Parenting with Cancer Webinar and Panel Series

Parent Panel: Navigating Anticipatory Grief
Date: Wednesday, September 30
Time:  11 am PT | 12 pm MT | 1 pm CT | 2 pm ET
Register Here

When your partner has metastatic or advanced cancer, grief can begin long before the loss—while you’re still parenting, making memories, hoping for more time, and trying to hold everything together. You may find yourself feeling overwhelmed, scared, angry, numb, or heartbroken, sometimes all in the same day. In this honest and heartfelt parent panel, bereaved parents will share what anticipatory grief looked and felt like for them, including the moments they didn’t expect and the things that helped them get through. As parents to very young children through teenagers, they’ll also share how they talked to their kids and helped them to cope through the death of a parent. Hear from parents who have been where you are. You don’t have to navigate this complicated journey alone.

This panel is a partnership between Bright Spot Network and Inheritance of Hope. 

This is for parents with cancer, their loved ones, and cancer care teams that support them.

Panelists:

Tessa Martinson, Moderator (Inheritance of Hope) is from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and brings a background in education along with a deeply personal understanding of the challenges families face after a life-threatening diagnosis. As the mother of two young children, she cared for her husband throughout his cancer journey before experiencing the profound loss of his death. Today, she serves on staff with Inheritance of Hope, where she uses both her professional experience and personal story to encourage and equip families navigating the realities of terminal illness. Tessa is passionate about helping families find connection, community, and hope in the midst of life's hardest seasons.  

Anina Winter is a mom to two little girls, aged 4 and 2. She lost her husband to esophageal cancer in July 2025, just 10 months after diagnosis. It took months after her husband’s diagnosis for her to figure out what she was feeling was grief. Once she discovered that anticipatory grief was a thing, she dove into her own research and learning journey which helped normalize and give words to the feelings she was having.

Chris Powell is a single dad to his six-year-old daughter, Waverly. His wife Blythe died in May 2024 after living with terminal brain cancer for a little over three years. Chris was her primary caregiver for all of it, while raising a small kid in the same house on the same days. He is learning to take all of it, the grief and the sadness and the actual happiness, without picking one and without making anything up.