My Path Here

I spent 18 years as a pediatric speech and feeding therapist, specializing in working with medically fragile infants who were transitioning from the NICU to home, usually with a feeding tube, and very scared and overwhelmed parents. I know what it means to stand at a threshold with a family and offer steadiness when everything feels uncertain.

Then death came to my own door.

In 2024, I lost both of my parents, both in their mid 60s, and just months apart.

In being with my mom during her final days, I found myself stepping into the role of a death doula – a calling that awakened something deeply ancestral within me. I had never been present to a death before, and while intellectually I didn’t “know” what to do, my body and soul remembered and took over. Witnessing my mom’s transition was profoundly life-changing and transformative – a moment of deep threshold magic, intimacy, and sacred witnessing.

Just weeks after her passing, my stepfather unexpectedly suffered a stroke. My siblings and I were suddenly navigating end-of-life discussions, decisions, directives, while also managing their home, pets, accounts, finances - all while working and parenting young children ourselves. It was overwhelming in a way words cannot describe.

Shortly after my parents passed, my 96-year-old proud Scottish grandmother passed, then my aunt, who died tragically. Within two years my entire matriarchal line passed. Leaving me as the current matriarch of my young family.

After this, everything shifted.

I left my career. I enrolled in a death doula training program. I became a hospice volunteer. And now, I am continuing this path by pursuing a master’s degree in psychotherapy - deepening my ability to support individuals and families through grief, loss, and transformation with both clinical skill and soulful grounding, presence.

I am no longer the person I once was.
And so, out of the ashes of my previous life, I offer to you my rebirth – and the magic and medicine of Enchanted Mournings.

“Rebirth is the word we use when we walk out of the flames,
our spirits and bones alive with a purpose and passion as deep as the ocean.”
-Nikita Gill

*I acknowledge that beneath and around my home are the traditional lands of the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla and Puyallup people,
as well as the Salish tribes who visited and traded in this area.
I honor with gratitude, the land and these tribes, past and present, and for time immemorial.