How to Deal With Grief
Drs. Williams, Guthrie, and Greene welcome Dr. Karla Booker, a fellow OB/GYN physician, for a conversation centered on her book, “”Seventy-One Days: How to Say Goodbye When Death Says Hello, A Caregiver’s Guide.”” Dr. Booker wrote the book, at her now-husband’s encouragement, about her experience caring for her late husband, Kent, and what she carries forward from that time. She describes writing it as an extended, organic conversation with her publisher rather than sitting down to write alone, intentionally shaping the book around a small set of themes rather than a complete account of everything she experienced.
The conversation centers on caregiving and self-care through loss rather than the details of Kent’s death itself; Dr. Booker is explicit that she wanted the book to be about what can be carried forward from pain, not only about the loss.
Given the sensitive subject matter, this synopsis stays at a general level. Recommend Chase/Annice confirm tone and any internal-linking decisions before this page goes live, and consider whether a softer publishing treatment (less SEO-aggressive title framing, careful meta wording) is appropriate here, consistent with how S8E5/E6 were handled.
Transcript:
Take Good Care Podcast
Episode Title: Seventy-One Days: Caregiving, Loss, and Healing with Dr. Karla Booker
Hosts: Dr. Mironda Williams, Dr. Deanna Guthrie, Dr. Karen Greene
Guest: Dr. Karla Booker, MD (OB/GYN, Family Medicine Physician, Author)
Episode Overview
Drs. Williams, Guthrie, and Greene welcome fellow OB/GYN and family medicine physician Dr. Karla Booker to the Take Good Care podcast. Dr. Booker shares the story behind her book, Seventy-One Days: How to Say Goodbye When Death Says Hello, A Caregiver’s Guide, which details her journey caring for her late husband, Kent, after a sudden stage IV lung cancer diagnosis. Encouraged by her now-husband, Kenneth, Dr. Booker developed the book through organic, transcribed conversations with a publishing coach, intentionally focusing on themes of vulnerability, self-care, and intentionality rather than just an exhaustive account of grief.
The conversation explores redefining our relationship with loss, breaking past social discomfort surrounding death, and moving through grief with purpose. Dr. Booker discusses balancing professional medical knowledge with personal caregiving, processing anger and vulnerability, and eventually opening her heart to love again.
Key Discussion Points
- Conversational Authorship: How Dr. Booker created her memoir through structured verbal storytelling rather than traditional isolated writing.
- Redefining Loss & Grief: Reframing death as another iteration of life and moving beyond passive wallowing through intentional timelines (30, 60, 90 days).
- The 71-Day Journey: The whirlwind timeline from childhood sweethearts reconnecting at age 50 to an ICU wedding ceremony and Kent’s passing.
- Supporting Those in Pain: Moving past empty platitudes (“God knows best”) to offer genuine presence, open-ended support, and honest connection.
- Vulnerability & Spiritual Growth: Unpacking childhood patterns, letting go of the need for perfection, and recognizing marriage as a covenant anchored in faith.
Featured Guest & Resources
- Guest: Dr. Karla Booker, MD
- Book: Seventy-One Days: How to Say Goodbye When Death Says Hello, A Caregiver’s Guide (Available on Amazon, Audible, and Barnes & Noble)
- Website: drkarlabooker.com
Full Episode Transcript
Dr. Mironda Williams: Welcome to Take Good Care podcast.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: An endeavor that grew out of our love for obstetrics and gynecology. Our aim and mission is to serve as a source of vital information for women of all races, ages, and walks in life.
Dr. Mironda Williams: I am Dr. Mironda Williams.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: I’m Dr. Deanna Guthrie.
Dr. Karen Greene: And I’m Dr. Karen Greene.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Welcome to our show.
Dr. Karen Greene: Welcome to our show.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: Welcome to our show.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Welcome to this episode of Take Good Care podcast. I’m Dr. Mironda Williams.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: I’m Dr. Deanna Guthrie.
