Today we’d like to introduce you to Wendy Kessler
Hi Wendy, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’m a Grief Counselor & Educator. Like many people who specialize in grief, I didn’t start my career dreaming of a profession in death and dying. I fell into grief care through an unexpected opportunity and then discovered this is the work I am meant for.
I grew up in an LA suburb and came to San Diego as a nineteen-year-old college transfer in 1991. I fell in love with this city and my Statistics tutor. After graduation, we married and made San Diego our home. In the fall of 1995, Ryan began a full-time job, and I began a full-time Master of Social Work program at San Diego State University. Two years later, I was crossing a stage to shake hands with an administrator and receive my degree, wearing an extra-large graduation gown to accommodate my very pregnant belly. Being a mom in my mid-twenties was not my plan. My path was detoured to another route. Two more sons followed, and I grew to love being a boy-mom. I was a stay-at-home parent for the next 20 years.
My education never felt wasted throughout the era of raising my family, and I remained deeply involved in volunteer opportunities that included peer support and small group facilitation. However, in 2010 my lifework began when I leaned into hospitality as a vocation. Beyond entertaining, I gathered people around my dinner table as an invitation to care and connection. Our home is less than three miles from our undergraduate dorm, and Ryan and I have stayed closely connected to our college community. Knowing the challenges of adapting to post-college life, we began welcoming young adults from our alma mater to join our family for home-cooked dinners. We didn’t just eat together. We shared life – joy and sorrow, fear and courage, disappointment and hope, as well as a healthy serving of banter and belly laughter. Our table became a place of belonging during the tumultuous transition from being full-time students to full-time adulting.
The twentysomethings coming to our home quickly expanded beyond our college community and the faces gathered around our table included their friends, roommates, and coworkers. When we outgrew our dining room table, they built a 14’ x 6’ farmhouse patio table for our weekly meals. Everyone signed the table with a permanent marker at their first dinner, and when someone was ready to move on they were sent with love and care. At their last weekly meal, I gave them a set of used silverware from my kitchen drawer, wrapped in one of my cloth napkins, tied with twine, and a handwritten note that read, “You’ll always have a place at our table.” Our community dinners ended abruptly in 2020 due to the pandemic shutdown. However, Ryan and I maintain lifelong friendships with many young adults who became extended family over weekly meals, and this decade remains one of the great treasures of my life.
In 2017, our finances were stretched because the son who crossed a graduation stage in utero had embarked on his college career. And so, in my mid-forties, my path took another major detour. I accepted a Hospice Bereavement Coordinator position, and my professional career began. Like I said, I didn’t set out to do grief work. Hospice care was an unexpected opportunity that welcomed me. On the first day of my career, I sat in a small conference room reading through a thick training manual and discovered that “hospice” and “hospitality” are derived from the same Latin root. Both words describe the shelter, nourishment, and provisions offered to weary travelers on a long or difficult journey. Hospice work was not a deviation from my path but a continuation of my formation. The ten years I devoted to radical hospitality was astonishing preparation for grief work.
In the practice of hospitality as well as hospice care, my job is not to fix people. My role is to be fully present with others during a pivotal moment of their life. Long before I walked through the doors of my hospice company, my vocation taught me the value of accompanying people on their unique journey through the terrain of loss, offering companionship as they explore a new identity, and guiding them toward renewal in the next chapter of their story. We don’t move on from significant loss. We move forward as difficult transitions give way to transformation. Human beings have a tremendous capacity for adapting to unwanted changes and growing around loss. The efficacy of my hospice work was built on the metamorphosis I witnessed around my dinner table as our twenty-somethings evolved in a season of life permeated by change and loss.
In 2022, I launched my private practice as a Grief Counselor & Educator. Five years of hospice experience taught me that we get stuck in the pain of grief because we don’t know how to grieve. Healthy, typical, adaptive grieving (which is super messy) is rarely modeled to us when we are children. As a society, we don’t normalize the value of all human emotions or learn how to express complicated feelings. Furthermore, we don’t teach our helping professionals how to respond to grieving people with supportive insight. You can become a licensed doctor, nurse, therapist, social worker, or minister in our academic system without ever taking one course on grief. We train our helping professionals to diagnose, cure, and heal – but often leave them unequipped for responding to people living with losses that can’t be fixed.
My counseling practice fills that gap. I invite clients to express their unedited and unfiltered grief. I witness their pain and validate their loss. I accompany them on their unique grief journey – offering comfort, coping skills, tools, and resources. My goal is not to make my clients feel better. My job is to be present in their sorrow, lessen the burden of grief by offering insight into the grieving process, equip clients with strategies to manage the distress of pain, identify the complicators that make their grief harder, and teach skills for emotional processing. Then, my clients utilize their agency to increase their resilience and coping ability in the face of grief, creating meaning and purpose as they move forward.
