Grief is a Language ™ with John Onwuchekwa
Grief Is A Language™ is a podcast about grief and loss, hosted by John Onwuchekwa. Each episode features conversations with psychologists, neuroscientists, artists, and everyday people about different forms of grief. The show explores grief from death to divorce, identity, and unfulfilled dreams. It presents grief not as a journey to finish but as a language to learn.
Episodes
How to Listen When Grief Speaks Through Your Body
Grief does not always arrive as words. Sometimes it shows up as exhaustion, tears, tension, or a body that simply refuses to keep pushing. In this conversation, John and the guests explore what can happen when we stop treating the body like something to overpower and start listening to what it may be trying to tell us about loss.
RESOURCES:
John Onwuchekwa
Website | https://www.joh
10: Grief Is a Body Language: Why Loss Can Feel Like Exhaustion, Anxiety and Shutdown
What if your body knows you’re grieving before you do?
In this Part 1 episode, John Onwuchekwa sits down with Dave, Rich Perez, and James Roberson for a deeply honest conversation about grief as body language: the exhaustion, tears, anxiety, tension, and physical reactions that can surface when loss has nowhere else to go.
Together, they unpack grief after death, friendship changes, leaving mini
Tembi Locke on the Grief You Can’t Escape and the Beauty You Can Create
Tembi Locke shares how widowhood changed her relationship with grief and inspired From Scratch. Using grief as a rock in the road, she explains why she stopped trying to get around her loss and instead learned its shape, lived beside it, and eventually used it as raw material to create something new.
RESOURCES:
Tembi Locke
Website | tembilocke.com
IG | @tembilocke
John Onwuchekwa
9: When a Writer Can’t Find the Words for Grief: From Scratch Author Tembi Locke on Widowhood
In this episode of Grief Is A Language, John Onwuchekwa sits down with Tembi Locke for a beautiful conversation about grief, language, memory, writing, love, and the slow work of turning loss into something that can hold meaning.
Together, they explore why grief is not something to rush, fix, or “move on” from, but something we learn to speak with more honesty, patience, and tenderness. Tembi ref
Why We Police Our Own Emotions While Grieving
Grief and joy are often treated like opposite emotions, but what if they can exist at the same time? John Onwuchekwa and Jessica Hurley unpack the “shoulds” we place on grief, why we police our own emotions, and what it means to let grief and joy intersect.
RESOURCES:
Jessica Hurley
IG | @jessicahurley__
John Onwuchekwa
Website | johno.co
IG | @jawn_o
Grief is a Language™
8: Anticipatory Grief: Learning to Live While You’re Waiting for Loss with Jessica Hurley
In this deeply reflective episode of Grief Is A Language™, John Onwuchekwa is joined by EPYC Media Network’s founder and producer Jessica Hurley for a conversation about anticipatory grief, ambiguous loss, joy, purpose, patience, and the loneliness that often accompanies them all.
Jessica shares what it was like watching her newborn fight for his life in the NICU, caring for her father through st
She Hid Her Pregnancy for 20 Years. Here’s What Shame Did to Her Identity | Dr. Zoe Shaw
Psychotherapist Dr. Zoe Shaw shares how becoming pregnant at 15, being sent away to a pregnancy home, and hiding the adoption of her first daughter shaped decades of complex shame. She explains why achievement became a way to outrun her past, why shame eventually caught up with her, and what it took to begin separating shame from her identity.
GUEST RESOURCES:
Dr. Zoe Shaw
Website| drzoe
7: Complex Shame™: How Unprocessed Grief and Guilt Shape Your Identity with Dr. Zoe Shaw
Grief is like a shadow that follows you, waiting to meet you when you think you've outrun it.
In this pilot episode of Grief is a language, host John Onwuchekwa welcomes Dr. Zoe Shaw to unveil the complex landscape of grief, offering a transformative perspective on emotional healing.
Dr. Zoe highlights complex shame as a deeply personal experience that goes beyond traditional understanding
Why This Hospital Chaplain Stopped Trying to Fix People’s Grief
Hospital chaplain Joon Park explains how to support someone who is grieving without trying to fix their pain. He and John explore why grief has no timeline, how well-intentioned advice can add another burden, and why quiet presence may be what a grieving person needs most.
GUEST RESOURCES:
J.S. Park
Website | jsparkblog.com
IG | @jspark3000
RESOURCES:
John Onwuchekwa
Webs
6: What Witnessing 1,000 Deaths Taught Hospital Chaplain Joon Park About Grief, Faith and Loneliness
Some people catch dreams, but others catch grief — holding space for pain, honoring loss, and ensuring no one suffers alone.