Dr. Karen Greene: And I’m Dr. Karen Greene.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Today, we’re excited that we have another wonderful guest in studio with us. For those of you who are checking us out on our website and our YouTube channel with the video, you can see that we have another person in here with us, and we’re so excited about that. I’m going to introduce her to you in just a minute, but as you can also tell, we are trying to up our game as it relates to our studio, and we are now on-air.
So, today, we have Dr. Karla Booker here with us, and I’m going to read a little bit from her wonderful bio just so we can introduce her to our audience. Dr. Karla Booker was born in Washington, D.C. while her father was completing medical school at Howard University. She had dreamt of becoming a physician since the age of 11. She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the third generation in her family to attend Hampton University, where she was a pre-med major. She is a graduate of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, which is the second historically Black medical school in the United States. At the time of this recording, we’re just starting into Black History Month as well as Heart Health Month, so we’re especially proud to have an HBCU double graduate here in the house.
She completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Georgia Baptist Medical Center here in the Atlanta area. She completed her chief residency year at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, and she practiced OB/GYN for 13 years, serving as the department chair at Southside Medical Center, the largest community health center in the southeast. Then, because she didn’t have anything else that she needed to do in order to expand her scope of practice, she completed a second residency—
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: I couldn’t have done that.
Dr. Mironda Williams: I couldn’t either.
Dr. Karen Greene: Me neither.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: I was not going back.
Dr. Mironda Williams: No. …in family medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine, my alma mater, and she was appointed assistant professor and director of the Maternal Child Health division there. Currently, she is practicing urgent care at WellStar Health System, but she likes to say her favorite titles are grandmommy, world traveler, and an avid crocheter. She’s an artist when it comes to crocheting. She has three beloved grown children and two delightful grandsons, Trey and Hunter.
But we have Dr. Karla here—she could talk about, as you can tell, any number of things, but to get us started, we really wanted to get her on our show to talk about this amazing, amazing book that she has written. It’s called Seventy-One Days: How to Say Goodbye When Death Says Hello, A Caregiver’s Guide, and we’re going to get into the specifics of how she came to write this book.
Karla and I truly… I call her my Facebook friend, because we knew each other peripherally because of our Morehouse School of Medicine connection, but had never really met-met or talked. Just because we were all OB/GYN physicians, we would be in some of the same circles, but when she was going through what she talks to us about in this book, I connected with her on Facebook. She mentioned in the book that as she shared her story on Facebook, there were thousands who fell in love with her and her then-husband on their journey, and I was one of those thousands. So, Karla’s book is an amazing accounting of her personal journey through what happened with her late husband Kent, the lessons that she learned, and what she wants to share with us and our broader audience in general.
One of the things that I think this book really spoke to me in terms of general themes are the things that keep recurring: the need to be vulnerable, the need to be intentional, and the need to be present. Karla is someone that I tell all the time, “I want to be like you. You’re my Facebook guru.” Karla is present in whatever she’s doing, and it comes across even on social media. She’s intentional about whatever she does, and she has been amazing in her vulnerability in sharing everything in this book and in other parts of her life.
So, Karla, can you tell us the story of how you came to write this amazing book?
Dr. Karla Booker: Wow. It’s interesting—my now-husband (I remarried) said, “You have to write a book. You can’t have gone through what you went through, and the way that you went through it, and the grace with which you shared it, and the overall openness of your life, without sharing it.” There were people who saw it happening on Facebook, but there were people who missed it, and those who missed it missed something. My husband said that he loved Kent too, because I wouldn’t be the woman I am right now for him if I hadn’t gone through what I went through with Kent. So, he just kept pushing me, and I was like, “Oh, come on, I’m old now.” And he said, “You got to do it.”
So, this time last year, I met the woman who became my publisher and writing coach at a Pink Goes Red event. I was telling her about me, she told me about her, and she said, “I’m a publisher.” I told her I had just gone to a writers’ convention that December in Puerto Rico, and I wasn’t inspired; there wasn’t anything making me sit down to write. She said, “Let’s do it like this: let’s talk about the concept, what you want to say, and then you just tell me.” So, we transcribed the conversations, edited them, and it became a book.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Wow.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: Oh, wow.
Dr. Karen Greene: Oh, wow.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Amazing.
Dr. Karla Booker: So, it was fantastic.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: So, it wasn’t actually sitting at a computer…
Dr. Karla Booker: I tried it. I would block out time in my schedule, and I would…
Dr. Karen Greene: That didn’t work?
Dr. Karla Booker: It did not work. But to just sit and organically talk about it over hours and hours of conversation, and then pull out, “Hey, these are themes that go together. Okay, well, this section is talking about self-care and you as a caregiver.”
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: Gotcha.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Amazing.
Dr. Karen Greene: I wondered how the book… because the book really flows. I didn’t know the story beforehand, so I was a little shocked when I started reading it. As I was reading, I felt like, “She’s talking to me.” I call myself an avid reader, but I hadn’t read in a while, and it was really nice to read the whole thing, digest it, and go back to certain parts. So, that explains why it flowed like a conversation.
Dr. Karla Booker: It was a conversation. We talked about how long it should be and how deep it should go. Some people have said, “Oh, but there’s so much stuff you missed.” And it’s like, no, we were very intentional about what we included and what we didn’t. I wanted to use our love story as a space to ask, “Inside of all of that pain, what can I bring from it?” I thought that was a bigger story than just the death of this wonderful man.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Yeah.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: For people who don’t know, can you give a short synopsis?
Dr. Karla Booker: Oh, sure. Kent Smith was my boyfriend in the fifth grade. I was probably in love with him when I was nine years old in the third grade, and our families were very close. There were very few Black families in Marin County when we were there, and he was just a knight in shining armor for me. My house was very chaotic with single-parent struggles, and he was just there being lovely to me—a pre-puberty little girl being cared for, and it was a lovely feeling.
We found each other again later—he was at Howard and I was at Hampton—and we had a wonderful weekend together. Then I didn’t see him again until I was 50 years old. I saw him on Facebook smoking his last cigarette (foreshadowing), and I was impressed that at 50 years old someone said, “I’m going to be done with this habit.” He messaged me and said, “I’m sure you and your husband are very proud of your daughter’s wedding.” I said, “I’m not married.” And he said, “I’m on my way.” That was in May. We talked on the phone, on Skype, and I was in love with this man before we ever saw each other in person again.
I knew I was in love with him when he said to me one day, “Watch your motive for what you do in this life. If what you’re doing isn’t truly to forward a love conversation with another person—even a stranger, like saying ‘Thank you for your smile’ in the checkout line—if that’s not why you’re doing it, don’t do it.” I had never met anyone who talked like that about the eternity of things. He said, “There’s never been a time, Karla, where we didn’t love each other, and there will never be a time when we don’t, because that’s what love is.”
He wrote me a poem when we reconnected that talked about the eternity of our love, not knowing that 20 months later he would be dead.
Dr. Mironda Williams: That’s an amazing thing. You talked about walking through it in real-time, Karen, because she had reconnected with the love of her life, things were moving forward, and they were preparing to get married. Thousands of us on Facebook were cheering, “Yay, it’s going to be wonderful!” And it was wonderful, but then, tell the audience about the diagnosis.
Dr. Karla Booker: So, we reconnected in May of 2013, met in person in July of 2013, got engaged in March of 2014, and planned for him to move from Richmond, Virginia to Atlanta. He moved his things into my house on September 29th. Everything was in the hallway because he was going back to Richmond for the week and coming back on the weekend.
