GRIEF THERAPY FOR THE EXistential IMPACT OF LOSS
GRIEF THERAPY & GRIEF INTENSIVES
With 27 years in hospice and palliative care, I offer in-home & virtual grief therapy, family intensives and ritual-based grief gatherings for individuals, families navigating profound loss and existential suffering and life-changing transitions.
Grief is not a feeling, it is;
a fundamental life skill
the loss of our assumptive world
a learning in a liminal space
a tightrope walk in an undernourished climate
a guide and a force for good
a disruption of identity
a collapse of meaning
a renegotiation of social roles
an unwanted attempt to reconstruct selfhood
consolidated fears
pain that feels impossible to localize
everything is on the healing table
a neglected duty
isolating in a grief illiterate culture
the active and ever-present process of reorienting all core fundamental aspects of living.
“IF HUMANITY WERE A COUNTRY, GRIEF WOULD BE THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE”
JOHN ONWUCHEKWA
Welcome, I’m Tracy
For the past 27 years, I have worked in roles centered around emotional support, grief and human connection. Beyond my professional training, my work has always been rooted in compassion, presence and deep listening. Being with people experiencing terminal illness, grief, loneliness, caregiving stress, life transitions and emotional isolation.
I understand that it is one of the highest states of overwhelm to carry pain that others may not fully see or speak on. My experience was inspired by my own encounters with existential uncertainty & impermanence growing up.
Working in hospice and palliative care, my clinical focus has been existential disorientation and grief in its many forms - anticipated, acute, complicated and existential (perhaps all grief is existential.) My work is grounded in both clinical practice and academic training across multiple institutions and settings.
I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California and my Master of Social Work from Columbia University. Throughout my career, I have worked across inpatient & outpatient hospice and palliative care teams, bereavement programs and medical education settings.
I continue to create and lead bereavement groups and also serve as faculty at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles, California, where I work with physicians in palliative care and geriatric medicine fellowship programs.
In that role, I guide reflective practice & clinician resilience, reflective capacity, exposure to suffering and end-of-life care. As well as emotional processing within medical systems & sustaining presence in high-intensity care environments.
I support physicians working closely with serious and life limiting illness, death and human suffering.
In October 2020, when death was more present than it had been in our lifetime, I began working in the emergency room on weekends to assist those who were dying alone and staff who had never seen such death, in an already grief illiterate death denying culture. I continue my work at the ER today on a per diem basis.
“The sorrow of all our human losses, great and small, anticipatory or contemporary, feeds into a river running beneath our lives. When that dark water breaks through the surface, at first, we feel totally alone. We may truly believe, “ No one but me has ever felt this kind of pain.” And that is half the truth, for grieving spreads across a vast and varied landscape that we can only really discover through our own intimate experience.”
- Roshi Joan Halifax
GRIEF DOLL
HERE’S HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER
“WHEN SOMEONE SAYS I CARE ABOUT YOUR SUFFERING, A DEEP HEALING BEGINS.
-THICH NHAT HANH
If you are navigating loss and looking for a space where your grief can be met with depth, clinical experience and attuned presence across decades of end-of-life work, I am here and eager to connect.