Grand Exit

In this episode, Tamatha and Chelsea trace the “invisible threads” that weave through lineage, friendship, work and love, exploring the ways we are tethered to those who came before us and those we’ll never meet.

This conversation moves between the deeply personal and the expansively metaphysical. 

Along the way, the two friends ask: What parts of connection are already alive in us? How do we honor them? And can threads of legacy stretch beyond bloodlines—into the lives we touch, the work we pass on and the love we leave behind?

If you’ve ever felt a sudden kinship with someone, sensed the presence of those who’ve gone before or wondered what holds us together when nothing else makes sense—this episode – the Season 3 finale – is for you.

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What happens when something beautiful is complete — but you’re still afraid to let it go? And then what happens when you do it anyway?

What makes a moment a ritual—and how can those rituals help us live, love, grieve, and remember more fully? 

In this conversation with Megan Sheldon, cultural mythologist, lifecycle celebrant, and co-founder of the Be Ceremonial app, Tamatha and Chelsea explore the art of transforming ordinary acts into intentional, symbolic actions that carry deep meaning.

This episode is full of creative, deeply personal examples of ritual in action. Megan shares her four-part definition of ritual, the difference between ritual and ceremony, and why giving ourselves permission to experiment—and even “retroactively” honor moments we missed—can be life-changing.

Whether you’re welcoming a new baby, grieving a loss, or simply marking the quiet in-between moments of your own living, you’ll come away with ideas and invitations to make your own life’s milestones more intentional, personal, and alive.

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What if death wasn’t an abstract fear to avoid — but a relationship you could nurture? 

In this workshop-style episode, Tamatha invites you into the “bus lane” — her metaphor for living with the daily awareness of mortality — to explore what changes when you treat your own death as a member of your inner circle.

Through guided exercises, she and Chelsea unpack how your closest relationships shape your living, and then flip the script by adding death to that list. 

They share candid stories about regrets, legacy, and the surprising ways this practice can deepen empathy, clarify priorities, and even bring joy. 

You can expect to leave with prompts to examine your own “relationship” with your death — not to dwell on endings, but to live more intentionally, yes: now.

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This week on Grand Exit, Tamatha and Chelsea are profoundly moved by Myra Sack—author of Fifty-Seven Fridays: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way, and founder of the nonprofit Emotion—for a conversation about what it means to live in the deep.

After her daughter Havi was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs and given 12–18 months to live, Myra and her husband created a weekly ritual called “Shabbirthday,” celebrating the birthdays Havi would never get. What unfolded was a way of living that was raw, intentional, communal, and in some ways, unexpectedly full.

You can expect to hear:

- How ritual can hold what feels unbearable

- The moment Myra stopped ignoring her parental instinct, to hear what her daughter’s soul was saying

- What it means to “do everything” without medical intervention

- What it’s like living with one foot in the land of the living and the other in the land of dying

- And how Havi lives in ways that feel so…within reach
This episode is about grief, yes—but even more, it’s about presence, community, and how love can expand time.

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How do you know when you’re truly alive—not just happy, but whole?

In this episode of Grand Exit, Tamatha and Chelsea unpack the “vital signs” of living fully—not the medical kind, but the emotional, spiritual, and relational markers that tell us we’re awake to our own lives. 

You’ll hear:

- Why delight—especially in the joy of others—can be a powerful indicator of vitality

- How “shoulds,” ego, and obligation can be roadblocks to aliveness

- The role of collective wellbeing in our own ability to feel fully alive

- Practical questions to help you identify your own vital signs

It’s a conversation that invites you to monitor—not measure—your own aliveness, and to remember that engaging fully with life also means engaging with our own mortality.

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This week on Grand Exit, Tamatha and Chelsea are joined by Dr. Jared Rubenstein — a pediatric palliative care doctor who brings clarity, humor, and heart to conversations people all too often avoid, even in the moments they matter most. 

Together, the three explore medicine’s blind spots, cultural weirdness with death, and how care changes when we slow down and truly listen.

You can expect to hear:

• A working definition of palliative care; and what keeps 70% of Americans from knowing that
• How end-of-life conversations, and naming what’s already with us (instead of ‘staying positive’), can connect patients with family members and care teams
• Two questions that reframe everything: “At baseline, what does a good day look like?” And “What are we actually fighting for?”
• A solid (and goofy) reminder of how palliative care is the fire department; not the fire
  

And more…

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In this tender, funny, and deeply personal episode of Grand Exit, Tamatha and Chelsea introduce their moms—Susan and Tammi—for the very first time!

