Everything Changes Everything — A Conversation with Lauren Kessler on Love, Loss, and Walking Through Grief

What do you do when everything you knew changes overnight? When the people you love most are suddenly gone — and you're left standing in the middle of a life you didn't choose?

Award-winning author and immersion journalist Lauren Kessler joins Georgette on the Junk to Jewels Podcast for one of the most tender, honest, and profoundly moving conversations we've ever had. Lauren's memoir, Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk, is a book that doesn't just tell a story — it holds your hand through the hardest ones.

Lauren shares the deeply personal journey of watching her husband Tom choose to legally end his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis — and then, while still in the shadow of that grief, losing her beloved daughter Lizzie to a drug overdose. Two losses. Two different kinds of goodbye. Both saturated in love.

Rather than breaking under the weight of it, Lauren did what her body and soul demanded — she moved. She laced up her boots and walked 500 miles alone across northern Spain on the ancient Camino de Santiago — a pilgrimage that became the path back to herself.

In this episode, we talk about:

What it truly means to love someone through their dying

The unique grief of losing a child to addiction — and the stigma no family should have to carry alone

Why movement can be medicine for a shattered heart

What the Camino teaches you that nothing else can

How grief and beauty can live inside the same breath

And the profound truth that everything changes everything — including us

Whether you are walking through loss right now, supporting someone who is, or simply hungry for a conversation that doesn't flinch from the hard and holy parts of life — this episode is for you.