My Journey with Grief.

I know what it is to be brought to my knees in grief time and again in my roles as adoptee, daughter, sister, friend, aunt, pet lover, and mother. I’ve felt the wounds of abandonment, trauma, stillbirth, deep sorrow, and unexpected loss. 

While my journey with grief began at birth when I became an orphan, I did not truly wake up to grief until a series of family deaths between Spring of 2009 and Fall of 2016 began to crack and re-crack my heart wide open. During this seven-year period of active mourning, I learned to apprentice myself to the ebbs and flows of grief and began to draw from my expressive arts and ritual toolkits in order to make meaning and find solace in the face of these losses. Grief tending helped me see grief as a dance. 

In October of 2017, I chose to study grief for my Masters in Celebrancy project on communal grief rituals. A handful of immersive months later, I had what amounted to a 158-page, book manuscript draft with It Takes a Village: Reclaiming Grief as a Communal Rite in a Fractured World. 

During this intensive season of study, I took the time to study the work of various bereavement experts and their teachings, myriad healing arts modalities, together with indigenous frameworks for public grief expression. My deep dive into communal grief rituals led me to create my own integrated model.   

In the years after, I pursued a handful of additional certifications including my Certification in Thanatology (CT) designation from the Association of Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), death doula, end of life educator trainings. I volunteered with my local hospice organization as well as with a teen bereavement camp as a ritual leader. And along the way, I was cracked open to grief in other ways.  

And then enter the pandemic, stage left, in February 2020. I was just getting ready to launch a self-paced, e-class on grief in February 2020 but instead, found myself part of a cohort of end-of-life specialists who stepped up to offer grief resources and ritual ideas for those grieving at a distance. Suddenly, death and grief were in the glaring spotlight in ways I had only just mused about. 

I’ve spent most of the pandemic focused on serving newly bereaved families and communities with my funeral chaplaincy work, in between enduring fresh losses, but now feel ready to open my doors to grieving folks, both individually and in community, as a grief tender and educator, ceremonialist, death doula, soulsmith, and guide.

My “Credentials.”

As much as I’ve chased numerous “certifications” in thanatology, I consider the lower-case title of lifelong griever and my own losses to be the most important credential in my work as a Grief Tender. I’m wary of so much of what passes for certifications, be that the white-centric coaching industrial complex or bereavement experts who continue to pathologize grief as some one-size-fits-all equation.

Having said that, here are some of my current and previous memberships, roles, and affiliations: