Andrea Girón Mathern (left) and Rebecca Luttrell share a laugh at the kitchen table during the Front Porch interview. The women host the podcast All The Grief, created through the shared loss of their fathers.

Grief hits everyone at some point in life, but it’s not something people readily talk about. Two women say they hope to open up the conversation about grieving so that “all the humans” who have experienced loss can find a space to feel better about sharing their emotions.

Andrea Girón Mathern, a social scientist, and Rebecca Luttrell, a psychotherapist, host the podcast All the Grief. Mathern works from a closet turned studio in her Park Hill home while Luttrell does the same in Longmont.

In a bedroom at her Park Hill home, Andrea Girón Mathern has transformed a closet into a quiet podcast studio.

Their friendship is evident through their conversation and laughter during a Front Porch interview around the kitchen table in Mathern’s Denver home. Yes, laughter can accompany a conversation about grief.

“Grief isn’t all sadness. There’s so much beauty and so much love, and there’s always laughter within it. I remember the first time I laughed after my dad passed away, and there was this mixed feeling—Does that mean I’m not sad anymore?” Mathern says.

The death of family members is just one of the many topics the two women explore in their podcast. The shared loss of their fathers is what brought the friends closer together.

“I just went to her (Luttrell’s) house and sat on her couch and cried, then everything was OK,” Mathern says. “I also was able to laugh and talk about it and not talk about it, and she just became an anchor for me during a really hard time—the grief and the shock of losing my dad.”

Mathern’s father died in 2020 so, like many others during the pandemic, she couldn’t hold a proper funeral and couldn’t grieve in person with her family. That’s how the two women became “griefy friends,” Mathern says—friends and podcast hosts who want other people to feel the same support.

“We suppress a lot of emotions,” says Luttrell. “That’s one of the big motivators for doing this podcast. How do we keep shedding light on what grief is, that you don’t have to be afraid of it, that when we let ourselves feel it, we can feel more fully into life? And how do we just normalize it in a culture that leans away from it? How do we keep people leaning towards it and wanting to engage in conversations? Like death and taxes, it is something we all will experience, and it’s sad that we don’t make space for that in our culture.”

Luttrell is a grief therapist now after years working with eating disorders. Grief, she says, “just kept popping up,” so it was clear to her that she wanted to be working in the area, because “it’s so different.”

Therapists are trying to fix anxiety and depression, she says, but she sees grief as something that can’t be fixed as much as supported.

Mathern’s career trajectory changed after her father’s death. Within a year, she quit her job at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where she’d been working for 10 years, and started to try to find what made her “heart happy.”

And now, at the beginning of each episode of All the Grief, the women greet each other with the same question: “How’s your heart?” Guests range from poets to authors and a death doula.

Mathern and Luttrell’s podcast focuses on emotion and creating a space where grief is not hidden but embraced. They say people have a desire to talk about their grief, to share their stories, and to be seen and heard, “getting to find safe space to talk freely about grief,” Luttrell says, and not to worry about tears or the fear their grief isn’t as important as someone else’s.

During times of year like Mother’s Day where people are supposed to be happy, Mathern says, “oftentimes the first thing we think about is death and loss.” She adds there’s starting to be more of a shift in recognizing that “it’s Mother’s Day. Remember, that’s not amazing for everyone.”

Mathern hosted a workshop last weekend that she says was designed as “a helpful resource for folks with complex mother relationships for whom Mother’s Day may be difficult or complicated.” (Information at tinyurl.com/FrontPorchMathernWorkshop) Also, the two women are hosting grief workshops and a three-day grief retreat in the fall.

All the Grief is available on Apple and Spotify.

Front Porch photos by Christie Gosch