Hi. I am Heather.
I think grief deserves better.

I did not set out to be a grief expert.
Grief found me first.

In November 2009, after a significant loss of my own, I went looking for a therapist who could actually sit with me in my grief. I could not find one. What I found instead were well-meaning clinicians who wanted to move me through it faster than I was ready to go. That experience did not just shape me. It changed the entire direction of my career.

A year later, I entered my PsyD program knowing exactly what I wanted to build. I spent four years volunteering with hospice, learning what it means to be genuinely present with people at the edges of life and loss. During my graduate training, I co-founded a community mental health clinic alongside my supervisor, and stayed on through my internship year, sitting with people whose grief had nowhere else to go.

My dissertation was a phenomenological multiple case study exploring how people use social media as a mourning practice, because grief was already moving into digital spaces and the field was not paying attention yet. I became a licensed psychologist in February 2021.

The STAY Framework grew out of all of it. My own loss. The research. The hospice rooms. The community mental health clients. The years of watching people decide they were failing at grief because the models they had been given did not actually fit the way grief moves through a human life. Grief does not go away. It changes. And the work is learning to carry it forward with intention, not in spite of the loss, but because of it.