I came to this work after my experience at my mother’s bedside. (I share that story on “My Mother’s Vigil.”)
For over thirty-five years I was a theatre artist and worked as an actress, director, and educator with doctoral study in the field. However, as I completed my mother’s vigil, I knew intuitively that it had all been preparation. Everything a director learns — to read a room, to hold an hour without glancing at a watch, to know when something has gone awry and how to set it right, to take a whole life and shape it into something the people who loved it will remember — has a special application with those who are dying.
After Mom’s death in 2024, I trained as an end of life doula and a Sacred Deathcare Guide, and I left my teaching career to found The Dawn Companion here in La Veta, in Southern Colorado.
I’m not a hospice nurse, and I’m not a funeral director. In a small town, I’m a neighbor, who is interested in people while they’re living, not only when they’re dying. And what I offer isn’t simply comfort. While comfort helps a family accept that it’s too late, I keep searching, right to the end, for what isn’t too late — the thing that can still be finished, said, sung, forgiven. Collectively, those things bring meaning, which can turn an ending into a culmination, the way a piece of music ends on the note it was reaching for all along.
I live with my husband, Mathew, a fine artist whose oil paintings capture light across a landscape or a face. Our son is out in Oregon, fashioning a life of his own. Our being in Colorado brings us a little nearer to him.
Loss is heavy, and grief is heavier; they have the weight and the darkness of night about them, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I called this practice The Dawn Companion because of what I know about nights: they end. Not because anyone hurried them along, and not because the grief was any lighter for it, but instead because morning comes eventually, as it always has. What I offer is company through the dark hours, and the steady knowledge that the light is on its way.
The next step is small: ten minutes on the phone, at no cost.
