A LIGHT ON CREATIVE PRODUCTION
An audio-documentary podcast exploring life, loss, legacy, and what it means to truly live
Created & Co-Executive Produced by
Conversations We're Afraid to Have.
73 Million Americans Grieving
Mortality is the most universal human experience. Grief touches every family, everywhere, always, but people avoid these conversations, leaving millions without a space to process it.
Audio-Documentary
Cinematic, scored episodes with the guests voices telling their stories
Hopeful, Not Heavy
Life-affirming conversations about mortality, meaning, and joyful living
Original Score
Composed by Heidi Webster, music is the emotional architecture.
Meet the Creators.
Theo Balcomb
Creator • Executive Producer
-
Created The Daily, The New York Times (2017)
-
Grew The Daily to 4M+ daily listeners
-
NYT won multiple Pulitzer Prizes under her tenure
-
duPont Award for audio storytelling
-
Peabody Award — Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop
-
Pulitzer finalist — Broken Doors (Washington Post)
Heidi Webster
Creator • Host • Composer • Producer
-
Hospice music therapist with 10 years working at the bedside of the dying
-
Award-winning singer-songwriter & composer
-
Wrote original song for The Eyes of Tammy Faye — performed by Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain
-
Songwriter for Paramount+, Hulu, Disney, Netflix, and more
-
Award-winning healthcare marketing & communications expert
We spend our whole lives avoiding the one conversation that could change everything — what truly matters in the end.
Eight Extraordinary Voices.
Dr. Russell Hilliard
Hospice Music Therapist · Author
Lost his mother at 19 — a loss that forged a 40-year career as America's pioneering hospice music therapist. Founder of Camp Kangaroo, a national bereavement camp where children learn to grieve by tearing through paper. On love as a verb.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Emmy-Nominated Writer · Death Doula
His grandmother, who raised him, showed him how to live — and her death inspired him to become a death doula, walking others through their final passages with the same grace she gave him.
Gina Moffa, LCSW
Grief & Trauma Therapist · Author
Lost her own mother, and brings that lived experience to her work as a trauma-informed grief therapist. Her book Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go is redefining how a generation understands loss.
Tamatha Thomas-Haase
Public Health · Metastatic Cancer
Living with metastatic cancer, navigating anticipatory grief alongside her family, choosing joy every single day. She is not dying — she is deciding what living looks like.
Colin Campbell
Academy Award Nominee · Author
Lost both teenage children when a drunk driver struck his family. He and his wife rebuilt their lives into a resource for the grieving world — his book Finding the Words is the roadmap millions have been searching for.
Dr. Julie Shaw
Grief Educator · Hello I'm Grieving
A professional athlete who lost her sister — and transformed her grief into Hello I'm Grieving, a community built on the belief that healing happens in relationship, not in isolation.
Fernando Murillo
Hospice Program Mgr · Advocate
Spent 24 years incarcerated and worked in California's only licensed prison hospice. His story of witnessing death behind bars — and choosing compassion — is unlike anything in podcasting.
Heidi Webster
Host & Creator · Music Therapist
A hospice music therapist, singer/songwriter, and podcaster , spent a decade sitting with the dying and changed her life forever. This podcast is the conversation she has been preparing for her entire life.