What unfolds is a conversation that spans decades: from giving birth during turbulent world events, to raising daughters who challenge and change them, to the shifting tides as the parent-child roles begin to reverse.

You can expect to hear:

- How they navigated motherhood through war zones, newsrooms, and small-town kitchen tables

- The arguments that broke something that begged for a rebuild anyway

- Family quirks and the little traditions that, often unexpectedly, become woven into legacy

- What they wish they could tell their younger selves about motherhood

This one's a rare, four-way conversation on love, letting go, and the joy of being “in each other’s orbit,” through every chapter of life.

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This episode reflects on End Well 2025 – an only-of-its-kind conference about death and life – through Grand Exit’s lens of legacy.

Rather than a conference recap, you can expect to hear:

• 5 takeaways that stayed with us — words that illuminate how tenderness becomes strength, culture becomes medicine for grief, silence causes suffering, and connection matters more than getting it “right.” 
• An exploration of what it means to live better because we’re willing to talk about dying better.
• A weaving of personal moments, redefined miracles, and the courage to meet one another where we are—without fixing, rushing, or turning away.

This one’s an invitation to choose depth over ease, conversation over silence, and legacy built in real time.

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In the Season 3 opener of Grand Exit, Tamatha and Chelsea dive headfirst into the tension between order and chaos, finding inspiration in the myth of Dionysus—the god of wine, revelry, and joyful disruption. 

From birth plans that laugh at our need for neatness, to cancer treatment decisions that trade certainty for quality of life, the two friends explore what it really means to loosen our grip and live as wildly and freely as their humanity will let them.

You can expect to hear:

• Why letting in a little wildness might bring you closer to your true self
• How (anticipatory) parenthood, illness, and activism crack open our relationship with control
• Stories that reveal how aliveness often lives beneath the surface, and how one person’s aliveness certainly impacts our ability to live fully.

This one’s an invitation to live in the questions, make space for the mess, and see what beauty unfolds when we stop clinging so tightly – especially in good company!

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They’re baaaack! Tamatha Thomas-Haase and Chelsea Leader Gold – two friends traveling the life-death-legacy continuum from very different, and always changing, vantage points – bring you a third season of their lovechild: Grand Exit.

This season, they’re hanging with life’s polarities – where joy and grief trade places without warning , and where endings often double as beginnings in disguise. 

They’ll feature some brilliant guests, like: 

Nikki Boyer: the Emmy-award-nominated Creator of the hit show Dying for Sex

Dr. Jared Rubenstein, a profound and inspiring Pediatric Palliative Care doctor

Megan Sheldon, Ritualist and Founder of Be Ceremonial

Myra Sack, a mother with a story that moves mountains, and Founder: E-Motion

Jesse Israel, meditation teacher, wellness entrepreneur and Founder: The Big Quiet

And…Tamatha and Chelsea’s moms!

Grand Exit Season 3 is a full-on invitation to live now in a way that will live on.

Be ready to re-enter when a new episode drops December 4 (and the rest, every other Thursday in season).

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In the meantime: 

- Catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 (Leave feeling more alive!)

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When Nikki Boyer’s best friend Molly Kochan was diagnosed with stage four cancer, she didn’t just face death—she rewrote how to live. Their journey together became the hit podcast Dying for Sex, now an Emmy-nominated FX series streaming on Hulu, and a testament to friendship in its rawest, realest form.

In this deeply personal (and dream-come-true!) conversation, Nikki joins Tamatha and Chelsea to talk about loving someone through the trenches, what Molly taught her about living boldly (and dying without apology), and the lessons only a soulmate can leave behind. 

You can expect to hear:

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More where this came from:

In preparation to introduce Season 3, Tamatha and Chelsea bridge the liminal space between, with a snapshot of where they are on this life-death-legacy continuum, now, and what kinds of legacy thoughts this time is eliciting.

Big announcements, big updates, and as always, big reasons to let this conversation open doors of its own in your life, with people who matter most to you.

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In this heartfelt conclusion to Season 2, Tamatha and Chelsea reflect on the journey of the past nine episodes—and the life season they’ve gotten to walk alongside you. 

With honesty, giggles and a few tears, they open up about where their conversations on mortality have led them, how Tamatha’s cancer and Chelsea’s hopes of starting a family shape their present, and what it means to carry legacy forward.

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In this episode, Tamatha & Chelsea are in deep and meaningful conversation with Carla Fernandez about what it takes to grieve well in a society that refuses to make eye contact with someone in the thick of it. 

