Join Us For Free:
The Death Inside The Death
FREE ONLINE SUMMIT | SEPTEMBER 28 - OCTOBER 2, 2026
Click the video to watch a welcome message from the host
Death doesn't fix a family. Death reveals a family.
The greeting-card version says terminal illness gathers everyone at the bedside and dissolves the old grudges.
For millions of us, it does the opposite — and nobody prepared us for that. Not our training, not our therapy, not our culture.
And underneath the grief for the person, there's a second grief almost no one names: the death of the hope that your family would ever become the family you needed. The repair that ran out of time. That's the death inside the death.
For five days, we're going to name it — out loud, together, with some of the most trusted voices in end-of-life care, family systems, and grief work.
This is for you if…
This is for you if you're walking a loved one to the door of death inside a complicated family — feeling twelve years old again in the group chat, terrified of the bedside going wrong.
And it's for you if you do this work professionally — the death doula, hospice nurse, or chaplain who has made peace with dying itself, but is being quietly consumed by the family systems around it.
Either way: you're not failing. You were never given a map for this. This is the map.
Five days, one arc
Day 1 · The Truth Nobody Says Out Loud — breaking the silence about how common this really is
Day 2 · Why You Feel Twelve Again — the science of regression, and finding your adult self when the system pulls backward
Day 3 · Surviving the Foxhole — boundaries, scripts, and nervous-system tools for the acute season
Day 4 · The Death Inside the Death — grieving the hope that dies with the person
Day 5 · Portal to Healing — ritual, real forgiveness, and death as threshold
Meet Our Experts
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Amy Wright Glenn
Founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Birth, Breath, and Death
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Karen Wyatt MD
Hospice Physician, Author, Host of the End-of-Life University Podcast
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Kenneth J. Doka, PhD
Professor of Gerontology, Author, Senior Vice President of Grief Programs at Hospice Foundation of America
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Daniel Maté
Author, Composer-Lyricist, Podcaster, "Mental Chiropractor"
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Claire Bidwell Smith
Internationally renowned American therapist, author, and grief expert
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Stephen Jenkinson
Author, cultural activist, and the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School
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Wilka Roig, MA, MFA, PLC
Death Activist, Transpersonal Psychologist, Death Doula, Grief Counselor
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Pixie Lighthorse
Author, Grief Educator, Wisdom Keeper
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Francesca Arnoldy
Community Doula, Author, and Researcher, Founder of Contemplative Doula
Meet the Host
I'm Nicole Heidbreder — hospice nurse, death doula, and grief educator. I've accompanied hundreds of deaths and trained hundreds of end of life doulas. I can hold that room.
And none of it prepared me for my own family when my father was dying. I grieved him — and I grieved the family we were never going to become. That second grief is why this summit exists.
Come as you are. Bring the family you actually have.
How it works
It's free. Each morning, September 28 – October 2, you'll get one email with that day's sessions — join us live or watch replay available for 48 hours, watchable from anywhere, no camera, completely private. Built for people in the thick of it.