Philotimo Life

Maria has a soft spot for this one. As a fellow Greek, and a fellow member of the Dead Mom Club, this conversation hit close to home.

She sits down with Gus to talk about his mom Julia, the woman behind some of his most viral social media skits, and the cookbook he wrote in her memory after she died in the summer of 2023.

If you've been on the internet in the last few years, you've probably stumbled across Gus's content. His skits capturing the gloriously unhinged reality of having a Greek mom, with all the intensity, the love, and food mixed together.

In this conversation, Maria and Gus talk about:

• What it was like growing up as a first generation Greek American and how that experience became the foundation of his comedy
• What it's like growing up between two cultures
• Of course his mom, Julia, and how her personality and cooking has left a lasting impression for so many people
• How grief moved him toward creating his cookbook, and what the writing process was like
• What he hopes the cookbook gives people, especially those who have lost someone and are figuring out how to navigate their new reality

 

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About Gus Constantellis
Gus Constantellis is a Greek American comedian, writer, and content creator based in New York. Known for his viral social media skits about Greek diaspora culture, he is now a published author. His cookbook — My Greek Mom's Cookbook. She Died. — is available now.

🎤 Gus on Tour — Get Tickets
📖 Buy the Cookbook
📱 Follow Gus on Instagram

 

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More From Philotimo Life

• Philotimo Life Services
• Musings of Mortals Newsletter

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Let the Kids Be Cringe: Toy Story, Play, and the Loss of Make-Believe

It's 2010. Maria is on her first date with her high school crush. They're in a movie theatre watching Toy Story 3. And they're both staring at the ceiling, trying desperately not to cry.

Sixteen years later, there's a new Toy Story in theatres and Maria spent a whole weekend rewatching every film in the franchise to get ready for it.

In this episode, Maria draws on her essay from Musings of Mortals to explore what Toy Story 5 got right about the world Gen Alpha is actually growing up in, with a world of screens before speech, cringe culture as social policing, and play as something increasingly rare and even seen as embarrassing.

This one covers:

• What Toy Story 5 gets right about the pressures kids face today
• How Gen Alpha is growing up 
• What researchers mean when they call pretend play a "metaphoric multivitamin" for the developing brain
• The steep, decades-long decline in free, unsupervised play and how this is impacting mental health
• Cringe culture as a social fence
• Why play isn't just for kids, and what it means to never stop being in a creative practice, no matter what form it takes

Because grief literacy is life literacy, and so is knowing how to play.

 

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Read the Full Written Version
📖 Let the Kids Be Cringe — Musings of Mortals

 

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Research & Resources Referenced

• Impact of social media on Gen Alpha — Annie E. Casey Foundation
• The decline of imaginative play in early childhood — Frontiers in Psychology
• The power of pretend play for children — Child Mind Institute
• Pretend play and early childhood development — Florida Atlantic University
• The decline of play and rise in children's mental health disorders — Peter Gray, Psychology Today
• Anxiety and depression in young people — PMC
• Benefits of play for adults — HelpGuide
• Adult play and wellbeing — National Institute for Play
• Ocean Vuong on cringe culture — Rolling Stone Philippines

You've seen these movies a hundred times. You know every word, every song, every scene. But have you ever stopped to notice how much death is woven through them?

Aladdin. Frozen. Beauty and the Beast. The Little Mermaid. Tarzan. The Lion King.

Every single one of these films includes death. Whether explicitly shown or simply implied. From missing moms and parents, to dying heroes or slain villians. 

This is what we watched as children.

In this episode, Maria shares her talk she did at the 2026 Dying Series Festival in Toronto to explore what Disney films are actually teaching kids about death, grief, and loss, and how this can actually shape the adults they become.

 

This episode covers:

• Why Disney films are one of the most powerful and underexamined sites of early grief education
• What peer-reviewed research reveals about how children understand death through film, and what the distinction between a protagonist's death and a villain's death actually teaches them
• How adult reactions in the room shape what children learn grief is "allowed" to look like
• Why euphemisms like "they went to sleep" can cause more harm than honesty
• Maria's personal experience growing up without her mom, and what it felt like to carry grief in spaces that had no language for it
• In Canada, roughly one in fourteen children will lose a parent before age eighteen, and what our systems are and aren't doing to support them
• How New Jersey became the first US state to mandate grief and loss education in public schools in 2024
• Why grief education belongs in schools, not just in crisis moments
• What it means to treat bereavement as a public health priority — and why The Lancet agreed in 2024

 

You can read a version of this talk on her substack here.

