Not a plan but a lifelong path

My Early Career -

Almost 35 years ago, a friend asked me to help run her husband's plastic surgery office here in Scottsdale. I had an administrative background and my medical aestheology license, so I gave her a couple of days a week. It was a great way to spend my free time.

As time went on, she promoted me to Patient Care Coordinator. I managed surgery consultations, worked with the surgical center to coordinate surgery times, schedule anesthesiologist and medical teams, order supplies, compiled medical necessity requirements for insurance cases, and set up compliance protocols with federal agencies. I loved being able to help patients and their families through this exciting adventure — and sometimes a much harder one, when someone was diagnosed with skin cancer. In those moments, I was able to advocate for them and help their families manage the diagnosis.

Almost ten years later, my oldest son, Kenny, was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 23.

When My Life Turned Upside Down -

At the time I was managing a household as a single mom, I had two children still at home and paying the bills and everything else on top of navigating a grief journey I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would be experiencing.

Any other circumstance I would have wiped the dust of my boots and kept going, like all single Moms do. But grief like that isn't something you just one day decide everything is OK and keep going. Grief like that is in your DNA.

After a few years I found a local group of parents of child loss. That group is now an international non-profit with over 33k members, all parent of child loss. Through my own journey I began helping other parents of child loss — one-on-one, and sometimes in groups. I even became an Affiliate Group Leader for the organization. If you have lost a child, you already know no one speaks the language of child loss but another parent of child loss. It's unimaginable, and it has a language all its own.

From Grief Work Back into Healthcare Logistics -

One day one of the parents in my group approached me and asked if I'd help his company set up a Transfer Center at his Air Medical Transport company, i.e., moving a medically compromised patient from one place to another, sometimes locally, sometimes across the country, sometimes across the world. He told me that with my medical background, and the way I was with the parents in our group, he thought I'd be a great fit. So, I took on the challenge.

Every day, I coordinated long-range transfers for families in crisis, and for families navigating something just as critical, and just as hard maybe a husband and wife retire to Arizona; Dad passes away; the adult kids in Chicago want Mom closer to home so they can care for her, but she can't, or they don't want her to, fly commercial. That’s when I get the call, and then I contact her senior living facility, gather the details, lock in a date, and coordinate every piece of that 3 D puzzle from where she is to where she is going: ground transportation, maybe awaiting hospice or a home RN, peer-to-peer coordination between her medical team here and a new one in Chicago, medical equipment deliveries, and so on.

There are lots of moving pieces to every single transfer. I worked with facilities, insurance companies, hospital systems, hospice teams, rehab facilities, medical teams, ambulance and private car companies — sometimes even customs, when a patient had retired in another country. I did this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for almost ten years. I loved the challenge and I loved helping people at some of the most critical times of their lives.

Super Bowl, Private Aviation, and a Turning Point -

This skill set was highly specialized, and I was good at it, often getting offers from other companies to make a move. Eventually I accepted the position to start up an air medical division with a private jet company here in Scottsdale. It was a great opportunity but a month in, my former employer reminded me that I had signed a non-compete and couldn't work in medical transport for three years. I had a dilemma, stay in private jets with no medical involvement or continued with the project and get sued.

Around that time, one of my former air medical families reached out. I'd helped them bring their father home from Las Vegas to New York so he could spend his remaining years with his grandkids. He had since passed away, and they asked if I could help charter a private jet to take the family to Mexico to spread his ashes. I made it work, and that became the start of a new venture as a private jet broker, coordinating flights for ultra-high-net-worth clients, no medical work involved.

In 2008, my company became the exclusive luxury transport provider for the Arizona Super Bowl. My work took a real jump in status — I was now working with high-need, high-expectation, high-touch clients. That work with that demographic is very demanding; you have to be able to see 10 steps ahead of what you are doing so that you meet the needs of each client. It’s always having a bird's eye view of all the moving pieces for each flight, for each client, for each experience. However, it was still 24 hours a day 7 days a week. At some point, I recognized I was getting on in years, and working those hours would not be sustainable for the next twenty years.

Finding David Kessler

It was time to figure out where my passion and purpose would be for the rest of my life. I decided to look into expanding my grief expertise, maybe more than exclusivity parents of child loss. I researched all the big names — every course, online and in person, every industry leader's background, how long they'd been in the field. One name kept coming up: David Kessler. He's known around the world for his work on grief and finding meaning after loss, and he collaborated on books and projects with both Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Louise Hay. He had a course for grief educators, and it seemed to fit what I was looking for.

I applied to his certification program and waited to hear back. While I waited, a Death Doula course came into my sightline. I'd had a Birth Doula with my last child, so I already understood the concept — same idea, different end of life right? I enrolled and was certified a few months later. It didn’t take long before I realized that this was the work I was doing all along as a Patient Care Coordinator and Medical Flight Coordinator and even the type of work I did with UHNW clients in my luxury transportation business. This was the perfect piece to the passion and purpose goal. Then I heard back from the Kessler group. I was in.

Where That Training Took Me

I had been in that “grief space” all those years working with parents of child loss and had become part of the Helping Parents Heal’s leadership team, so I knew my way around death and dying and the grief journey. Yes, all those things we don’t like to talk about. But my training with David Kessler expanded that work beyond death loss — into every kind of grief we experience throughout a lifetime: job loss, relationship loss, pet loss, friendship loss, the loss of our health, the loss of a life we thought we'd have. It went into the feelings we carry over from each loss until we acknowledge those experiences. It even explored how we find meaning after loss.

What I was reminded of time and again is that grief isn’t linear, it isn’t the “five stages.” It’s a lived experience that we carry with us until it's honored and acknowledged — and as a Doula, at the last stage of a parent’s life, I see this show up as an adult child suddenly behaving badly, a caregiver's quiet exhaustion, a family that doesn't know how to talk to each other anymore all disguises for anticipatory, prolonged and even disenfranchised grief. As a Grief and Loss Specialist I see it every day in women going through an end of a marriage, or men losing their jobs, or even kids living through the loss of a pet. I even see it when I speak on Podcasts, and in large groups at retreats and private events. We have stories and lightbulb moments when we finally feel safe to talk about loss.

Grief doesn’t mean we are broken, it is a human experience, and it means we lived and loved.

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Connect with me directly at 480.848.1534, or reach out through the Contact Page to explore the ways we can partner to help others.