After a lifetime of loss (both parents before I reached 13, my only sibling at 20, then my eldest child when he was 20)—the story I tell in my memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared—I’m passionate about supporting others in their journey through grief.
Many of us were never given a language for grief, and so we’ve gone months or years or decades carrying it alone. Even when we’ve experienced loss ourselves and mean well, we often still come up short. We don’t know what to say or how to help, so we say the wrong thing, we say too little or, worse yet, we say nothing at all.
We also don’t talk much about the ongoing presence of grief in day-to-day life. Triggered by anniversaries, by music, by ordinary moments, grief often coexists with everyday living—and even, seemingly out of nowhere, joy.
Because we’ve had to face grief in a culture that’s largely grief illiterate, we may feel as if we should be further along or question whether what we’re experiencing counts as grief, even years later.
Enter grief coaches.
As I spoke about my memoir to groups large and small, I began to notice one constant: questions about grief. Why do I still feel this way after all this time? Will I be sad/angry/lost forever? How do I move through this? What helps?
So in March 2026, I was trained as a grief coach, certified in The Grief M.E.N.T.O.R. Method, and subsequently completed additional education in order to provide gentle, practical support that helps people experiencing the normal, human experience of navigating loss to build resilience and create a meaningful life while carrying grief.
As a lifelong lover of the written word—-as evidenced by a lifetime of reading, a career in communication disorders, and a decade and a half of writing and publishing essays, then a memoir—I’ve seen how writing can help us discover the stories we’ve been living by.
You don’t have to be a writer to begin.
You don’t need writing experience or even to think of yourself as someone who likes to write. We’ll begin with accessible prompts that might invite you to make a list, recall a moment, describe an object, or follow a thought wherever it leads. There’s no expectation of polished writing or sharing anything you’re not ready to share.
Writing is simply a way to explore the stories we carry, discover what we may not yet have words for, and make room for the many often-contradictory truths of our lives.
You may even surprise yourself with what you find on the page.
If this journey through grief resonates with you—if you’re drawn to a community that understands the need to be witnessed, if you long to keep your loved one close and present, and if you’d like to explore the stories you carry about your grief through accessible writing—I hope you’ll join us.
