Losses Become Gains
Loss Doesn't Mark the Conclusion of Your Story
In an 18-month span, Tara Accardo lost her mother, her father, a long-term relationship, and her childhood dog. She was 27. She built Losses Become Gains from the wreckage — not as a way to move on, but as a way to move forward, carrying her grief with her.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Tara Accardo — grief coach, soul purpose coach, host of the Life with Grief podcast, and the voice behind Losses Become Gains — for a conversation about loss, and more specifically, about what becomes possible in its aftermath.
This isn't a conversation about moving on. It's a conversation about moving through — and about who we become when we do.
Eighteen Months
In May or June of 2019, Tara's mother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer — caught too late to be curable. From diagnosis to passing was roughly seven or eight months. She was 62 or 63. Healthy, active, vibrant, from a family where people lived well into their nineties. Tara still has trouble believing it.
Partway through her mother's illness, she underwent an emergency tracheotomy. Tara never heard her speak again. It's a form of loss that doesn't fit neatly into how most people think about grief — losing someone's voice while they're still alive, the relationship changing shape before the person is even gone. Tara names this as a grief in its own right, layered on top of everything else.
"My mom was my best friend. Not having that North Star in my life anymore — devastating doesn't even begin to describe it."
— Tara AccardoHer mother died on December 9th, 2019. Her father, who had been living with prostate cancer for five or six years, changed after that — became more reserved, more lost, more like he was simply surviving. His cancer metastasized to his brain. There were ambulance calls. ICU. A post-acute facility. Hospice. He died in July 2020 — the height of COVID, with Tara as an only child carrying the weight of it largely alone.
"I grieve my mom, I grieve my dad, and I grieve them both together — our family unit. It's almost three different losses. Loss like this touches every single aspect of your life. There is hardly an aspect it doesn't reach."
— Tara AccardoDuring this same period, Tara went through a breakup with the man who is now her husband — a relationship that had been quietly breaking down under the weight of everything happening with her parents. They reunited several months later. And then, in June 2021, her eighteen-year-old dog — the sister she always joked she never had — died. Tara describes sitting in the car afterward, forehead against the window, thinking: my entire immediate family is gone in a year and a half. How is this my life?
The Moment of Reckoning
One detail from her father's final weeks stands out. He had become lucid enough, even with the cancer affecting his brain, to tell Tara: I'm ready to go be with mom. Tara describes this as a moment where she had to, in her words, put her big girl pants on — to find a way to tell her father it was okay for him to go, while also asking him to hold on just a little longer so she could find her own footing first.
He did hold on a little longer. And when he did die, Tara was not okay — but she was not starting from zero either. She had already begun therapy a few months earlier, not long after the breakup and before her father's death. She credits that timing — though she didn't plan it strategically — as one of the smartest things she did without realizing it.
"It was like putting glue on a foundation that had already been completely shattered. So that when my dad did die, I was already in a mindset of: I don't want to be asleep to my life anymore."
— Tara AccardoThe Logistics Nobody Talks About
Tara is direct about something that compounds grief in ways that rarely get acknowledged: the practical aftermath. A three-year probate process. Hospital bills arriving for months. Decisions that had to be made by someone, and as an only child, that someone was always her — with family members who wanted to help but had never navigated this either.
"As if their absence wasn't bad enough — hospital bills, probate, logistics you can't be prepared for and are learning as you go. It made the grief worse. All you want to do is crawl in a hole. But if you're the only one who can deal with it, what choice do you have?"
— Tara AccardoThis period brought real resentment — not toward any person, but toward life itself. The familiar why me, why them, why now. Tara names this without flinching, because she believes grief that gets sanitized into something purely beautiful isn't honest, and isn't useful to anyone else trying to navigate their own version of it.
Mediums, Untamed, and Permission to Explore
Tara is open about a part of her healing that she knows isn't for everyone: she sees a medium. She and her mother used to watch Long Island Medium together — it was something they shared, a shared belief in continued bonds with people after they die. Within a week and a half of her mother's death, Tara sought out a local medium. The first session was rough — too soon, emotionally — but it gave her something she needed. Over time, with sessions spaced months and then years apart, it became a source of real comfort, eventually helping her feel that her parents were okay — which let her start to feel that she could be okay too.
Around the same time, a friend sent her a copy of Untamed by Glennon Doyle. Tara credits it as a gift — not because it addressed her specific losses, but because it made her feel seen in a way she needed. Walking, reading, sitting with her own thoughts — and, strangely, the isolation of COVID actually gave her permission to do that without the pressure of social obligations she wasn't ready for.
How Losses Become Gains Was Born
Around her birthday in early 2022, after a particularly beautiful medium session, Tara found herself telling the medium that she felt called to help other people navigating grief — parent loss, anything. She didn't know what to call it. In that conversation, the phrase emerged: losses become gains.
Tara is careful about how this is understood. It is not about finding a silver lining. It is not "at least you got something out of it." It's something more specific: an overarching awareness, a layer of compassion and empathy and patience that loss unlocked in her — not because the loss was good, but because of what she chose to do with what was left.
"I don't think I'd have a grief podcast if I hadn't lost my parents. Why would I? Everything their deaths have led me to — none of it would have happened otherwise."
— Tara AccardoIt started as a blog — Tara has always found writing cathartic. One of her earliest posts, about navigating a wedding without a parent, remains one of her top-performing pieces years later, because it names something almost no one talks about directly. From there came grief coaching, then the Life with Grief podcast, then soul purpose coaching. Tara describes the whole arc as simply following where she felt led — one open door at a time.
Grief Integration, Not Moving On
Tara's core framing is one of the most useful reframes in this conversation: grief isn't something you get over or move on from. It's something you integrate — it becomes part of the architecture of your life, taking new forms as your life changes.
Tara now has a two-year-old daughter. Her parents' deaths happened years before her daughter was born, and the shock has worn off — there's a permanence to their absence now that she's grown used to. But nothing prepared her for the specific grief of her parents never meeting her daughter. She always assumed they'd be there for her engagement, her wedding, meeting her child. None of that happened. It isn't fair, and she doesn't pretend otherwise.
"I have a choice. I can wallow in that, stay stuck and resentful. Or I can honor the griefy moments when they come up — and have people around me who can just sit with me and say: this really sucks, instead of trying to fix it."
— Tara AccardoWhat to Say (and Not Say) to Someone Grieving
Tara offers specific, hard-won guidance for anyone supporting someone through loss — grounded in the things that have helped her, and the things that, however well-intentioned, have not.
Why This Conversation Matters
Tara Accardo's losses didn't happen in a way that allowed for any kind of preparation — compounding, overlapping, arriving during a global pandemic, with no built-in community to lean on as an only child. What she has built since is not a story about getting over any of it. It's a story about what becomes possible when grief is allowed to be exactly what it is — without being rushed, sanitized, or silver-lined — and integrated into a life that keeps moving forward anyway.
Loss doesn't mark the conclusion of your story. It may, in fact, be where a new chapter begins. If you're navigating a season of loss right now, your experience doesn't define you — but it is quietly, persistently shaping who you're becoming.
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