Award-Winning and Grieving: A Conversation with Women Who Podcast Magazine's founder

And just like that, we're an award-winning podcast!

In this special episode, I’m sharing a replay of my conversation with Kathy Barron, founder and editor-in-chief of Women Who Podcast Magazine. We talk about the journey behind Grief and Light, the power of being recognized as an award-winning podcast, and why grief isn’t a linear process—it’s deeply personal, unpredictable, and life-changing.

We dive into stories of life after loss, the sneaky ways grief shows up in everyday life, and how giving yourself permission to feel can actually deepen your connection to life and others. Whether you’re a griever, a podcaster, or simply curious about the human experience, this conversation offers insights, validation, and hope.

Key Takeaways:

• There are no “steps” in grief—everyone experiences it differently.
• Grief shows up unexpectedly, even in ordinary places like grocery stores.
• Giving yourself permission to grieve is essential for healing and integration.
• Recognition and community make a difference—even in the often-lonely world of podcasting.
• Facing grief can deepen connection, empathy, and the richness of life itself.

If you’ve ever experienced loss, or want to understand grief more deeply, tune in, follow and subscribe to Grief and Light wherever you listen to podcasts, and connect with me on social media for more conversations, resources, and support.

Related Links:

• Award-Winning Podcast Announcement on IG
• Live Conversation replay on IG

Grief Support Resources for the Road:

• Grief Tending Toolkit
• Access our online community

Hosted by: Nina Rodriguez

• Creator of Grief and Light, Grief Guide
• griefandlight.com
• @griefandlight
• Resting Grief Face on Substack

Subscribe for more conversations that explore grief, healing, and what it means to be human.

Chapters

• 0:00 Preview & Intro song
• 0:31 Grief and Light is an award-winning podcast!
• 2:47 A conversation with Kathy Barron
• 4:48 Grief and Light's beginnings
• 7:50 no one-size-fits-all in grief
• 9:00 Showing yourself grace & permission to grieve
• 12:35 Grocery store grief
• 16:00 Healing is physical and relational
• 18:20 20-year grief

Transcript

take an inventory of the difference between how you think you should be grieving and how you're actually grieving. then step two would be to give yourself permission to grieve and to allow the experience to be as it is, not as you think it should be. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief in Life podcast where we explore this new reality through grief-colored lenses. Openly, authentically, I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez.

Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the grief and light podcast. If you're new here, welcome. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I am your host. And if you're returning, welcome back. Always good to have you here. I am excited to share some really exciting news. Grief and light is now officially an award winning podcast. Thanks to

Women Who Podcast magazine, we won one of the Women Who Podcast awards for this year. This means so much and I'm so very grateful to you, to everybody who listens, who shared that episode, who has given me feedback. It absolutely means the world. I have also been moving. So I moved out of Miami. I am still in the state of Florida, just about an hour up north. And it's been quite a change. I lived in Miami for nine years and that was...

like the best of times and the worst of times because in that time is when I lost my brother obviously and we had the pandemic and all the things that happen but it was a beautiful chapter and right now it is time for a change so if you've moved recently my heart goes out to you because that is a whole lot of grief in and of itself having to let go and box and all the memories and all the things so I'm coming off of some very intense weeks of

a lot of transitions and shifts and I'm still not 100 % settled in, but it's getting there. We're getting there. So today's episode is a little different. I had a conversation with Kathy Barron, founder and editor in chief of Women Who Podcast magazine. Kathy not only featured me in their July issue, but she also invited me to talk about the heart behind grief and light and how it came to be. I love the way that this Instagram live conversation unfolded so naturally and

I loved how we touched on how there are no steps in grief, just each person's unique way forward. I hope you find as much meaning in this conversation as I did in sharing it. You could also check it out on Instagram. Of course, it's saved under the Instagram replays. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Kathy Barron of Women Who Podcast Magazine.

you

Hey everybody, it's Kathy Barron, founder and editor in chief of Women Who Podcast magazine. If you haven't gotten your copy of the July issue of Women Who Podcast magazine, go to our website womenwhopodcastmag.com and check it out. My guest today is actually featured in the July issue. So you'll want to read it and you'll want to be here today.

