"Grief isn't a game. There are no winners, just people trying to survive."

In this solo deep-dive episode of Grief'd Up, host Rebecca Feinglos steps back from the personal interview format and does something she's been wanting to do for a while: pull apart a story about grief that's being told out in the world.

Rebecca has spent years watching the sports world handle grief in a very specific way. The halftime human interest segment. The music goes quiet, the lighting dims, a black-and-white photo fades in, and a player's loss becomes the emotional centerpiece of the broadcast. The narrative is always the same: tragedy strikes, the team rallies, the player perseveres, and by the time the game cuts back in for the second half, we're in tears. Rebecca calls this grief porn, the polished, emotionally manipulative version of loss that tells us if we channel our sadness into something productive, we can outrun the pain altogether.

To examine it, she turns to a real story, one that belongs to her friend of over 20 years, Evan Fjeld. In 2010, Evan was playing basketball at the University of Vermont when his mother, Susan, died of cancer just days before the America East Championship game. Vermont won, punching their ticket to the NCAA tournament, and suddenly Evan's story was everywhere. Articles, interviews, and emotional close-ups of his father in the stands. What the cameras didn't capture was what Evan actually felt. Fifteen years later, he told Rebecca the truth: he wasn't playing for his mom, and he wasn't channeling his grief into triumph. Rebecca also speaks with Dr. Natasha Trujillo, a counseling and sports psychologist in Denver who works with grieving athletes, about the very real fallout of these narratives, including the impossible pressure placed

Join Rebecca for this honest, unscripted look at the grief stories we tell, the myths they reinforce, and what it looks like when someone tells the truth about loss because, as she reminds us, grief doesn't end when the buzzer sounds.

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What Sports Halftime Stories Get Wrong About Loss