In this episode, I share a reflection from my book Beneath the Skin of Sorrow—a poetic “recipe” for caring for ourselves in the midst of grief. Loving Kindness Tea invites us to slow down, breathe deeply, and return to gratitude, silence, and love.

Through story, meditation, and a touch of ritual, we explore how healing can live in small, intentional moments—and how we can begin to live greatly through grief.

After my husband’s passing, I found myself searching for language that could hold both my grief and my continued capacity to love. Then, a stranger offered me a new way of seeing.

In this episode, I reflect on the idea of an encore—that unexpected moment when you are called back to the stage.

As a young jazz singer on my first European tour, I experienced my first encore and discovered something powerful: the space between what we plan and what we are asked to give in the moment is where the real magic lives. Through story, music, and reflection, I explore how that lesson returned to me years later through grief. Sometimes grief calls us back to the stage of our lives when we feel unprepared, uncertain, and afraid. Yet in those moments, we are invited to trust, to improvise, and to find healing in the unexpected.

If this episode resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe to Great Grief Podcast, and to join my community as the season unfolds. New episodes are released bi-weekly!

Valentine’s Day can stir many things — joy, memory, longing, even sorrow. Not everyone greets it with candy and flowers. So instead of wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day, I offer you something else: a love bouquet from my heart to yours.

Recorded live at Moorhead Manor on Valentine’s Day, this episode reflects on love through the lens of loss. What is this thing called love? What happens when grief reshapes it? When marriage, partnership, and shared life change form? When the question stops being theoretical and becomes deeply personal?

Welcome to Season 3 of Great Grief.

In this episode, I sit with the word “loss.” What does it mean to lose something? A bag. A job. A sense of direction. A beloved. What does it mean to feel lost yourself?

Through meditation, storytelling, and song, I explore the difference between something being gone and something being changed. I reflect on grief as a landscape—where the map no longer matches the terrain, where you show up but feel estranged from your own life.

Welcome to Season 3 of Great Grief!

This season I’m listening closely—to stories, songs, and the quiet places where grief lives beneath the surface. In this opening episode, I share ancestral stories of my grandmother and great-grandmother, reflecting on grief, memory, and lineage. Through music, storytelling, and poetry, I explore grief not as something to fix, but as a journey—one that can be honored, felt, breathed with, and sometimes sung through. This season holds a culturally wide lens and a feminine gaze, creating space where sorrow and joy can coexist. If this episode resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe and join my community as the season unfolds. New episodes are released bi-weekly. What has grief taught you about listening? Share in the comments.

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December has been calling all year long. This holiday offering from Great Grief is an invitation to pause, to listen, and to remember what the heart craves — belonging, rest, and communion with spirit. Featuring a summer moment of joy and reverence with Paperhand Puppet Intervention, this piece honors our oldest ancestors and calls to our beloveds on both sides of the veil.

Every goodbye ain’t gone.

🎧 Season 3 of Great Grief returns weekly beginning January 13, 2026.

Great Grief is a podcast about living greatly through grief and is available everywhere you get your podcasts.

Special thanks to Naima Harrell, Andrew Berinson, Donovan Zimmerman, and Larkin Consulting.

Grief comes to live with us all eventually, and she needs no invitation. In this bonus holiday episode of Great Grief, Nnenna Freelon appreciates the quiet moments shared in the kitchen with her late father and wonders aloud how to curate her space for the holidays now that grief has made a home in her home.

In this previously-recorded live edition of Great Grief, Nnenna Freelon shares her memories of the lessons her grandma's wooden spoon and wisdom gave her about gathers with community to create a warm space for us to sit with our loves and our losses in the company of those who also know suffering.

The seasons are changing—an apt metaphor to talk about the shedding, withering, and falling away that accompanies the most painful parts of grief. This season, Nnenna looks to nature and the cyclical movement of time to delve deeper into loss, creating rituals and making discoveries that help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the ones we’ve lost.

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Unlike other podcasts on grief, Great Grief by Grammy-nominated vocalist Nnenna Freelon doesn’t give you a blueprint for how to get over it. Instead, she offers her own experiences as a wife, a sister, a Black woman, and a powerful jazz artist to help you get into it. Each four-episode season is organized around topics that intertwine our grief experiences—topics like sisterhood, the inevitability of change, and Black love. A new collection drops every quarter, accompanied by a live opportunity for us to gather around our griefs in different cities across the South.

• Check out the archive of essays in Scalawag's grief & other loves series.
• Join the Great Grief Facebook community.