Today, host John welcomes Joon Park, a hospital chaplain who has witnessed over 1,000 deaths, for an insightful conversation about being a “grief catcher.” As the author of the book "Take As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve", Joon shares his unique approach of providi
Why Grieving People Want You to Ask About the Person They Lost
What happens when the smallest detail suddenly reminds you that someone is gone? In this segment of Grief Is A Language™, Natalie and John explore the sharpness of absence, the loneliness of remembering alone, and why grieving people often want us to ask about the people they’ve lost. From tall grass to old toothpick cases, they reveal how ordinary objects can preserve connection, memory, and love
5: Compounded Grief: Coping With Multiple Losses and the Numbness of Grief with Natalie Lauren Sims
On today’s episode, John Onwuchekwa sits down with Natalie Lauren Sims to explore what grief actually feels like when loss comes in waves. From losing multiple family members in a short span of time to navigating numbness, rage, memory loss, faith, and radical acceptance, this conversation offers a powerful framework for understanding grief beyond clichés and stages.
John shares his four-part mod
Trip Lee on Chronic Illness, Ambiguous Grief and Feeling Alone
John Onwuchekwa and Trip Lee explore how the brain learns to live after loss and why chronic illness creates a uniquely lonely kind of grief. Trip opens up about grieving his health, energy, and independence without a funeral, anniversary, or community that always recognizes what he has lost.
GUEST RESOURCES
Trip Lee
IG | @triplee
RESOURCES
John Onwuchekwa
Website | johno.co
IG
4: Intangible & Tangible Grief: Trip Lee on His Chronic Fatigue Diagnosis, Losing His Father, and the Life He Thought He'd Live
Grief, chronic illness, and unshakable resilience—this powerful episode dives into Trip’s raw 18-year journey with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Today, John Onwuchekwa sits down with Trip Lee, Christian rapper, singer, and preacher, for an insightful conversation. John and Trip unpack the silent weight of living with an invisible illness, especially how it steals not just energy, but dreams, id
Why Your Brain Still Expects the Person You Lost with Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Why does your brain still expect someone after they die? Grief neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor explains how the grieving brain processes loss, why loved ones become encoded as “everlasting,” and why you may still reach for the phone or expect them to walk through the door. Discover how the brain gradually relearns a world changed by loss—and why grieving is not forgetting, but learning a
3: This is Your Brain on Grief: How Loss Changes Your Brain, Body & Identity with Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor
Grief doesn’t only live in the mind. It changes the brain, affects the body, and can reshape our understanding of who we are.
In this episode of Grief Is A Language™, John Onwuchekwa sits down with renowned grief neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor to explore the science of love, loss, and the grieving brain. Dr. O’Connor explains why our brains continue to expect someone after they have die
The Five Stages of Grief Were Never Meant for You | KevOnStage
What if the five stages of grief were never meant for the people left behind? Dr. John Onwuchekwa and KevOnStage challenge one of our most familiar beliefs about loss and explore why grief doesn’t move in a straight line. Through personal stories of losing their brothers, they offer a more honest framework: grief is not a journey to finish, but a language we learn so we don’t have to carry loss al
Can You Find Love Again After Losing Your Spouse?
In this segment, Jessica and Jordan Rice open up about the complicated reality of dating after losing a spouse young. Jessica shares what it felt like to enter the dating world as a widow in her twenties, carrying both love for Jerron and uncertainty about who she was becoming. Jordan reflects on the awkwardness of starting over after Danielle’s death, the gift of her blessing to build a life agai
2: KevOnStage on Losing His Brother and Learning the Language of Grief
What happens when the person who knew you best is suddenly gone?
In this powerful and unexpectedly funny conversation, comedian, creator, and entrepreneur KevOnStage talks about the loss of his older brother, Jason. Together, they explore why grief doesn't feel like a journey, why the popular "five stages" framework often falls short, and how loss reshapes the way we move through the world.
Kev
1: Dating After Widowhood: Can You Have More Than One Love Of Your Life?
Jordan and Jessica Rice never expected to have this much in common.
Both lost their spouses unexpectedly in their twenties. Both found themselves navigating a kind of grief that few people around them could understand. And both eventually faced the same impossible questions: Can you fall in love again after losing the love of your life? How do you build a future without leaving your past behind?
Our Most Shared Experience Is Also The Most Isolating | Grief is a Language Official Trailer
At some point, grief finds all of us.
Sometimes, it arrives through the death of someone we love. It may also come through divorce, illness, disappointment, loneliness, a lost future, or the painful realization that life did not unfold the way we hoped it would. Yet for something so universal, many of us struggle to find words for what we're carrying. We feel isolated in experiences that millions
What If Grief Is A Language We Never Learned? | John Onwuchekwa
At some point, grief finds all of us.
Sometimes, it arrives through the death of someone we love. It may also come through divorce, illness, disappointment, loneliness, a lost future, or the painful realization that life did not unfold the way we hoped it would. Yet for something so universal, many of us struggle to find words for what we're carrying. We feel isolated in experiences that millions
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