So before I bring on my special guests, I just want to thank everyone again for submitting their podcasts for the Women Who Podcast Awards, our first annual awards. And it was a huge success. And thank you to the judges as well for being part of it. And if you'd like more information, just go to our website, womenwhopodcastmag.com, for the winners and the judges. And we also have the featured article on our website too.

for

Go ahead and check that out. I am honored and excited to have Nina Rodriguez, host of grief and light podcast with me today. There she is.

So.

Kathy,

Good to see you. You were featured in the July issue of the magazine and I actually had the pleasure of interviewing you for the article and that was a great time to talk with you and I wish we had more time to talk because there was a lot more that I wanted to hear, you and you shared a lot of personal stuff with me in the interview but I wanted to ask if you would share what got you into podcasting.

why you started grief and light and kind of what your mission is for the podcast.

Absolutely. And first of all, thank you for the opportunity for the conversations and for the feature in the July issue of the magazine. And also congratulations to all the amazing podcasters who were also featured or won an award in some way. This is often very lonely work, it feels like. So to be seen and recognized and celebrated in community is very meaningful. So I want to thank you for that.

Grief and Light started because unfortunately, I mean, like who has a podcast about grief, right? Usually somebody who has been through some kind of loss and in my case, that was no exception. September 11th, 2019, I unexpectedly lost my brother. He was my only sibling. His name is Joseph. I like saying his name. We're coming up on six years. So September 11th this year will be six years since his passing. And he passed a day after his 32nd birthday. So he never got to celebrate like.

fully enjoy his 32nd birthday. I'd lost other people before, but that particular loss really cracked me open and redefined how I saw life, how I understood life, how I navigated life. It just changed everything about me and how I saw myself in the world. Then we had the pandemic, and then there was this huge collective form of grief and these conversations started to happen. And yet I noticed that there was this huge disconnect between the limped experience of loss.

and how society expects you to recover, right? And I said, gosh, this is unbelievably difficult and yet people, you know, for whatever reason, pass away every day. So why are we not better at dealing with life after loss and supporting grievers? And so that question started to get amplified in my mind over time through my own grief journey. I started looking for people who were talking about particularly adult sibling loss and I did not find much.

So I decided that I wanted to engage in conversations about this topic and explore it further for myself. I put out this sort of batwoman signal to the world is what I like to call it through the form of a podcast, which is the outlet that resonated with me the most. And what initially started as something of a personal journey eventually evolves into this calling and this platform for other people. This was so much bigger than just me and my grief. This has

been a beautiful journey, a very powerful journey of giving people the space to speak of their experience authentically and openly as it actually is, not as it should be, quote unquote, should be. And so that was the birth of it. Since then, it has evolved. do solo episodes, I do interviews, and each one always teaches me something.

There's always some nugget of wisdom, some takeaway about the way people navigate loss. We don't all do it the same. We all experience grief, but it is such a broad umbrella term that eventually impacts us all. getting into the nitty gritty of what that is, what does life look like after loss? And the loss doesn't have to be death related necessarily. It could be an everyday type of loss, like a divorce or losing a job or a major transition in life.

So all these explorations became very interesting to me. we, I say we, know, my guests and I explore this openly through the podcast. We're going on two years now.

Yeah, I mean, that's great. And I think this podcast is a great resource for people. yeah, as a society, we don't handle grief. We don't handle death. I mean, we barely handle living. you know, it's nice to have someone like yourself who has gone through it, especially with Joseph, your brother, and the circumstances around that as well.

The way we grieve, it's like, okay, this is the first step, this is the second step. It's like we put these parameters and these guidelines out there on how to deal with things. And it's not a one step for everyone. Everyone handles grief and loss in their own way, individually. It's a very personal thing.

So, you know, it's hard to say, okay, well, this is what you'll experience first, and then you'll experience this, and then you'll experience this. And it's just like, now we feel like, my gosh, I haven't gone through, you know, anger yet. What's wrong with me? You know, so how do you, when someone is dealing with grief and loss, what are some ways that we can maybe not be so hard on ourselves?

while going through the grieving process.

Really good question. And if I may backtrack on one thing you said about it's a different step for everybody, I think is the phrase that you used. Absolutely. And I would argue there are no steps, right? So there's just each person's way forward. The capital big G grief experience is a umbrella term, but how we relate to that experience is our particular form of grieving. And so

a lot of people assume the stages of grief, right? By Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross are the steps to follow. And then when you get to the end, then you should feel better. And that's just not the case. As David Kessler says, he's an authority figure, a voice here in the Greece space. These steps were descriptive, not prescriptive. So it's not a path forward. It's just a framework to give words to what you're feeling. And I would even dare say those fall short because they were never meant to be applied in the country.

context of grief and loss. It was meant for people who were essentially dying on their deathbed and how to come to that term of acceptance. So to answer your question about advice for grievers, one is giving yourself permission to grieve. We are taught to be strong, keep carrying on, know, toughen up, you got this, you got to push through, you got to move on, right? That's usually what most of us are taught. And what grief taught me is that we move forward.

we move forward with. And it's not something you shed. It's not something you leave behind. It's not an arm that you amputate. It's a life experience that you integrate. So first it's examine your own biases and beliefs about what you think grief is. And how does that agree with or differ from what you're actually feeling? When your inner and outer world are the same in terms of how you're feeling and how you're moving through both of them.

there's harmony. And when they're different, when your outer experience and your inner experience are at odds with each other, there's disharmony. And so we can't change the element of pain, which is the loss happened. This thing in my life happened and I cannot go back. Like I got divorced, I lost my puppy, I lost my person. That can't be undone. So you tend the pain and you adjust the suffering. The suffering is the element that you can control. So

Sometimes we go into these spirals in our minds of what if I did this, maybe they would have lived or should I have done this other thing, maybe they would be okay. Maybe if I didn't do this one thing, my life would still be okay. And so we tend to those thoughts and we adjust them as we move forward with the loss and with the acceptance of what actually has happened. But step one is take an inventory of

The difference between how you think you should be grieving and how you're actually grieving. then step two would be to give yourself permission to grieve and to allow the experience to be as it is, not as you think it should be.

Yeah. And that's great advice and that's hard to do a lot of times because, you know, I, my dad passed away in 2005 and then my sister passed away unexpectedly two years later. And, you know, then my dog died and then, you know, it's just like one thing after another, after another. And, you know, if I didn't grieve, you know, I remember I was working at Trader Joe's in Seattle at the time my dad died and I was like stocking some bags of potatoes or something. And I just like.

lost it. Like I was just bawling my eyes out and I was like there was no prompt, there was no anything. It was just like you know and I still love potatoes to this day but it's just you know it's it sneaks up on you if you're not really healing and and dealing with what you're feeling with the loss.

think grief is sneaky. Grief is very sneaky and the grocery store is a notorious place for it to just, you know, spook us in the middle of an aisle. And actually, interesting story. First of all, I'm sorry about your losses. And I can imagine that one loss also unearthed feelings from the previous loss. Yeah. As they compound, it gets a little bit more or a lot more heavy in some ways. So I could definitely see that. When the moment, speaking of...

grocery stores, the moment that I realized that this grief thing that I was dealing with was bigger than me and or just something new that I hadn't experienced before was when after my brother passed, I said, you know, the hardest thing I've ever gone through was about like three to four weeks. So let's double that time and then I should be okay. So when weeks eight, nine, 10 came around and I was not okay, I called my one of my best friends who lost her mother 10 months prior and.

I said, what did you do to get rid of this? I need your help, like help me get rid of this thing. And in my desperation, she says, honey, I'm at the baking aisle of my grocery store, picking up a pan to make some cookies with my kids. And I just start bawling because it reminds me of my mother. And she says, this is 10 months, this is grief. It is going to be a lot longer than you realize. And that thought terrified me. And in my fear,

I rationalized it by saying, you know what, that's her experience. It doesn't have to be my experience. Well, little did I know. He's absolutely right. And grocery stores will always be trigger points and activation points for so many people. And grief does come in waves for years, decades on end. It's the nature of it.

Yeah, and you know, it's, and it's okay. It's okay to feel that having the feelings come through. For me, I notice that I'm good at stuffing things down. And it's better for me not to, because then it does come out in, you know, ways that are unexpected. Dealing with it and healing, however that is, whether it's journaling, seeking a counselor or therapist, whatever, a support group.

whatever works for you and knowing that you're not alone in your grief and your healing. I think it's time that we, this is the lack of a better word, but normalize that grief is okay. It's a natural process of life. And I don't know about other countries and cultures, but it just seems like Americans are just hard to cry or to...

feel from the greeting.

