In 2010, I lost my mother to colon cancer — and felt the earth disappear beneath me. She was my foundation, my unconditional love, my anchor. In the years that followed, I lost three of her siblings back to back, became one of only four elders left in my family while still in my 40s, watched my children leave the nest, and walked through my second divorce after 23 years of marriage.
Then I lost my father to a long, painful battle with dementia.
But the loss that brought me to my knees was the one that no one fully saw. I lost one of my greatest loves — a man I had known my whole life, loved for over six years — to pancreatic cancer. His adult children had never accepted me. So when he died, I was left to grieve him alone. No seat at the table. No acknowledgment. Just an invisible wound that the world didn't know how to name.
That grief made me ambivalent about life itself. I knew I needed help — or I might not survive what I was carrying.
"I am not a guide who studied grief from a distance. I am someone who lived it, nearly lost herself in it, and found the way back — not to who I was before, but to someone I could love again."
Therapy helped. But what truly changed my life was going through the Grief Recovery Method — a structured, evidence-based process for healing unfinished emotional pain. It gave me a path through the darkness. And in that process, I found my calling: to walk other women through exactly what I had survived.