our lives, maybe a job or a career, relationships, love, our youth. We're going to lose our health, people we love. These kinds of losses are out of our control. They're unpredictable, and they bring us to our knees. And so I say, let them. Fall to your knees. Be humbled. Let go of trying to change it or even wanting it to be different. It just is.”
Alyssa Monks, an artist, uses this TED talk on grief to discuss her mom’s death from lung cancer. She talks about how she tried to find answers and ways to help her – how she spent hours researching alternative medicines, diets, juicing, acupuncture and anything else she could look into. She talks about coming to terms with the inevitable, letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable and focusing on spending time with her mother while she could. The TED talks goes on to talk about how Alyssa continued life after loss, focusing on how chaos and imperfection impacted her work and life outlook.
TED talks on end of life care
Let’s talk about dying – Peter Saul
“Obviously we are all going to die. But how we die is actually really important. Obviously not just to us, but also to… the lives of all the people who live on afterwards.”
Peter Saul is a Senior Intensive Care specialist who also worked as the Head of Discipline for Medical Ethics at Newcastle University. In this TED talk on dying, he focuses on end of life care. He shares how he’s found that very few people have ever told anyone what they’d want to happen to them if they ended up in an intensive care unit, meaning that families rarely know what decisions to make during emergency or end of life situations.
This is a TED talk on end of life care that encourages us to be more open with ourselves and our loved ones, no matter how hard the subject matter might be. He highlights how knowing what people want in worst case scenarios can remove doubt and reduce stress for those who might end up making important decisions about treatment, care and end of life experiences.
What really matters at the end of life – BJ Miller
“I am in no way suggesting we take a light approach to dying… there are mountains of sorrow that cannot move… rather, I am asking that we make space… to allow life to play itself all the way out – so that,,, aging and dying can become a process of crescendo through to the end.”
BJ Miller is a palliative care physician whose views on life and death changed when he lost both legs and an arm in an accident. His TED talk on end of life care talks about what really matters at the end of life, including stories of patients who’ve made decisions that go against doctors’ recommendations, and won’t extend the amount of time they have left, but will bring them happiness, comfort and joy.
This talk could give some useful insight if your loved one is making decisions you find difficult to understand, like discontinuing treatment, returning home rather than spending time in a medical facility or picking up a new activity or hobby that seems against their best interests.
My mother’s final wish – and the right to die with dignity – Elaine Fong
“It required us to talk about it. To talk about it with her doctors and hospice and with our families to make decisions. By having the conversation, it allowed us to come together to grasp what was happening, so we could have a shared language and a common goal.”
Elaine Fong doesn’t work in the healthcare industry. But her mother did decide to choose death with dignity – a form of euthanasia that’s legal in 10 US states. In this talk, Elaine discusses the difficulty of accepting someone else’s decision to end their own life. While this process isn’t legal in the UK, this is still a useful TED talk for anyone whose loved one is terminally ill or approaching the end of their life in another way. It places emphasis on the importance of talking about the hard things that we often choose to avoid. Whether that’s knowing what they want in regard to their treatment, life support, resuscitation, funeral arrangements or where they want their ashes to be stored or scattered.
Image by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash
