When Laura gets a call from the hospital telling her that her dad has severe frostbite and could die, Laura is shocked. Not because of the whole frostbite part ... but because her dad is alive. She hasn't seen or talked to him in years and honestly assumed he was long dead.

This is a story about what happens when we realize our parents are, in fact, real people — and that real people mess up and make mistakes.

Nathan always knew he was different growing up. He also knew the LDS church had certain expectations of him: He'd do his mission, find a girl, get married and settle down. Being gay? Not part of that plan.

Nathan does everything he can to be straight, including sending himself to "conversion therapy". It, of course, doesn't work. Then ... he starts to uncover his true self. And his true self is beautiful.

Jamie Hahn was 29 years old when she was murdered by Jonathan Broyhill — the guy who had been the best man in her wedding to her husband, Nation.

The intrigue surrounding Jamie's death and her killer's subsequent murder trial created non-stop news fodder ... and the story quickly became about Broyhill — his lies, his deception, his crimes.

Nation wanted to tell his and Jamie's story without putting her murderer at the center of it. And in this episode, he does exactly that.

Religion often gives people a sense of belonging. It tells them who’s in and sometimes (depending on the faith, or depending on the microcosm of the faith they're raised in) who's out.

That's how Patricia grew up — in a faith where leaving your religion meant leaving behind everyone you love. She is a former Jehovah’s Witness who left the church when she was in her mid-20s.

This episode looks at what's worse: keeping the people you love at a distance, or showing them your true colors and losing them forever.

Charlotte’s career is built on theoreticals. As an operating room nurse, she has a protocol for every tragedy — a “then” for every “if.”

That all changes one night when, on her way home, Charlotte encounters a teenage girl on the wrong side of a guardrail on an overpass above a highway.

Charlotte wasn’t this girl’s mother, or sister, or best friend. She didn’t even know her. But Charlotte was the last person who spoke to the girl before she died. She was THERE. And now, she doesn't know how to get back to the way her life used to be.

The Achilli siblings would like you to know that if there was a Dead Parent Contest (there's not), they would win the gold medal. In 2008, their dad was murdered by a hitman in a dispute over a girlfriend. Four years after their father's killers are tried and convicted, their mom dies after driving her car off a cliff.

This is a story about being orphaned as young adults and the family ties that keep siblings together.

So many people start off their stories by saying their pain and suffering doesn’t compare to what happened to someone else. But this isn’t a game of Who Has It Worse, so why do we act like there is some sort of imaginary yardstick for struggling? Today’s episode tries to convince you that if you’re feeling pain, it’s painful- no caveats.

Five years ago, on Mother’s Day, Katie was sitting in prison, far from her kids. She couldn’t hug them, she couldn’t kiss them. It was at that moment she decided she would completely change her life so she could be with them again. But changing her life required a lot of help that didn’t exist in prison. Then one day, she opened a book in the prison library and a brochure fell out. It was for a place called Benevolence Farm, and they could help her change her life.

When Xiomara Medina was a teenage girl in Puerto Rico, a quinceañera was all she wanted when she turned 15. She dreamed of a big, sparkly dress and dancing the night away with her friends. But her family couldn’t afford it. So when she grew up and had four daughters, she wanted to give each of her children the party she never had. In this episode, her daughter, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, brings us along as the family hosts its final quince for Jeyca’s youngest sister.

Grieving is a lonely experience. Many of us who have been through it wish there was a handbook to lead us through the experience. When comedy writer Jason Roeder lost his mom, he decided to write the guidebook that he wanted to read.

This episode of Terrible Reading Club is a chat with Jason about his book Griefstrike!, a humorous guide to grief.

Jason Roeder is comedy writer, and is the former senior writer and editor of The Onion.