How I found my way into this work

Written in response to the most frequently asked question: "Why and how did you become a Death Doula and Grief Guide?"

In truth, I did not arrive here through a single moment of clarity, or a story I could neatly trace. This work formed slowly through a series of endings that, at the time, felt personal, circumstantial, even ordinary.

Moving to the United States as a teenager.
Learning a new language, a new culture.
Coming out.
Losing my grandmother, my person.
A near-death experience.
Living with chronic illness.
My sister’s addiction.
My father’s death from cancer.
Changing careers.

At the time, I did not understand these as initiations. I experienced them as disruptions. Individually, they each felt like moments where something was taken, altered, or undone. Moments where I felt, in different ways, the edges of powerlessness.

But looking back, I can see that I was being shaped by thresholds.

Long before I knew that “death and grief guide” was a role one could claim, I was already living inside its contours. Again and again, I found myself in the presence of endings—moments when something was falling away and what came next had not yet formed

There is a particular kind of disorientation in those spaces.
A loss of reference.
A sense that the ground you were standing on is no longer there.

And with that, a question: How do you stay with yourself when you cannot control what is happening?

Part of this came from so much successive early loss. But something deeper shifted after my near-death experience. To me, it’s an encounter that is difficult to explain, but impossible to dismiss. Death, which had once felt distant, became intimate. Familiar. Endings no longer felt like interruptions, instead they became doorways.

Within them, I sensed something else. Something steady. A kind of presence that did not require understanding in order to be felt. Where there had once been isolation, there was now a feeling of being accompanied.

I walked away from that experience less certain, but more open.
More able to stay with what I could not understand.
More willing to remain inside not knowing, without immediately trying to resolve it.

I started to see that the moments I had felt most powerless were not actually empty of power. They were moments where I had lost contact with myself—where my instinct to move, to feel, to respond had been overridden by fear, by survival, by the need to make sense of what could not yet be understood.

What I was learning, without yet naming it, was how to return.

We are rarely offered guidance through these kinds of experiences.
Instead, we are taught to move on.
To make meaning quickly.
To return to who we were, or become someone new as efficiently as possible.

We are not taught how to remain in the in-between.
How to listen there.
How to let something change us without rushing to stabilize.

So I began, slowly and deliberately, to orient my life toward the places most people are taught to avoid.

I immersed myself in the fundamentals of hospicing modernity.
I entered into a contemplative residency at a Zen Buddhist monastery.
I studied spiritual ecology.
I trained as an end-of-life doula.
I sat with people who were dying, and with those who loved them.

I sat with people who were dying, and with those who loved them.

In those spaces, death is not abstract. It is relational. Immediate. Unavoidable.

And in its presence, everything unnecessary falls away.

There is no performing.
No controlling the outcome.
No pretending to be untouched.

Only the question of how to be here: fully, honestly, and in relationship with what is happening.

This unfolding of purpose is not something you decide, but something that reveals itself as you stop resisting your deeper nature. A movement from shadow into gift: from holding pain alone, into becoming a presence that can hold others.

To follow this path is not only a commitment to learning. It is a commitment to unlearning.

I had to begin looking closely at what had shaped me, on every level.

The ways I had internalized systems that prioritize control, productivity, and resolution.

The impulse to optimize experience.
To make meaning too quickly.
To turn even loss into something useful, something complete.

I had to confront how deeply I had been taught to distance myself:
from the body,
from the earth,
from the unseen itself.

I noticed how often endings are often treated as failure.
Letting go becomes something to resist.
Grief becomes something to move through, to finish, to recover from.

What emerged from this was not a role I chose, but a way of being I stopped resisting.

Today, my work takes shape through end-of-life care, grief ritual, teaching, and facilitation. But at its core, it is about accompanying people at thresholds—when something is ending and the next thing has not yet taken form.

I support them in staying with what is here.
In sensing what is shifting.
In finding their way back to themselves, moment by moment.

With people who are grieving.
With people who are dying.
With people who are becoming someone they do not yet recognize.

Sometimes this looks like ritual.
Sometimes it looks like conversation.
Sometimes it is somatic, creative, or silent.

Always, it is relational.

At the heart of it, I offer presence.

A kind of witnessing that does not rush, fix, or demand resolution.
A willingness to sit inside the tension where sorrow and beauty co-exist.

And underneath that, something quieter but essential: A trust that even in the midst of chaos there is a way to remain in connection with oneself. That power is not found in controlling what is happening, but in how we meet it.

That is what lies at the core of my personal practice. 

A practice of returning, again and again, to myself in the midst of what is changing.
A practice of allowing emotion to move without being overtaken by it.
A practice of meeting intensity without collapsing or armoring against it.

A practice of honoring the shadow without becoming consumed by it.
A practice of tending to beauty, not as an escape, but as a necessary counterpart.
A practice of staying in relationship to what is sacred in the midst of what is breaking.

I came to this work:
Not by deciding, but by listening.
Not by striving, but by responding.
Not by arriving, but by returning, again and again, to what is here.

And if there is anything I offer through it, it is this: an invitation.

To stay a little longer with what you might otherwise turn away from.
To notice where you leave yourself, and gently, come back.
To trust that even in moments that feel like endings, something in you remains responsive, alive, and capable of meeting what is here.

Because this path is not mine alone. It is one we walk, each in our own way, whenever we dare to meet life at its thresholds, and choose, even then, not to abandon ourselves or each other.