I handed him his coffee that morning and asked him to call me at 10:00 AM to wake me up for my 1:00 PM clinic. When he called at 10:00, he said, “Babe, something’s wrong with my hand. I can’t grasp my coffee cup.” He sent me a video showing he couldn’t move his left hand. He had high blood pressure, so I called some medical contacts to see if we needed to pull his bus over. They advised getting him off the bus and taking him straight to the emergency room.
He arrived at the ER at 7:00 PM. At 7:20 PM, he called me and said, “I’m bleeding in my brain. I have a bleeding tumor in my brain, and they’re calling the neurosurgeon.” I initially thought he had a hemorrhagic stroke. It turned out they had already told him it looked like metastatic cancer, but he couldn’t process it yet and didn’t tell me right away.
When I landed and got off the plane, I received text messages indicating suspected primary cancer in the lung, skin, or kidney. They found an eight-centimeter tumor in his lung and lymph nodes. On September 30, 2014, we received the diagnosis of stage IV adenocarcinoma of the lung with brain metastasis.
When cancer metastasizes, it means microscopic cells are in the bloodstream and throughout the body; the treatment goal becomes killing those microscopic cells before they take root elsewhere. For Kent, the bleeding in his brain occurred in three areas, creating immediate risks of vision loss or speech impairment. He required whole-brain radiation to preserve brain tissue, which brought on dementia within about three weeks.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Explain why Seventy-One Days is the title of the book.
Dr. Karla Booker: When he was first diagnosed, I told him, “Let’s not knee-jerk or rush just because of cancer. Let’s handle the medical and legal paperwork so I have medical power of attorney.”
Then he got extremely sick one night in severe pain. A CT scan showed a large fluid buildup around his affected lung, requiring immediate surgery. Before he went under anesthesia, I said, “I think we should get married now.” He reminded me, “You said cancer wasn’t a reason to rush.” And I said, “Things are moving faster than we thought. Let’s make this official and show everybody what it looks like to be in love and committed.”
While under anesthesia, he went into septic shock, ended up on a ventilator, and his vitals plummeted. I prayed over him: “Lord, you know the number of his days. Wake my baby up one more time.” The staff mentioned that if he wasn’t off the ventilator by 5:00 PM the next day, we wouldn’t be able to proceed with the wedding. He came off the ventilator right by 5:00 PM.
Family drove in, brought my white dress and shoes, and we had a beautiful one-hour wedding right outside the ICU on Monday, October 27th. He was oxygen-dependent, wheelchair-dependent, and had two chest tubes inserted, surrounded by a team of nurses and respiratory therapists. Yet, in the pictures, you don’t notice any of the medical equipment—you just see the love.
The nurses decorated our ICU room, prepared a filet mignon dinner with champagne for us at the hospital, and we got married in the Healing Garden at Medical College of Virginia. We were blessed with 71 days together from that season until he passed.
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: People are often afraid to talk to someone who has experienced loss. They hesitate, wondering if they should bring it up. How did you feel when people avoided the topic? Is it wrong to ask?
Dr. Karla Booker: First, I take gentle exception to the word loss, because Kent is not lost to me. I know where he is spiritually, and his impact remains accessible.
Death is a word people fear and avoid, but what if we recognized death as simply another iteration of life? What if we treated it as a true celebration of life, where connection continues spiritually? Because we fear the word, we treat it like a boogeyman under the bed.
What I wished people had asked me was simply, “What do you need?” Even if my answer was “I don’t know,” the offer meant everything. Typical platitudes like “God knows best” or “He’s in a better place” can feel empty when you simply want your loved one present. It’s better to admit, “I have no idea what this feels like, but I know how much you loved him, and I am here for you.” Don’t pretend the pain isn’t happening. Step up and show you care.
Dr. Karen Greene: You mentioned in the book that suffering is what makes us grow. Looking back, how do you see yourself before and after Kent died?
Dr. Karla Booker: Looking back, I realized how much surface-skimming I was doing in my life, and how my view of my biological father had colored my view of God. My dad was a trauma surgeon who loved fixing problems quickly by cutting them out. Growing up after my parents’ divorce, I developed a pattern of trying to be the “perfect girl”—checking every achievement box (AKA, Hampton, ROTC, physician).
