Pod Crashing Episode 282 With Author And Podcaster Annie Gudger Fascinated with the heart and its fifth chamber that holds more love, that holds shadows, Annie poetically chronicles her passage through grief and the beauty she found on the other side in her debut memoir, The Fifth Chamber. In 2022, about 60,000 children in the United States under the age of six lived with a single widowed mother, nearly three times the number of children living with a widowed father. Yet our society still shies away from open discussion about death and its aftermath, normalizing the tragedy and ignoring the pain. Crafted with lightning bolts of joy and sorrow, The Fifth Chamber is a tender and lyrical memoir about the dance of loss and life, and how grief can make the heart beat stronger than ever before. Annie and her daughter Maria Gibson have a podcast - Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude. For Annie, writing about love and loss has been her life’s work, publishing works in The Rumpus, Real Simple, Tupelo Quarterly, Atticus Review, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, Cutbank, Columbia Journal, and many more.