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 dif ...