Absolutely. We heal in relation to others. We need an empathetic witness to be able to be seen in our pain without being changed. And once we're validated, we're able to move forward. And what gets us stuck oftentimes is that stuffing down, that holding it in our body, you're absolutely right. And part of moving through grief is actually very physical. I had no idea about this because in the past, the progress that we've made is that we're now able to talk about it. I think the next

step as a collective is being able to reconnect with our body and move it through our body in community. And I think that piece is so key because you're absolutely right. I can't speak for every culture, but definitely our culture tends to reward individualism, hyper individualism. All this technology enables us to be faster, quicker, communicate and all this stuff, and it disconnects us from ourselves and each other.

So we have to be very cognizant of that, very mindful. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much tech we have, we're still human and we still need that authentic connection. I believe that grief is, or being able to be grief informed and talk about grief and understand the nature of grief is deeply life-affirming work. I've, let me speak for myself. I've been able to connect more with life because of my grief.

because I'm allowing myself to feel all the stuff in this fullness. And a lot of it is very uncomfortable. A lot of it I would love to get rid of. And also it's been the image that comes to my mind, it's like the river rock. It's smooth because of the water that's constantly going through it. So it's been that thing that's been polishing me and getting me to be comfortable in the discomfort just because of being able to understand the nature of it. And it's all part of us. And when we don't deny the reality of

life in its fullness, which includes very uncomfortable things we try to avoid so much. When we are able to just accept them, then we live a fuller life and we're able to connect with others more authentically and honestly just be better humans in my opinion.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's like we don't like being uncomfortable in any situation. you know, grief is definitely one of those. And, you know, just thinking about my dad in 2005, like that was 20 years ago. It doesn't feel like 20 years ago. And so it's just interesting how things still remind me of him or like he loved Tommy Bird's and I was visiting my mom yesterday who's in a boarding care home. She's 91.

That doesn't

And she was like, oh, hummingbird just came by the window. And I'm like, well, that was dad saying hi to us. those little signs that keep his memory alive, I think, is important.

And I've met people who have started to grieve 30 years later. It's very patient. It's not gonna go away. It's always there. So you can try ignoring it as much as possible. We could say, no, I'm not looking that way. It'll say, that's fine. I'll be right here whenever there's a window for you to feel me, right? And about the 20 years, I remember the story. I know we're running out of time here, but I remember the story about a same friend, her aunt.

unfortunately lost her husband in the Twin Tower collapse in 2001, was it? my gosh. In the 9-11 attacks. And so she became instantly a widow mother of two, and she had to finish raising the kids and all these things. And so they finally went to college and she is officially an empty nester. And she told my friend, would be stranger for me to accept that he's actually gone.

than if he just walked in through the door and said, oh, sorry, honey, I'm late. Like I was off doing whatever I had to do. Because in her mind, those 20 years, time becomes, I call it grief time. It sort of operates outside of the linear time and the 24 hour clocks that we have. 20 years, two years, two months, it's both a blink and a lifetime because of the way that our memory works. So in her mind, if her husband,

walked through the door, she said it would be less weird than her having to accept that he's actually gone and that her life now that she has had the moment to feel what she couldn't over the last 20 years, that she's going to have to be without her husband. Just that acceptance of it. There is no expiration date on this feeling of connection with our loved one or disconnection for that matter.

Yeah, it's so true. And that must be so hard having that happen, having to raise the kids and now all of a sudden they're gone and there's not that around for her. So it is hard and just difficult, but it's like that proverbial onion you just keep layer after layer after layer. And when you think, you feel from that particular situation. There's more. There's more.

Yes, that's always Mark.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. For those listening, go ahead and check out grief and light podcast and follow Nina on social media and follow her podcast.

Thank you so much, Kathy, and thank you for all you do. It really is filling a meaningful purpose here in this world of podcasting for us. So thank you so much.

You're welcome and thank you. You have a great day.

You too. OK. Bye bye. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the grief and light podcast I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page at grief and light Or you can also visit grief and light comm for more information and updates Thank you so much for being here for being you and always remember you are not alone