I am a coach who helps you hold the grief you carry.
I hold a master’s degree in industrial social work from the University of Southern California, focusing on change management. I possess more than twenty-five years of professional social work experience with more than a decade spent in hospice and palliative care, respectfully. The latter, and my work as a medical social worker, have been most influential in my life. I have yet to find anything more profoundly meaningful and complex than the way of life and the way of death. I feel honored to contribute to that which exists in the space between the two.
~Kissiah
The grief that we carry must be held.
I was twenty-eight years old sitting on the floor of a Barnes & Noble bookstore with two graduate school friends when unbeknownst to me my father had died. Hours would pass before I received the news, and time seemed to stop the moment I did.
That was twenty-two years ago, and not a single day passes where I don’t think about my father. A picture of him as a little boy rests atop my altar. I greet him each time I light the candle there, and each time I blow it out. Daddy. To think on him is to access a tender place within, a place where I feel how close the tears remain just behind my eyelids. At times they become tangible damp spots of grief.
