Full Story
I think about memory, story, and what it means to stay fully yourself as life changes. I always have.
Where it begins
The kitchen.
You can read the degrees and credentials below. But the truth is that two objects in my grandmother's kitchen probably tell you more about the work than any of them.
The first was her refrigerator. I stood in that kitchen doorway so often that the sound of the seal releasing, the cool air escaping, and the small rituals that followed became part of my internal landscape. The glass of milk poured the same way every time. The sandwich made without asking what I wanted, because she already knew.
The second was a sugar bowl on the kitchen table. The spoon was always poking out of it. An invitation that assumed I was welcome before I walked in the room. I would pour spoonfuls of sugar onto plain Cheerios and feel, without having a word for it, what it is to be held in someone's ordinary attention.
Those moments taught me how memory lives in objects and gestures, and how meaning settles into the body.
That kitchen showed me what it feels like to be known and tended to.
It also showed me what is lost when nobody thinks to ask.
The Work
A lifetime.
One belief.
Every person wants to be seen, heard, and valued as who they are. That doesn't stop being true when memory shifts or life becomes harder to navigate. The conditions for it can be built deliberately. It is designable.
I have spent my career working with people navigating the transitions that don't come with instructions: caregiving, memory change, legacy, grief, and the quieter questions of what we want to leave behind and how we want to be remembered while we are still here.
What I have built is a practice that takes the full person seriously. Not just their needs, but their humor, their aesthetics, their language, their pleasures, and the stories they most want held. I call this practice Worldholding.
I work with individuals and families navigating memory change, identity transition, and legacy. And with organizations — healthcare environments, care facilities, cultural institutions — building conditions where people remain visible and recognized.
I speak and teach to clinical teams, cultural institutions, and professional communities where this work is needed.
Credentials
The training that made the work possible.
Three degrees. Not a straight line — each one adding a layer the others needed.
PhD
Media Psychology
Master of Human Services
Social Gerontology
MA
Psychology
Selected Certifications
The gerontology came first, because of my grandmother, and because aging is one of the most underthought territories in design and care. I wanted to understand what it actually costs people when the systems around them stop seeing them clearly.
The psychology came next: how people make meaning, how media shapes the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, and how identity holds or shifts across a life. The marriage and family therapy certification is where the relational work lives: the families in the room together, the dynamics that shape how a person's story gets held or lost, the conversations that need someone skilled to help them happen at all.
The design certification came later, and it named something I had already been doing for years: building experiences and environments that help people stay more fully themselves.
Together they describe someone who approaches aging not as a medical problem or a social challenge but as a design problem — one that, when taken seriously, helps people remain seen, heard, and valued as who they are.
A Closing Thought
My grandmother never used words like legacy or meaning-making. She just opened the refrigerator and poured the milk.
But what she gave me — the experience of being known, tended to, and held in someone's ordinary attention — is exactly what I have spent my career trying to help other people give each other.
That is the work. It is worth doing carefully.
Working with me looks different depending on what you need — individual and family sessions, organizational consulting, speaking and training, or Remembering Together, a structured practice for families who want to hold someone's story before urgency arrives.
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