People sometimes ask me why I became a grief coach. The answer isn't found in a certification program or a career change. It began years before either of those things, when life taught me more about grief than I ever wanted to know.

Like many people, I once believed grief was something that happened after someone died. I know now it's so much bigger than that.

Over the years, our family walked through one unimaginable challenge after another. One of my children battled cancer. A few years later, my husband died suddenly, leaving me to raise our three young children—just ten, eight, and six years old. In an instant, I wasn't only grieving the man I loved. I was grieving the future we'd spent years dreaming about together.

Time moved forward, as it always does, and eventually I found love again. I truly believed that chapter of heartbreak was behind me. Then my second husband was diagnosed with a progressive neurological disease, and once again life became a series of hospital visits, caregiving, uncertainty, and another kind of grief—the slow ache of watching someone you love change before your eyes.

Looking back, I can see that every season of loss asked the same question:

Not, How do I stop hurting completely?

That isn't how grief works.

We grow around the hurt. We lessen its sting. But we don't completely shed it.

The real question became:

For a long time, I didn't have an answer. My job was simply to put one foot in front of the other. To take care of my children. To survive the next day, and then the one after that.

Eventually, surviving stopped feeling like enough.

I wanted to believe there could still be joy. Still be purpose. Still be dreams worth chasing, even if they looked different from the ones I'd lost.

That desire is what led me to coaching.

I enrolled because I thought I was learning how to help people set goals. Instead, I learned something far more important: we are not defined by the worst thing that has ever happened to us. We carry our grief with us, yes, but we also carry our strengths, our values, our resilience, and our capacity to build a meaningful life alongside the pain.

Becoming a certified coach didn't erase my losses. It didn't make me "get over" anything.

It changed the trajectory of my life.

It gave me the courage to ask myself a question I hadn't dared to ask in years:

Little by little, I began saying yes to dreams I had quietly packed away. Today, I'm nearing the completion of the first draft of my first novel—a dream I've carried for decades but never believed I would actually accomplish. There are other opportunities I never could have imagined, too, but writing this book feels especially meaningful because it reminds me that grief doesn't have to be the end of our story.

That's why I do this work.

Not because I have all the answers.

Not because I've figured grief out.

But because I've learned that healing isn't about returning to who you were before loss.

If you've found your way here, chances are your story hasn't unfolded the way you hoped it would either.

I'm so sorry for that.

But I'm also deeply convinced of this:

Sometimes it's the beginning of one you never could have imagined.

And if you're ready, I'd be honored to walk that next chapter with you.