About me and my path into this work

My path into this work has been shaped by both professional experience and personal encounters with loss, grief, and profound life transition.

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, has transformed my understanding of grief and its power to shape us.

Over the past fifteen years, I have worked in community organizing and social justice movements, and spent seven years working in long-term healthcare, community grief support, and end-of-life care and planning. In that time, I have supported hundreds of people through grief and life transitions of many kinds. I became increasingly 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.

These collective experiences called me toward supporting others through the terrain of living, dying, loss, transition, and renewal.

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 to these relationships can help us better tend to ourselves, one another, and the world we live in.