Carla is the author of Renegade Grief: A Guide To The Wild Ride of Life After Loss (Simon & Schuster) and co-founder of The Dinner Party, an organization connecting young adult grievers to peers over community dinners that normalize grieving through honest conversations with others who get it.

You can expect to hear:

• What it means to be renegade griever

• How the curiosity in Carla’s early grief gave way to a powerful counterculture

• A moment of connection between Tamatha and Carla’s late father, Jose

• The dire need for not just greater grief literacy but grief allyship, from the group text to the workplace to Capitol Hill

• Some profanity (oops) because WTF is with people being so weird about loss?!

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More about Renegade Grief, The Dinner Party & Carla at-large:

If our legacy is a sum of all our parts, then that includes our biggest and brightest ideas…our beliefs, and how we piece them together. 

In this episode, Tamatha and Chelsea open the floor to listeners to share their ideas on what happens after life.

What happens to a person after they die? Is it the end? If not, then what?

Tune in to explore the source of some of these vivid and inspiring beliefs about what happens after we die, and most importantly, their implications on living, now. 

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In this episode, Chelsea and Tamatha are joined by four very special others who’ve never been in conversation together before – for a collective, existential dive into our own belonging, and how that informs what we extend to others. 

In our shared exploration ofthe role belonging plays in legacy,we’ll answer questions like: 

• Where/what do youcome from?

• Where/when do you feel like youbelong?

• How do heritage and belonging inform and impact how you contribute to the world?

Featuring: Harrison Nir, Colleen Ovelman, Clover Stieve and Karen Webster

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In this workshop-style episode, Tamatha and Chelsea take you through a sensory activity meant to offer a fresh perspective on how taking time to imagine the elements of your good death hands off to a better life and clearer legacy. 

It’s an invitation to dream of your dying - the moment that connects your living to your living on - in rich, vivid color for the benefit of enhancing your living, now.  Especially impactful for listeners seeking personal growth, legacy planning, or deeper introspection about life and death.

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In this heartfelt episode, dedicated to Chelsea’s dad, Tamatha and Chelsea discuss the complex emotional experience of caring for an aging parent – or really, anyone you love. 

They travel through themes like: 

• What it feels like to care for someone who is no longer who you always knew them to be

• Living fully vs. being alive

• How legacies can become intertwined

• The art of finding and noticing joy inside what IS

• And love, at the heart of it all

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Tamatha and Chelsea are joined by Merle Saferstein, Legacy Educator, Author, and perhaps most importantly, Grandy’s mentor. Together, they explore living (and remembering) with intention, and the different lenses through which people assign meaning to their lives.

With powerful anecdotes and introspective questions, this episode invites listeners to rethink their relationship with life and legacy.

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You know when someone says, "I'm living the dream." What's supposed to happen after that?

This episode, a retrospective, is a heartfelt reminder that dreams don’t just end when they come true — they evolve.

In it, you can expect to:

• Travel with Tamatha through the emotional journey landing her dream of attending daughter Harper’s high school graduation

• Consider the evolving nature of aspirations

• Explore what dreams are made of, anyway

• Awaken something in you that connects your highest vision for your life, to how you're living right now. 

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Join Tamatha and Chelsea as they kick off the second season of Grand Exit, as they share their update on ever-evolving relationships with time, planning, and hope, tackling life’s (very built-in) unpredictabilities, parenthood (and trying for it), and the emotional complexities of both giving and receiving care.

Discover the magic that surrounds meaningful conversations about life, death and legacy and the importance of “updating,” as two friends navigate living fully and embracing the inevitable, and encourage you to to do the same.

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Re-enter “the conversation” with Tamatha Thomas-Haase - a fierce public health professional living with metastatic breast cancer - and Chelsea Leader Gold -- a primary caretaker on the verge of starting a family.

This new season, an absolute (and unlikely!) gift, has two friends - in extremely different seasons of life - diving deep into conversations about living and dying, centering death as the doorway.

Be ready to enter Season 2 when Episode 1 drops November 21st! In the meantime, catch up on Season 1. Leave feeling more alive.

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Join Tamatha and Chelsea, in the the last deep-diving conversation of Grand Exit's very first season, in considering the many facets of 𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆.

This episode takes on: what home means, what 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 has to do with it, and where it fits with living, dying, and living on.

The two touch on the feeling of being "at home" in a place, what makes it so, which places have hit it home for them and - perhaps - why that might have been. Plus, they lightly explore, and draw on others' diverse and creative contributions around, where we return to after this life.

