Grief does not wait for a death certificate. In this episode of the Digital Legacy Podcast, I sat down with identity grief and emotional regulation strategist Njeri Njuhigu to talk about the grief that arrives before the loss, and what we can do about it.
Some conversations stay with you long after the microphones are off. This was one of them.
My guest, Njeri Njuhigu, and I met through Women Build AI, a tight knit community of women who are passionate about artificial intelligence. But what we really have in common is that we both work in the death space, and neither of us dances around the topic.
Njeri spent twenty five years as a television producer, working as a supervising producer on shows for NBC, Netflix, and HBO. Her job was to sit down with a stranger, on a deadline, and get them to the truest thing about themselves. Then, for thirteen years, she went home from that job and cared for her mother, who lived with a progressive neurological condition, and later for her mother’s husband through pancreatic cancer.
“It was TV,” she told me, “but when I left the office and I went home, I was actually dealing with life and death.”
Today she calls herself an identity grief and emotional regulation strategist, and once you hear her explain why, you will never think about grief the same way again.
Every major loss is an identity crisis in disguise
That line is Njeri’s, and it is the heart of this episode.
“Every major loss is an identity crisis in disguise,” she said. “The loss is the event. And the identity crisis is the story we tell ourselves about the event.”
Who am I when I stop being a wife? Who am I when I stop being a caregiver? As Njeri put it, “The caregiver who structured four years around one person wakes up on a Tuesday with no role.”
This is why loss is so much bigger than death alone. On this show I have talked with divorce attorneys, because divorce is the death of a marriage. Losing a job is a loss. Watching a child leave for college is a loss. In Njeri’s words, “Whenever you’re in anticipation and your body cannot regulate and or adjust to it, you’re in anticipatory grief in one form or another.”
Procrastination is protection
As a thanatologist, I am one of the few who does not specialize in grief. I specialize in pre planning, taking care of the administrative burden ahead of time so that when someone does die, the people left behind can actually be in their grief instead of drowning in paperwork. So I hear constantly from people who know they should plan and keep putting it off.
Njeri reframed that beautifully.
“Procrastination isn’t really procrastination,” she said. “What it is is protection. It’s your brain and your body going in sync to try to protect you from what it feels like it’s going to destroy it.”
If nothing else, she offered, give yourself grace for that.
And grief is not only emotional. It is physiological. Njeri walked us through what happens in the body, the brain fog, the forgetting, the body searching for the person who is gone. As she put it, the body keeps score. Or as we both said on air, the issues are in the tissues.
The grief before the goodbye
I shared something personal in this conversation. My son in law is in hospice. He is thirty four. We are celebrating his birthday in August, even though his birthday is really in October, just because. My family is living inside anticipatory grief right now, so this was not an academic conversation for me.
I said on the show what I believe deeply. The hardest part of dying is not the dying itself. The hardest part is watching someone you love die, because you have to continue to live on once they are gone.
Njeri honored that, and she offered something I want every caregiver to hear. Be present in the moment with the person, without making them feel responsible for the people they are leaving behind. Sink into the loving of what you have already experienced together, and make these last days the best they can be.
Rituals, names, and the third death
We talked about the Ho’oponopono prayer, a four phrase mantra I love to share. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. And I love you.
We talked about names. Njeri’s name comes from the Kikuyu tribe of Kenya and means little warrior. In my own Jewish tradition, we pass the names of our departed to the next generation, which is how my daughter Anna carries my mother’s memory. As Njeri said, “When we say the name, we conjure all the memories, all the experiences, and all the love.”
And then she said something that speaks directly to why I built ENDevo. “We often say we die twice, the last breath and then the last time somebody says your name.” Then you add the third passing, the digital one. Our photos, our voices, our threads. Almost nobody is planning for that digital forever.
We also went straight at the hard question of grief bots and digital twins. Njeri’s take: if a grief bot guides a person toward human connection, she is all for it. But too often, “a grief bot is engineered for continuity, for subscription,” and that keeps people swirling in grief instead of moving through it. My question remains the one I ask everywhere. When the human expires, who owns the digital twin? Right now, we don’t.
Three things to take with you
Njeri left our listeners with three practices, and I am passing them straight to you.
First, forgiveness. Create your own ritual around it, and do it in the mirror so you can see yourself truly.
Second, surrender. Be present in the moment with the people you love.
Third, practice the breath. We are shallow breathing our way past the beauty in our lives.
Because as Njeri says, “Grief is a hundred for a hundred. It never misses.” We cannot avoid it. But we can prepare for it, plan around it, and meet it with love instead of paperwork and panic.
Listen to the full conversation on the Digital Legacy Podcast. You can find Njeri and her work at livenlight.com.
And may you live in love, light, and legacy today and every day.
Live Fully ~ Die Ready
Niki
