Grieving a parent, a relationship, or a life you expected?

Grief is deep sorrow for a loss, and it looks different for everyone. It can follow the death of a parent, partner, child, or friend. It can also follow a divorce, an estrangement, a diagnosis, or a loss that no one around you seemed to recognize. Whatever its shape, grief is often layered and hard to carry alone.

I’m a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, a Certified Compassionate Bereavement Care Provider, and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I’ve also felt the heartbreak of loss myself, and I know there’s no right way to grieve.

Loss comes in many forms, and you may recognize your own experience in more than one of these.

Traumatic Grief 

Some losses knock the wind out of you. When a death is sudden or unexpected, the world can feel shattered and unrecognizable, and it’s hard to know what comes next. People may tell you how to grieve or what you “should” do. You don’t have to follow their timeline. We start where you are.

Loss of a Parent, Including When It’s Complicated

Losing a parent changes your place in the world, whatever the relationship was like. When the relationship was complicated, the loss can be painful and confusing in ways that are hard to explain to others. You may feel sorrow and relief, or anger and longing, or guilt, or nothing at all, sometimes all in the same day.

You may be grieving the parent you had, and also the parent you needed and never got. People around you may expect a simple, loving kind of grief, and that can leave you feeling alone with what’s actually true for you. None of what you feel is wrong. We make room for all of it, without pushing you toward forgiveness or closure before you’re ready.

The Death of a Child

No parent is ever prepared to lose their child. Whether your child never took a first breath, or lived a long life into adulthood, or died at any age in between, the pain can feel unbearable. This loss also reaches siblings, grandparents, and the wider family, but your grief is different because the child was yours. I’m here to walk alongside you as you find your way through it.

Grief and Serious Illness

Not all grief follows a death. You may be grieving while someone you love is still here, while caring for a person who is dying, or after your own diagnosis changed the life you expected. This kind of loss is often called anticipatory grief, and it’s easy to overlook because there’s no clear event to point to. You may feel pulled between hope and loss, exhausted, or guilty for feeling any of it.

Early in my career I worked with children and adults living with cancer and blood disorders, and I carry that experience into this work. Together, we can make space for the fear, the sadness, and the changes in your body, relationships, and sense of who you are.

Ambiguous Loss and Disenfranchised Grief

Some losses are hard for other people to see. With ambiguous loss, you mourn something that hasn’t clearly ended, or hopes that may never come to pass, such as a parent lost to addiction, incarceration, estrangement, or divorce, or a loved one who is physically here but changed by illness.

Grief becomes disenfranchised when others don’t recognize the loss as valid. There may be no rituals to follow and no support around you. There’s no ribbon for grieving “the right way,” and you don’t have to be “over it by now.”