AUSTIN – I curled the microphone in my hands. Sweat dripped from my palms as I brought it to my lips. "Hello? Oh, that's loud," I muttered as the sound surprised me. It set the tone for a sometimes silly, sometimes serious conversation about death at the 2026 SXSW conference in March.
How did I get here? Four years ago, I never would've expected to moderate a panel in front of dozens of people, ruminating on grief and how death became the new wellness frontier.
Me? Grief? What did I know about grief? Sure, my grandmothers died, and I had friends whose parents died, and it sounded so awful and I empathized, or thought I did. But around this time four years ago, grief stormed into my life with Category 5 hurricane speed. It destroyed everything in its path and left me to clean up the debris of my shattered world.
My dad, Dr. Mark Oliver, died of rare fatal illness Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) over the course of seven weeks. I turned my pain and anger into action and wrote about it at work. I interviewed people about all kinds of losses, from death to unemployment. Mental health and grief experts told me that the journey is not linear, that everyone reacts differently, that there's no timeline.