A Conversation with Tracey Robertson of the Home Hospice Association

What would it look like if everyone, regardless of income, background, or belief, had access to genuine, compassionate care at the end of life? That's not a hypothetical for Tracey Robertson. It's the work she's been doing since 2014.

In this episode, Maria sits down with Tracey, co-founder of the Home Hospice Association -- a Canadian nonprofit leading the way in community-based palliative care, death education, and grief support. Together, they explore what it means to build an organization in a space most people would rather avoid, and why that work has never been more necessary.

About the Home Hospice Association

Founded in 2014, the Home Hospice Association is a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that everyone has access to dignified, compassionate end-of-life care. Through community-based palliative care, grief support, and death education programs, HHA is helping to change the conversation around death and dying -- one person, one family, one community at a time.

 

Some Important Links

• Home Hospice Association
• Donate to HHA today
• Upcoming Events
• Get Involved / Volunteer

 

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Grieving the Planet Together: A Conversation with Laura Schmidt of the Good Grief Network

What do we do with the weight of watching the world change in ways we can't control? How do we stay present, stay connected, and stay human, when the scale of what we're facing can feel utterly paralyzing?

This conversation with Laura Schmidt, co-founder of the Good Grief Network, is one Maria recorded late last year… and it has only grown more relevant since.

The Good Grief Network is a nonprofit built on a radical but simple premise: that grief deserves to be witnessed, not bypassed. Through peer support groups and a structured 10-Step Program, they help individuals move through eco-anxiety and climate grief together, building emotional resilience and real community along the way.

Understanding Eco-Anxiety & Climate Grief

If some of the concepts in this episode are new to you, here are a few places to start:

• Eco-anxiety
• Climate grief
• Death anxiety and Terror Management Theory (TMT) 

Bonus Resources & Good Grief Network Updates

• Get Laura's Book – How to live in a chaotic climate
• Good Grief Network Programs
• Good Grief Network Events
• The Weight Of Climate Change – Written By Maria

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Grief, Memory, and the Stories We Don't Tell: A Conversation with Kiran Rai and Baljit Sangra

Some stories don't just move you, they quietly rearrange something in you. Time is one of those.

Last year, Maria sat down with Kiran Rai and Baljit Sangra, two storytellers whose work has long lived at the edges of what South Asian stories are "supposed" to look like. They explore grief, aging, love, and loss with an honesty and tenderness that is rare and necessary.

Their film, Time, is a deeply intimate documentary that follows an elderly woman navigating the loss of her husband to dementia. It's a meditation on memory, devotion, and what remains when so much has slipped away. What makes it especially extraordinary is that the woman at the centre of the film is Baljit's own naniji, Jeet Kaur.

 

About Kiran Rai & Baljit Sangra

Kiran Rai and Baljit Sangra are storytellers, filmmakers, and photographers whose work centres underrepresented voices and challenges cultural taboos around grief, aging, and family. Together, they are the team behind By The Kollective — a creative studio committed to authentic, human-centred storytelling.

 

🎬 Watch the Time trailer

🌿 By The Kollective

🖼️ Buy Baljit's Prints

 

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Ritual Is for Everyone: Ceremony, Grief, and the Moments We Forget to Mark

What if the moments we grieve most quietly are the ones most deserving of ceremony?

Maria sits down with Megan Sheldon, founder of BeCeremonial and one of the most thoughtful voices working at the intersection of ritual, grief, and what it means to be human. 

Megan is a cultural mythologist, humanist celebrant, and end-of-life doula based in BC. They discuss how Megan found her way to this work from a young age, what it felt like to experience recurrent pregnancy loss without any ritual framework to hold it, and how those invisible moments of change became the heartbeat of everything Be Ceremonial is built on. 

They also dig into what it means to approach grief and ceremony outside of religious tradition, and why secular ritual might be one of the most important things we're collectively missing.

Upcoming Events & Workshops

• End-of-Life Planning Process
• Ceremonial Training: The Elements of Ritual
• Pregnancy Loss Ritual

 Bonus Resources

• Scottish Paganism
• Homicide loss and grief
• Cumulative Grief
• Jessie Harold – The Becoming Podcast with Megan Sheldon
•  Grief in North America, a death-denying society

 

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Dead Mom? Same.

