Love, Loss and the Light That Follows - The Story of Molly Cassaro Jones

Recorded at Jeff's kitchen table on a cold, rainy late October night, this conversation traces a lineage of people helping people. Molly Cassaro Jones—daughter of Irish and Italian second-generation immigrant families—grew up watching her grandfather defend dispossessed renters in Depression-era New York, her mother choose integration in 1960s Florida (“because I can make this choice now”), and her father welcome Iranian students during the hostage crisis. That inheritance of courage met an unthinkable loss when one of Molly’s 5 children, her son Pete, a gifted, big-hearted twin, elected to take his own life by suicide at the age of 23.

Out of grief, Molly and her family built The Pete Foundation the very next day—turning sorrow into action, silence into language, and stigma into community. This episode is a hand  ...