Living with Chronic Illness, Cancer & Mortality
For people whose life now includes mortality, in one form or another.
And for the people who love and care for them.
Serious illness changes time. The future becomes shorter or less certain. The present becomes louder. Old questions come back wearing new clothes: what matters, what is enough, who am I if I am no longer the person who could.
Most therapy is built for people on the way back to a regular life. This work is for people who are not going back. Whose lives now include something that will not be solved, only inhabited.
I want to accompany people through profound human experiences rather than treat disorders.
Facing Mortality
When my father died, I was thirteen years old. When I started working with hospice as a bereavement counselor, I was thirty. I spent ten years inside that work. Children whose parents were dying. Adults in midlife whose bodies had stopped cooperating. Elders whose minds had moved on before their hearts did. Whole families rearranging themselves around a diagnosis.
Why this is my work
Ten years inside hospice. Two decades sitting with mortality.
I spent ten years as a grief counselor for Hospice by the Bay, supervising the clinical intern program for three of those years.
Years later, I was debilitated by severe chronic pain for over two years. I was healed through body-mind-spirit interventions, the same approaches I now bring to my clients.
I am not the right therapist for everyone. I am the right one for the conversations most people are too uncomfortable to have.
Who I work with
Six rooms inside the same house.
Living with a Diagnosis
Stage IV cancer. Autoimmune disease. Long COVID. Any illness that has rearranged your life and refuses to be a temporary detour.
Anticipatory Grief
Loving someone whose time is shortening. The grief that begins long before the loss does, and that often has no one safe to speak to.
Caregiver Stress
The slow erosion of the person doing the caring. The loneliness of holding it together for everyone else. The guilt of needing your own life back.
Aging and the Long Goodbye
Watching a parent become someone you no longer recognize. Your own body changing. The reckonings that come with a longer view backward than forward.
Fear of Death
The ordinary, often unspoken human work of meeting your own mortality. Without performance, without religion required, without rush.
Living with Chronic Illness & Pain
For people facing serious illness, chronic pain, anticipatory grief, or the work of caregiving. Befriending the body. Walking with mortality.
Free 15-Minute Consultation
No pressure. Just a conversation to see if I am the kind of company you are looking for.
You'll meet with Laurie directly.
Book a Free Consultation