What does it mean to live on when so many of your loved ones have already gone?

How do you begin to navigate the survivor’s guilt left behind?

In Chapter 2 of Heather’s story, she helps us explore those questions.

She recounts her daughter Lexi’s cancer journey, hoping to save another child if she couldn’t save her own.

She shares how hospice taught her the quiet power of the will to live, and what it truly means to “be there” when someone you love dies.

Most of all, she teaches us how to say goodbye.

This is Last Words: Death Perception.
This is Heather Lawson.

You met Taylor in the debut episode of Last Words Podcast.

A 24 year old Li-Fraumeni patient embracing the unconventional.

Now, meet her mother — Heather Lawson.

Host Nic Main returns to Indiana to hear Heather’s story.

A NICU nurse, Heather reflects on what it means to work with such fragile lives and how her own story shaped her into an advocate for the mothers and newborns who enter her world.

She shares what it was like to lose her father as a teenager and years later, help her own children navigate that same kind of loss.

She answers the questions:

What does it mean to explain death to a child?

Where do we place the love that remains

after someone is gone?

Teaching us in crisis: everything has to change.

This is Last Words: Death Perception.

This is Heather Lawson.

This episode of Last Words is In Memoriam of Virginia Viviano.

Virginia was deeply loved by her family and known as a living example of unwavering faith.

Diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and given three months to live, she chose to face her final chapter with grace, courage, and conviction.

In this episode, host Nic Main makes a 12-hour drive from Mississippi to the Texas–Mexico border where he meets Virginia and records what would become her final interview.

Despite the pain, Virginia’s faith never wavered. In fact, it only grew stronger—meeting terminal illness head-on, with no stone left unturned.

She shares her living testimony as a devout Catholic, reflecting on how her beliefs shaped her from a career in radio, to serving in the military, to her view on the erosion of faith in modern society.

This is Last Words.

This is Virginia.