In this season finale, you can expect to hear shaky voices and sniffles alongside joy, clarity and power. And many thank-you's to the special people who set this stage.

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This episode features John Haase, Tamatha's husband, who's been in the financial services industry for the past 20 years. (You'll hear that in the way he shows up in this one!) Perhaps more prominently, John's also the CFO the Haase family, a role he plays differently these days as he prepares for his wife's eventual death and takes on more parts of parenting their daughter, all while also working to stay in the Now with Tamatha and those he loves.

As with all Grand Exit episodes, you can expect to hear shared laughter of people who "see" each other through life's stuff, depth and levity: together in a single thought, and the exploration of corners we tend to otherwise avoid. 

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In this episode, Tamatha and Chelsea are in conversation with Dr. Peter Gold, who found himself in the middle of a national news story in the Fall of 2015 when he was shot on the street in New Orleans while intervening in an attempted assault, it was all caught on security camera. Peter, now an orthopedic surgeon (and Chelsea husband), joins Grand Exit to tell the story of how close encounters with death inspired his upgraded approach to living his life.

You can expect to hear how Peter's second near-death experience -- on the front of a rocket ship -- gave him a gift he carries every day; why Legacy after living doesn't much interest him; and much, much more in a heartfelt conversation among friends.

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In this episode, you can expect to hear a hot take or two on: where Tamatha stakes hope; and hope in relation to action, to gratitude, to connection and more. Plus, an inspiring way-of-life story from Chelsea’s 100-year old friend Aunt Honey; and what Gwyneth Paltrow might say about all of it.

The hope? That listening to this conversation sparks a self-inquiry for you, shared with someone who matters to you, as the content here is a great way to start thinking and talking about how you wish to be honored - while living, really.

This episode is rich with deep tracks, with contradictions and incongruences, and a clear invitation for you to follow this lead and start conversations of your own in this vain.

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This episode is guided by 40 Living Questions -- meaningful legacy questions to ask your loved ones while they’re alive, so the lives of those who matter most don't leave you wondering.

You can expect to catch easy ways to engage with your loved ones to capture the essence of who they are and how they came to be; and to listen as Tamatha and Chelsea model answering a few of the questions, so you can get a feel for what's possible when you dive in.

In this episode, Tamatha and Chelsea invite you to explore imagination, how bearing witness to a good death allowed their guest - Court Fuller - to live more fully in their body, and so much more awesomeness to inspire a more self-directed life.

Court (they/them) is the Senior Editorial Manager for More Perfect Union, helping working people be seen and heard in media coverage. They’re also working with ninth graders in California's Bay Area on identity exploration and sex education. *And* they're Chelsea's sibling, Tamatha's dear friend, and a constant source of inspiration, some of which you'll catch here in this episode.

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In this episode, Tamatha and Chelsea invite you to explore a case of mistaken obituaries that may have led to the Nobel Peace Prize, to consider the eye-opening value of crafting your own obituary, and to join in an exercise that gets you thinking and writing about who you really are and how you intend to be remembered.

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In Tamatha's first round of treatment at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, she appointed three Chiefs of Staff to take on leadership of the parts of her life that she couldn’t lead at that time. Erin Rayne was one of them.

In this episode, we’re talking about the concept of a Chief of Staff (in a non-professional, deeply personal context) and delegating like -- and when -- life depends on it.

Erin Rayne is Founder of Good Culture Works, a coaching company that helps businesses maximize success by focusing on people as a top priority. Alongside two other co-Chiefs of Staff, Erin applied this same philosophy to her leadership role in Tamatha's life.

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"Is time a vessel? Is it a currency?" "Where do we hold time?" Co-hosts Tamatha Thomas-Haase and Chelsea Leader Gold are talking about the MYTH of TIME, the human-made system that yes: helps us organize our life, but sometimes keeps us from enjoying it, too. 

In this episode, you can expect to: Consider what your calendar says about what’s most important to you ~Think through how the COVID-19 pandemic time warp affected your relationship with time ~ Try on another way to think about “the right time” to do anything important in your life, especially considering tomorrow is not guaranteed.

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In their first-ever episode, Tamatha and Chelsea catch you up on the nearly three-year journey that brought the unlikely duo here with you today, relaying legacy lessons from life’s bookends.

The two introduce their shared POV on the life-death-legacy continuum, where the wellness industry falls way short, and the depth and gorgeousness available to all of us if we are open to starting conversations with ourselves and others about what matters most.

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