Maria sits down with Amanda Katz, founder of The Parentless Club, to talk about what it really means to live without a parent, and why community might be one of the most powerful tools we have for navigating grief.

After losing her mother at a young age, Maria knows firsthand how isolating this kind of loss can feel, and how rarely we're given real space to process it. In this conversation, Amanda shares her own experience with parental loss, what moved her to create The Parentless Club, and how a Toronto-based community has grown into a gathering place for people who just get it.

They explore why belonging matters so much in grief, how creative and communal spaces can hold what words sometimes can't, and what it looks like to build something meaningful out of loss.

If you've lost a parent, or love someone who has, this one's for you.

 

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About The Parentless Club

The Parentless Club is a Toronto-based community offering connection, shared understanding, and mutual support for people who have lost a parent. Through events, fundraising for mental health initiatives, and online resources, they're making sure no one has to grieve alone.

 

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Upcoming Events

• 🌸 Toronto — Motherless Day Tickets
• 🌸 Winnipeg — Motherless Day 
• 🌸 Vancouver — Motherless Day

 

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Bonus Resources

• When Your Spouse Loses a Parent
• Helping Children With Grief

 

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The holiday season is often called "the most wonderful time of the year," but for many, it’s anything but. Instead, it can bring a swirl of heavy emotions and bittersweet memories. In this more sombre, heartfelt episode (very off-brand for us – we know!), we dive into how grief and the holidays often collide, shaping everything from traditions to mental health.

In this quickie episode, we touch on:

• How grief manifests during the holidays
• Strategies for reimagining traditions and creating space for emotions, whether joyful or sorrowful
• Meaningful ways to support grieving loved ones, both during the holidays and as the new year begins

This episode is a gentle reminder that grief and love often coexist. We wish you the holiday season that you need, and we can’t wait to see you in the New Year.

 

Additional Resources:

• Supporting your mental health during the holidays – https://www.samhsa.gov/blog/supporting-your-mental-health-during-holiday-season
• Facing the New Year when you are bereaved – https://www.vitas.com/family-and-caregiver-support/grief-and-bereavement/holidays-and-grief/facing-the-new-year-when-you-are-bereaved
• Facing the New Year after the death of a loved one – https://boomingencore.com/facing-a-new-year-can-be-difficult-after-the-death-of-a-loved-one-e20939aa-01c6-4a23-adf1-4c200d251346 
• Setting your intentions for the new year – https://www.hospiceaustin.org/grief-and-healing-setting-your-intentions-for-the-new-year/ 

Philotimo Life episodes are now recorded in Miraki Life Workspace, a creative co-working space that fosters community and collaboration. Be sure to follow Philotimo Life on Instagram at @philotimolife and sign up for our newsletter at philotimolife.com/subscribe.

Background music by Oleksii_Kalyna from Pixabay.

Have you ever wondered why we carve pumpkins, dress up, and celebrate all things spooky on Halloween? In this episode, Maria dives deep into the fascinating history of Halloween, exploring how this beloved holiday evolved from ancient traditions to the playful celebration we know today.

What You’ll Learn:

• The origins of Halloween in ancient Celtic and Roman festivals
• How Samhain traditions influenced today’s Halloween customs
• The history behind trick-or-treating, costumes, and jack-o'-lanterns
• How Halloween transitioned to a community-focused celebration in the 20th century
• Discovering medieval traditions like “souling” and “guising” and their connection to modern Halloween activities

Important Links:

• Historical information on Samhain and Celtic traditions – https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/samhain
• The origins of jack-o’-lanterns and traditional turnip carvings – https://www.history.com/news/history-of-the-jack-o-lantern-irish-origins
• IMAGES: Absolutely terrifying turnip carvings that would ward off any evil spirit: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-people-carved-turnips-instead-of-pumpkins-for-halloween-180978922/

Philotimo Life episodes are now recorded in Miraki Life Workspace, a creative co-working space that fosters community and collaboration. Be sure to follow Philotimo Life on Instagram at @philotimolife and sign up for our newsletter at philotimolife.com/subscribe.

Background music by SOULFULJAMTRACKS from Pixabay.