People often ask me if my work is sad. There certainly are moments when I feel deep sorrow with a grieving client. But I am far more often inspired by them. Human beings come into the world hard-wired with this amazing ability to rise through the ashes of loss and discover a way to thrive once again. It is incredible to witness the resilience of the human spirit. Furthermore, shared grief isn’t just shared loss. It is a shared connection that bridges countless divides. The profound human connection within the darkness of grief illuminates this life with beauty. That is what drives me to continue in this work.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
My personal struggles can be summed up in a familiar story: I entered midlife with a foolish amount of certainty that I figured out life, encountered despair as the life I’d carefully built fell apart, and then regained my footing when I stumbled forward onto the path that embraces complexity. We’ve all seen this movie.
A formative struggle I’ve moved through as a grief professional is not just one but two of my closest friends dying of cancer while we were still in our 40s. Sitting bedside in their final days, being present with their loved ones in the agony of grief, while trying to practice everything I teach others to manage the distress of my own pain was exhausting and hard. One of the greatest challenges was just permitting myself to feel everything without self-judgment or self-imposed limitations on my grief.
Learning how to thrive while also remaining present in sorrow (mine and others) is a continual practice of freeing myself from the binary mindset that I am happy or sad, my life is good or bad, I’m great at what I do or I’m awful at everything. So much energy was expended in my early adulthood to keep myself and everything and everyone around me in the “good” column. When my carefully constructed life blew up, I experienced the desperation of trying to grasp at falling fragments that kept slipping through the cracks in my fingers like sand. During this time, trying to understand my profound feelings of loss using my system of binary columns led to despair. The only way through the overwhelm of that time was to learn a new way of being in the world. Letting go of a binary mindset and embracing the complexity that contradictory thoughts and feelings can exist simultaneously opened a path forward through debilitating pain.
But breaking free from the whirlpool of despair is more like turning a cruise ship than a speed boat. The energy required was not powered by denial of my pain, positive thinking, or oversimplistic acceptance. Shifting my thought patterns from binary thinking to a dialectic philosophy took a generous amount of time, effort, and support. I’ll always regret the ways I hurt people I love, occasionally feel the sting of old wounds caused by others, and dearly miss loved ones who died. However, I’m also deeply glad to live the second half of life in the open space of both/and mindset rather than either/or delineations. I’m learning that in life’s most desolate places I can still make big movements with compassion, wisdom, and strength that are anchored in the ashes of my losses. Life is a constant swirl of joy and ache, and I always get to choose connection or disconnect with others within that shared reality.
I no longer see life as a linear path. I think life expands like rings in a tree. The widening rings make space for everything we experience to fit within the boundaries of that time and space we fill in the world. For me, the same rings that hold the painful memory of helplessly watching loved ones waste away from the ravages of cancer expanded to make space for some of my most treasured moments. One dying friend asked me to host his memorial in my backyard because the life our families shared there made it feel like a sacred space. On a sunny August day, his family, friends, and community came to my home in shorts and flip-flops to hug, cry, and laugh together as we honored and remembered a truly special human who died way too soon. I also hosted an intimate graduation party at the bedside of my other dying friend because he wasn’t going to live long enough to watch his daughter receive her college diploma. She wore her cap and gown. I made a cake and poured glasses of prosecco. We cried and laughed and took photos as he gazed at his daughter with tremendous pride. A few years later, his daughter asked me to officiate her wedding. I’m not a minister, but staying present with her and her dad in his final moments created a bond that became a joy-filled invitation to actively participate in the beginning of her married life. Most recently, many of the people who gathered in my backyard to grieve at a memorial gathered again around my patio table to celebrate the engagement of his son. Joy and ache. There is an alchemy to grief that gives way to a meaningful life when we discover our ever-widening capacity to hold loss and love simultaneously.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My support services include grief counseling for individuals, couples, and families; facilitation of in-person and virtual support groups; and education for organizations supporting staff, clients, and communities living with loss. Because my career began in hospice care, I specialize in death loss. But all loss is processed as grief. I work with clients processing difficult emotions and adapting to unwanted changes facing the aftermath of non-death losses as well.
I’m not a licensed therapist, but grief is not a diagnosable condition necessitating a treatment plan. Grief is a natural part of being human that needs to be acknowledged and validated. Grieving is the energy that moves us forward when we learn how to tolerate the distress of it. My private practice is built on my master’s degree, five years of hospice bereavement experience, and a “Fellow in Thanatology” credential awarded by the Association for Death Education and Counseling. (Thanatology is the study of death, dying, and bereavement.) Earning this credential required passing a comprehensive grief education exam and submitting a portfolio of my contributions to advancing the field of grief work.
