As a glass-ceiling cracking journalist, Betty Rollin knew quite a lot about life and death. She was a hard-working, female broadcast reporter with NBC News who typified the now outdated descriptor “career girl,” a term that at age 87, she found amusing.

Grief comes and takes what it wants, when it wants. You have no say. That’s how Jess O’Neill explains trying to make sense of the nearly eight years after the sudden death of his fiancé Beshara Shiferawe in 2016.

Grief is an initiation into the dark side of being human and it requires courage. So says licensed mental health therapist Emily Green who describes grief as an ongoing negotiation with oneself about how to feel, what to think and how to act.

Peter King is the quintessential eternal optimist. He is also charmingly philosophical. At the same time, Peter is a working journalist and therefore, he has always been a realist, accepting life’s hardest moments as well as new adventures, including love.