Welcome back to This Person I Met! My name is Kayla and I’m the host of this podcast.

When I approached Nikki, the first thing I noticed was how well spoken she was. Words flowed from her mouth so naturally and so coherently that I found it hard for me to keep up. However, behind her demeanor was a story riddled with trauma that made her the woman she is today, building a story that does not let her past define who she is now. Nikki, now working with A Brighter Way, an organization helping the previously incarcerated, turned her past into the change she wants to see today as the founder of her own nonprofit, the Worthy Brown Girl Network and even her own podcast, The Worthy Well Podcast with Nikki G. Her story reverberates one powerful message: all of us are worthy of healing and building a future dedicated to personal happiness, no matter our past and the trauma we believe we will never be able to move past.

Due to the length of her segment, Nikki’s story will be split into two episodes: one tackling her background and past traumas, and another where we discuss what she has learned and how she is moving forward as she shares insights on self-worth.

Welcome back to This Person I Met! My name is Kayla, and I’m the host of this podcast.

A few weeks ago, I got the opportunity to sit down with Uzochi Nwauwa to talk about a topic that most of us avoid despite its inevitably: grief and the concept of death. Specifically, we talked about the scary, unavoidable thing that most of us will have to face at least once in our lives, grief, and how it impacts children. This is the second part of Uzo’s story, where we dive into specifics on how society can better approach those who are grieving and slowly take down the barriers that prevent us from facing death not just for ourselves, but for the sake of others. If this is your first time listening to her, I suggest you take a look at the first part of this segment. Without further ado, here’s Uzo.

Welcome back to This Person I Met! My name is Kayla, and I’m the host of this podcast.

On my first snow day of the season, I drove 30 minutes to Ele’s Place, braving the iced highways to sit with Uzochi Nwauwa. Uzo, the bereavement coordinator for Ele’s Place, talked to me for nearly an hour about a topic that many, including me, shut our ears to: grief and death.

Ele’s Place was founded by Betsy Stover and her husband following the death of their daughter, known as Ele. The organization was created in the interest of youth dealing with grief and the concept of death, an idea that many young minds have yet to truly define and absorb. Death is the thing that we do not talk about. It’s “passing away,” “kicking the bucket,” “biting the dust,” but it truly is just what it is. Dying.

In this episode, Uzo talks about how grief differs from person to person, and specifically how it affects children. She is blunt about death and how to go about helping those dealing with grief, those existing on, as she said, “a completely different timeline” as those that are not. The world moves on when a loved one dies, but how do you move with it when the one who you loved is no longer in the same world that is still pushing forward? What does existing in this new timeline without them look like? And to a child, what does this feel like, and how can we support those who have yet to formulate even the idea of death?

Due to the length of our conversation, this will be the first of two episodes dedicated to Uzo and her work. Without further ado, here’s Uzo.