After a ten-year career as a theater actress in Miss Saigon and other international productions, Lissa Romero de Guia was living a joyful family life in Baguio with two young children when she suddenly lost her husband, the filmmaker Kidlat de Guia, who died in his sleep while visiting Spain in 2022.

When he died, Lissa had just taken a workshop on grieving after losing a close friend. She had also been doing yoga and meditation, and had experience counseling traumatized typhoon victims. A newspaper columnist and author, she has been writing openly about her grief and offers an example of how to deal with such a devastating loss. “I don’t cope, I just allow,” she tells Howie Severino. “You should allow the crucible of that pain, that experience to shape you, to change you… I feel like that is the gift.”

She and her two children, now 10 and 8, remember Kidlat every day, so they still feel his presence.

“My joke is that Kidlat couldn't have died at a better time in my life because in my 50 years here on Earth, I've gravitated towards practices that are really about soothing the highly anxious child inside.”

In this revealing conversation, De Guia talks about those practices, but also about the importance of writing to “right things” and adjusting to life as a single parent. She shares advice on how to talk to people going through loss. She quotes another writer who said, “Every love story is a ghost story.” She explains what that means in this episode.