I am known in my community for warm, compassionate care as well as my ability to equip clients with support, knowledge, and tools that help them forge a new path when they are stuck in the complexity of grieving. Furthermore, I am proud of doing what I can to lessen the stigma of grief and advocate for the needs of grievers. In a culture that elevates winning and happiness, loss and grief are too often experienced as failures. This perspective of grief isolates people in their sorrow and drives disconnect in our communities, adding suffering to the pain of loss. I want to contribute to efforts that bring grief out of the shadows so it can do its intended work of freeing us from the dark places where the natural process of grief is stuck, stalled, and derailed. When the path is difficult, it helps to have companions or a guide.
My intuitive ability to mirror my clients sets me apart as a Grief Counselor. Grief is not limited to expressing sadness. Healthy grieving is experiencing the fullness of all of our emotions. Feeling joy or peace amidst profound loss requires as much resilience as expressing our sorrow. My clients set the tone for our sessions, and I meet them where they are at in that moment. I can sit with people who need silence. Lean towards others as they express pain. Trouble shoot with people needing to solve a problem. And belly laugh with grievers who share something amusing.
Movies and television tend to cast Grief Counselors as melancholy people who lead serious conversations. I can attune my emotions to my clients and feel deeply with others, but I’m not a somber person. I laugh often with a deep, jovial tone that could be heard at the far end of our office suite when I was working in hospice care. Several colleagues reached out to me after I left my Bereavement Manager role to tell me that they missed hearing my laugh in the office. I think this is one of the biggest surprises of working in my field. People who specialize in death, dying, and grief are some of the brightest, happiest people that I’ve met. It is not a work fit for the cynic. It is work for the hopeful.
Any big plans?
We are living through a particularly divisive period in our nation’s history. Too many people are defining themselves by what they are against and what they fear. How each individual makes sense of their world seems to be elevated over any sense of collective responsibility for societal wellness. Our present condition is exacerbated by technology that keeps us busy interacting with more people without really feeling known by anyone. We are exposed to countless interactions without experiencing connections that give life meaning and depth.
I really do believe that one powerful way to bridge the widening gaps of our modern times is through shared grief. Dinners around my patio table and support group meetings I facilitate are like magic for the same reason. When people engage in genuine conversation and relate to one another over the universal experience of loss, the differences that separate us become far less divisive. One of the things I value most about grief support groups is bringing an eclectic group of people together – who typically would never cross paths in their regular life – and witness life-giving connections form in the sacred space of shared loss. Two people can be on opposite sides of political or religious perspectives, but if you can get them talking honestly about the grief of losing their loved ones, they co-create a bridge of vulnerability that allows them to move easily into each other’s world to offer compassion and care. It is incredible to witness.
I am seeking more speaking and writing opportunities to normalize grief, teach grieving as a life skill, and create meaningful spaces for people to connect in a shared experience of grief. I want to be a part of movements that are pushing social evolution toward greater connection.
I recently began attending monthly volunteer meetings with Humane Prison Hospice Project. Their mission is “to transform the way incarcerated people die through education, advocacy, and training to support their peers as caregivers and grief companions.” Utilizing a peer caregiver model for hospice support within the prison system creates opportunities for restorative justice for men and women on both sides of end-of-life care. I deeply value their purpose and hope to support future training directly. For now, I am still getting oriented to the nuances of their program, learning about the needs of the participants, and exploring where I fit in best with the work others are already doing so well. I look forward to discovering how I can uniquely contribute to their efforts to foster restorative practices within the prison system.
I also plan to continue gathering people around my table to share good food and good conversation. To keep connecting deeply with others and laughing until my side hurts. My work doesn’t fill me with fear or dread about the fragility of life. It keeps me respectfully aware of the fragility of life and inspires me to live with intention because nothing is guaranteed. I tell loved ones I care about them, make time to be with friends and family, eat the slice of birthday cake, let go of petty grievances (this is always a work in progress), and Ryan and I aren’t waiting until we retire to travel. Life needs to be lived now, not in the future. Because the only certainty I have about the future is that it will not unfold according to my expectations. This is a lesson I have had to relearn countless times since a pregnancy test in graduate school diverted my trajectory onto a different path. As I enter the second half of life, I finally understand that life isn’t a series of detours. It’s a series of evolutions. A continual story of the new life that comes after every loss.
Pricing:
- $95/one hour counseling session (in person or virtual))
- $30/session for in person support group; $20/session for virtual support group
- Education rate varies
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mygriefguide.com
- Instagram: @my.griefguide
- Facebook: @wendykessler (my grief guide)
- LinkedIn: @wendykessler, MSW, FT
Image Credits
Photo Credits: Sutton Joslin