Because of that, I viewed authority figures—including God—through a lens of “don’t complain about the pain, just be strong.” I was afraid that if I started crying, I would never stop.
Going through Kent’s illness broke open that surface-level existence. I learned that vulnerability is the pathway forward. If you don’t share your pain, it is wasted. There is sacred space to hurt and cry. It taught me to stop prioritizing superficial status or appearances and instead seek deep, authentic connection.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Karla is someone who truly practices that presence. I remember during the summer of 2020, around the anniversary of my mother’s death, a wave of grief hit me. Karla reached out and asked me a simple question: “What is it that you miss the most?” Asking that allowed me to open up, share memories, and feel my mother’s presence right there. It allowed me to finally exhale.
She also once asked me via message, “What does love mean to you now at this age?” It forced me to reflect beyond socialized fairytales and realize that true love is rooted in deep spiritual connection.
Dr. Karla Booker: When Kent and I connected, it was a profound spiritual gift at 50 years old. It showed me that time and age are relative. If love is eternal, then 80 years in our physical bodies is just a fraction of existence. Age gaps or timing standards imposed by society don’t define the truth of a relationship. We need to stop judging how people find joy and let them be happy.
Dr. Mironda Williams: In your book, at the end of each chapter, you include a “Now Let’s Do the Work” section with processing questions. You suggest setting intentional milestones for grief (30, 60, 90 days, or 71 days) because at some point, you have to choose to engage with life again.
Dr. Karla Booker: The heaviness of grief can feel comforting at first when you need to rest and retreat. But eventually, staying in bed stops being comforting and becomes stagnant. Setting an intentional timeline doesn’t mean you stop missing the person; it means giving yourself a reason to get up, walk, find beauty in the world, and rebuild your daily life.
Suffering often comes from resisting what is. When you realize you just want the pain to stop, you have to take intentional steps toward healing rather than staying isolated.
Looking back, I was openly angry with God at times, and that honesty was necessary. Experiencing that depth of pain equipped me to truly show up for others. Grief support groups and therapy are valuable, but they should have a direction: asking yourself, “In 90 days or six months, how do I want my life to feel?”
Dr. Mironda Williams: Dr. Karla Booker is an OB/GYN, family medicine physician, author, and speaker. Karla, please remind everyone how they can find your book and connect with you.
Dr. Karla Booker: You can find Seventy-One Days on Amazon, Audible (which I narrated), Barnes & Noble, and directly through my website at drkarlabooker.com.
Dr. Mironda Williams: Tell our audience a little bit about your current husband, Kenneth.
Dr. Karla Booker: My late husband’s name was Kent Smith, and my current husband’s name is Kenneth Strickland!
After Kent passed, I reached a point in my singlehood where I cultivated a deep, complete relationship with God and felt whole in my own skin. One Friday night, I walked into an event, and Kenneth walked in at the exact same time. We struck up a conversation, laughed, and hit it off. He asked me out the next night, asked me to be his girlfriend 12 days later, and eventually proposed in Cartagena, Colombia under the stars. We are approaching five years of marriage now.
What I learned is that marriage isn’t just a contract between two people—it’s a shared covenant with God. Having that foundation allows you to navigate life’s challenges together with grace and vulnerability.
Dr. Mironda Williams: This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Karla.
Dr. Karla Booker: Thank you for creating such a warm, safe space to share. Keep doing the incredible work you are doing!
Dr. Deanna Guthrie: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Take Good Care podcast. If you have questions or comments, email us at [email protected] or visit our website at rosagynecology.com.
Until next time, I’m Dr. Deanna Guthrie…
Dr. Mironda Williams: I’m Dr. Mironda Williams…
Dr. Karen Greene: And I am Dr. Karen Greene.
All: Take good care!
