Like many who are inspired to minister to the dying and bereaved, my call to this work comes from experiencing several deaths very near to the most tender places of my heart. The story is long, yet offering it to you here both honors my dead and gives you a chance to better understand me as a potential ally to you in your own explorations.

It began in January 2017, when my younger brother—my only sibling and most cherished human—was killed tragically and nearly instantly in a car accident at just 36. I reacted to the news the way you’d see it in a movie: shrieking, protesting, my body both electrified with rage and numb with disbelief. I’d been living in Los Angeles, far from him and the rest of my family, and I understood quickly that I couldn’t move through this anguishing event without deep and ancestral support at my literal fingertips. Michael’s death prompted a return to Phoenix to find safe harbor after nearly two decades away—a move back to a place I thought I had left behind for good. It also introduced me to emotions and states of being completely unfamiliar, unanticipated, unguided—and, as I have come to understand over time, unparalleled in their gifts.

Just four months later, I helped to move my last living grandparent, my father’s dad and namesake, into a skilled nursing facility. My last visit with him had unexpectedly coincided with a visit from the hospice RN, who recommended that he be relocated into safer, more consistent care than could be provided at home. Sitting with my step-grandmother as we waited for transport to arrive, I observed my first deathwork instinct appear: as we spoke about my grandfather’s apparent reluctance to let go from the diminishment of age—fortunate as he was to see 96 without life-limiting illness—I asked if she had simply told him it was okay to make his departure. She looked puzzled at first, as the idea hadn’t occurred to her, then seemed to gain clarity as she remembered having had just this conversation with her first husband many decades ago as he lay dying of cancer. After several hours negotiating the mechanics of the move and making certain he was clean, comfortable, and in compassionate care, I offered my grandfather my final words of love and serenity. The next day, between visits by his children, my step-grandmother assured him that all was in order, that he could rest knowing that both family and affairs were settled with his death. It proved to be perhaps the key: he met his peace within 48 hours.

The following year, a colleague I admired and counted as a friend accepted my offer to come sit with him for a few hours as he made his way through what we knew would be the final stretch of a rare and incurable stomach cancer. Upon meeting him in his backyard amidst the gentle sunshine—his body frail with decline, yet his humor, wit, and intellect perhaps sharper than ever—I sensed something shift inside me. I felt an ease to being with disease; there was no recoil from the sights, smells, or sounds of his once-athletic form responding to the stimulus of change and intervention. We shared tears, laughter, and the solidarity of being two humans navigating life’s mysteries, speaking frankly about his approaching death as much as we traded gossip and talked shop about our shared industry. In this experience, I perceived a new level of wholeness and the first stirrings of a call to service. Gerhardt passed with loving energy that summer, in August 2018.

It would be only six months later when, in February 2019, I lost a deeply beloved intimate friend, Shannon, to suicide. The second of my father’s brothers, Rich, would be taken by cancer in the spring. That fall, I drove out to Southern California to attend to one of my two best friends, Melissa, who had been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor of the liver just after my brother died and had been fighting its relentless encroachment ever since. Two years into her diagnosis, a routine procedure had gone awry; we weren’t sure she would survive it. What I thought would be a brief, gut-wrenching visit to say good-bye turned into five weeks of in-hospital and at-home caregiving and peer support that ultimately showed me the gifts I intrinsically possess and how my composure in chaos can help ease the burdens of illness and decline. I returned home once she stabilized, strengthened and more inquisitive than ever about why death seemed to appear so frequently at my door. An exploration with my therapist a short while later showed me what was intended by all its knocking: an invitation to formally initiate into deathwork.

But the universe was not quite done with my apprenticeship.

As I completed my primary training as a death doula in February 2020, the pandemic bloomed. Melissa never quite recovered from the events of the previous year, and she passed that May at only 45, COVID protocols locking us all out from last visits and bedside vigil. We could not hold her celebration of life for more than a year—shortly after which a dear cousin of mine, Christopher, lost his life at 38 to a freak hiking accident that left all of us bewildered and searching for meaning in ways that mirrored the grief of my brother’s untimely death.

Throughout all of this, my mother, Barbara, was beginning to turn the final page of her own story. She had been diagnosed with, and successfully treated, breast cancer in 2018, only to learn the next year that endometrial cancer had developed. As I served the dying in private practice and as a volunteer, as I deepened my skills and acquired new tools through seminars, courses, workshops, and networking, she championed me while quietly enduring surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation. Twice, it was enough; the third time, it wasn’t. Always, she personified the dignity, grace, resilience, fallibility, and humor of what it means to be in love with life even as it is pulled more and more urgently from your grasp.

Beginning in January 2023, I companioned her through her last weeks on Earth—giving thanks at every turn to the teachings of all who had allowed me to walk with them in dying before her—and yet again joined my stepfather, extended family, and friends in the liminal and familiar spaces of grief, love, and life after death.

The universe will never be quite done with my apprenticeship.

I share my story not to garner sympathy, but to make plain how near death is to us in every moment—and how precious, mystical, and fleeting life is. I hold death close as a trusted mentor, sage guide, and benevolent friend. That is not to say that I haven’t railed against Spirit in the dark, screamed and sobbed and rattled with pain so vast and paralyzing that I did not know when it would end or who I would be without it. It is to acknowledge that without going deep into the gloaming, I would not know the light of this work.

I provide highly competent and professional deathcare, nurture my community with a diverse network of peers and mentors, and commit to continuing education several times a year, but this work is genuinely an avocation rather than a job—a calling rather than a career. I invest in my self-development not to serve an egoic drive to achieve, but to more deeply understand my shadows as well as my skills, for that is how we most ethically and authentically offer ourselves to others in the healing arts.

I cannot and will never pretend to know exactly how you are feeling, the unique shape of the challenges you face, the scale of the mountain in front of you, or the arc of the drop at the edge of this life. But, as your death midwife, I can meet you wherever you are with the enlightenment earned from entering adjacent landscapes and emerging with a kind of strength, clarity, purposefulness, and gratitude that I could not have known without those pilgrimages. A writer since childhood, I bring a narrative heart to my work, seeking to help my clients discover the stories inside them and claim their joy as much as their pain.

Death gathers us to ourselves and to each other. I look forward to meeting you…