Sooner or later we all experience bereavement, grief and loss in our lives. So can we ever be ready for this experience when it comes?
'Death: a podcast about love, grief and hope' is a locally-produced show out this week, that tries to find some answers about how we can cope with grief, and how we can help others do the same. And the story's told by a man who's experienced an incomprehensible loss of his own.
In 2011, Mark Longley's daughter Emily was murdered in England when she was 17 years old. This bewildering event, Mark's attempts to come to terms with it, and audio collected from home videos of the young Emily, give the show a lot of its emotional resonance, and its driving force.
But it's not just his story: he speaks to others who have lost loved ones to suicide, illness, in accidents, and to old age. And- spoiler alert - despite all the cliches about time healing wounds and closure you're not going to find any nice, neat, simple answers here: the experience of grief's complex and confusing, messy and highly personal.
We share a clip from an episode of 'Death: a podcast about love, grief and hope' presented by Mark Longley and produced by Maggie Wicks for Newshub.
There are 3 episodes and they're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or from wherever you get your podcasts.