Credentials & Training

It started with a novel. I was reading when I came across a scene that stopped me completely — Scotland Yard is about to notify a family that a body found near the Thames is likely their missing son. The mother, understanding the weight of what was coming, calls a trusted friend who was an end of life doula — not just for company, but to be a steady, knowing presence as she and her husband walked into the unimaginable together. Someone who could hold the room when they could not.

I set the book down and looked up "end of life doula." I had never heard the term. Within minutes, something shifted in me. The connection between this work and everything I had spent my career doing, everything I had lived through personally, everything I had been quietly drawn toward — it all arrived at once.

For over 15 years across manufacturing, financial services, nonprofit, and disability services, I worked as an HR leader — not just in the administrative sense, but in the deeply human sense. My work lived in the hard moments: the conversation that could go one of several ways depending on how it was held. I sat with employees navigating FMLA leave while simultaneously watching a loved one deteriorate. I coached leaders through crisis. I helped people find their footing in the middle of their hardest chapters.

What I understand now, more clearly than ever, is that what I was always doing was presence work. The title said Human Resources. The actual work was sitting with people in the middle of loss, uncertainty, and change — and helping them find their way through. End of life doula work is the clearest and most honest expression of that calling I have ever encountered.

I have also lived close to this work in ways that matter. Early in my years in Pittsburgh, I became close with Baylee Gordon — the Executive Director who built Family Hospice here from 30 to over 300 staff — and her husband Marshall, both lifelong social workers. They became family to us. I absorbed their world without fully understanding, at the time, that it would one day become mine. Baylee has since been diagnosed with advanced dementia. Marshall visits her every single day — even as she no longer recognizes him. That quiet, faithful presence — showing up not because it is easy, but because it is right — is everything I want this practice to be.

I know from my own life what it means to sit at a deathbed when the relationship was complicated — to show up not because it was easy, but because it was right. To be present when grief is not simple or clean, when the feelings are layered, contradictory, and not easily named. That knowledge doesn't make me a wounded practitioner. It makes me a more honest one. It lives in me now. And I intend to put it to use.

I formed Harbor and Home Consulting LLC in 2026. The name matters to me. A harbor is not a destination — it is a place of shelter between one journey and the next. Home is where we are most ourselves, where we are known, where we are allowed to be exactly who we are without performance or pretense. That is what I want to offer the people I serve: safety and authenticity in the hardest season of their lives.