If you've ever made a decision out of panic — about your health, your grief, or your life — episode 418 of Grief and Happiness is essential listening. Author and life coach Mia Godfrey shares how losing her father, her first husband, and her sister across three decades left her without the tools to cope — until a therapist handed her a journal and changed everything. From the realities of caregiving to a terrifying liver diagnosis she refused to rush, Mia's story is a masterclass in never letting fear make your decisions for you.
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
(00:55) Mia Godfrey: author, life coach, keynote speaker, youngest of ten from Romania
(01:18) Three devastating losses across three decades — and no tools to grieve
(05:35) Why she left Romania: addiction, shame, and a love story
(07:46) Growing up under communism and her father's survival lessons on the Danube
(10:50) Her sister: 13 months apart, inseparable — and why her loss broke everything
(11:26) What 11 months of caregiving taught her about grace and self-neglect
(14:43) Why honoring a loved one's treatment decisions matters — even when it's hard
(17:23) The end-of-life conversations she refused to have — and what it cost her
(19:30) How to navigate conflicting medical advice and advocate for yourself
(22:41) A terrifying liver diagnosis and why she refused to let fear decide
(33:58) On living guilt-free while grief and happiness coexist
Mia Godfrey is a certified life coach, Bible counselor, keynote speaker, and author originally from Romania, where she grew up the youngest of ten children under communist rule. She came to the United States in 2008 through marriage, and over the past two decades has built a career spanning leadership, talent acquisition, and her own coaching practice, Scribbled Pages International Life Coaching. Her debut memoir, Buried, Not Broken: A Memoir of Survival, Sisterhood, and Starting Over, is the through-line of this conversation — a raw, cross-cultural account of loss, caregiving, and the unexpected healing that came from putting her story on the page.
In the episode, Mia traces a lifetime of grief she never had the tools to process: the death of her father at 18, the sudden loss of her first husband at 42 (whose end-of-life conversations she shut down, leaving her financially and emotionally unprepared), and the 11-month caregiving journey that ended with her sister's death from ovarian cancer in 2023 — the loss that finally broke her open. It was her therapist who suggested journaling, a practice Mia resisted before eventually turning those pages into her memoir. She speaks with hard-won clarity about what caregiving taught her: that self-neglect is not devotion (she compromised her own health so severely that she faced a frightening liver diagnosis shortly after returning home), that patients must be allowed to make their own treatment decisions, and that panic is the worst basis for any medical choice. Her own health scare — which resolved after months of conflicting diagnoses and a deliberate pause to research rather than react — anchors her central message: weigh all options, and never let fear make the decision for you.
Connect with Mia Godfrey:
Book: Mia Godfrey - Buried, Not Broken
Let's Connect:
The Grief and Happiness Alliance
Book: Emily Thiroux Threatt - Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief
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