The Grief We Bury: Daria Burke on Childhood Loss, Collective Grief, & Estrangement

Daria Burke is an author, executive, and healer-at-heart. She's also a grandchild grieving for her grandmother and a daughter estranged from her parents. In this episode, Daria shares the profound impact of losing her maternal grandmother at age seven and how that early loss reverberated through her life. This loss and grief exist alongside the immense healing she's done around growing up in poverty, childhood trauma, and her parents' absences, addictions, and the eventual estrangement from them.

With the recent release of her memoir, Of My Own Making, Daria opens up about the moment, decades later, that reawakened the grief for her grandmother - finding a newspaper article about her fatal car accident. That discovery, and ensuing grief, started a new chapter in Daria's healing process. In our conversation, we talk about inherited trauma, the emotional weight of estrangement, the invisible grief of childhood neglect, Daria's healing practices, and how she stays connected to her grandmother through what she calls “love taps.”

Key Topics:

• What role Daria's grandmother played in her early childhood

• The ongoing impacts of childhood grief and unprocessed trauma

• How truth-telling is part of healing

• The collective grief she grew up around in Detroit of the 1980's

• Uncovering the grief she buried after her grandmother died

• Grieving for family members who are still alive

Grief Practices Daria Shares:

• Giving herself permission to cry freely

• Meditative practices to connect with her grandmother

• Volunteering on holidays and creating new rituals

• Finding signs from her grandmother in the world around her

Daria Burke is an American writer, speaker and award-winning business leader. A marketer by trade and a seeker at heart, Daria is a storyteller and sense-maker, weaving together personal experience and the science of healing and transformation to explore new ways of understanding how we choose who we become. This passion led her to complete Dr. Tara Swart’s Neuroscience for Business course at MIT and Positive Psychology and Well-Being at Stanford, taught by Dr. Daryn Reicherter, an international expert in trauma psychiatry.

Her debut memoir, OF MY OWN MAKING (April 2025) explores trauma, neuroplasticity, and Post-Traumatic Growth through the lens of her own healing journey. Kiese Laymon called it “as profound a book about the treacherous experience of befriending ourselves as I’ve read this decade.” Part memoir, part methodology, OF MY OWN MAKING blends personal narrative with scientific insight, Daria inspires readers to reimagine the narratives that define their lives.

Connect with Daria:

• Website: www.dariaburke.com

• Instagram: @dariaburke

Resources & Links:

• Dougy Center: www.dougy.org

• Email the show: griefoutloud@dougy.org

Grief Out Loud is produced by Dougy Center: The National Grief Center for Children & Families, and is supported in part by The Chester Stephan Endowment Fund.