Episode 21 – Grieving the Untimely Death of Our Friends & Peers with Lou-Lou Igbokwe

In this episode, Dana Daugherty invites her guest Lou-Lou Igbokwe to talk about something some millennials are beginning to face as they move through their 30s and 40s when their friends and peers die prematurely at a young age. Together we talk about how grieving the loss of friends doesn’t get as much support as grieving family members, the difficulty of processing untimely death because we know a person has so much more life to live, and what it means to keep someone’s memory alive through ritual, story, and connecting with others who are grieving as well.

Born and raised in the suburbs of New Jersey to Nigerian immigrant parents, Lou- Lou Igbokwe has always used the cultural kaleidoscope that colored her world to shape the stories she tells. From reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show to the visceral language of Toni Morrison, the common theme of Lou-Lou’s early influences is community.  She discovered her love for theater at Dartmouth College, later earning an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Asia, where she developed her play Iyom during her two years in Singapore. Her writing has since taken her into film and TV, with credits including Starz’s Step Up: High Water, BET’s Bigger, and Netflix’s Bridgerton, as well as short film, Chula, that screened at Palm Springs Film Festival. She’s also, by her own admission, a shameless performer who owns three karaoke microphones.

This conversation is for anyone who’s lost a friend and felt like the world didn’t quite know what to do with that grief, and for anyone trying to figure out how to hold onto the memory of their friend once they’re gone.

You can connect with Lou-Lou on LinkedIn or Instagram @writeonloulou