About Me

Death and grief came for me at a very young age. It is how I came to see the world. It was what raised me, and is still raising me. As I got older, my path continued to be shaped by both my personal and my professional experiences with loss, grief, profound life transition, and continued becoming. These collective experiences called me toward supporting others through the terrain of living, dying, loss, transition, and renewal.

But of all of the grief in my life, sitting vigil and caring for my dying parents- one after a stroke and the other at the end of her journey with Alzheimer’s disease- along with navigating pregnancy loss, divorce, single parenthood, and other human and non-human losses, as well as significant life changes all within a short time frame, provided the deepest transformation of my understanding of grief and its power to shape us. When grief and death came for me at that time in my life, I was so deeply grateful I had walked with it before, met it before, and had met myself right there with it. I knew that I could trust it to the depth of my bones, and trust myself enough to feel it, all of it, all the way out again.

Professionally, over the past two decades, I spent seven years working in long-term healthcare, community grief support, and end-of-life care and planning. I supported hundreds of people through grief and life transitions of many kinds. I also worked in community organizing and social justice movements, which made me even more acutely aware of how often grief lives just beneath the surface of our lives and communities, yet is so often unseen, minimized, or hurried past in our culture.

I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Holistic and Integrative Health. During my undergraduate studies, I focused on death, dying, bereavement, spirituality, and religion. I also studied Reiki during that time. I completed my End-of-Life Doula training through INELDA (International End of Life Doula Association) in 2019, earned a Certificate as a Grief Support Specialist from the University of Wisconsin in 2022, and trained as a Transformative Life Coach in 2023. I am also a trained mediator and facilitator.

Beyond my grief support practice, I co-own Sideyard, a New England native plant nursery, with my partner. Working closely with native plants keeps me grounded in the rhythms and cycles of the natural world and continually reminds me that life unfolds through seasons of growth, loss, rest, renewal, and regrowth. I see relationship in all things, including within the natural world- and believe that learning to listen deeply and notice closely in these relationships can help us better tend to ourselves, one another, and the world we live in.

Art and creativity are other ways that my work with grief and becoming shows up. I love exploring myself and my relationship with life and death and the suspended transitional through photographs and writing. Both mediums require me to stay curious about the mysteries and contradictions of being alive- paying attention to what is changing, what we are losing, what we are tending, what hovers, and what is quietly beginning again. I write about life, death, grief, plants, and everything in between in anyway that feels right to me in the moment: essays, poems, prose essays, dream-like reflections, political pieces, etc.

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