About
I think about memory, story, and what it means to stay fully yourself as life changes. I always have.
Where it begins
Some things you know before you have words for them.
I knew it in my grandmother's kitchen. The refrigerator opening the same way every time. The glass of milk poured without asking because she already knew. A sugar bowl on the table with a spoon always poking out of it. An invitation that assumed I was welcome before I walked in the room.
I didn't have language for it then. I just knew what it felt like to be held in someone's ordinary attention.
I started working with older adults in my teens. Later I found myself in a funeral home, sitting with families in the hours after someone died, watching what people carried into those rooms: the objects, the stories, the things they wished they'd said.
I understood early that the end of a life was also a design problem. That what was in the room mattered. That what got said and what didn't shaped everything that came after.
I've never fit neatly into one discipline. Media psychology, social gerontology, family therapy, narrative work, experience design, it's an eclectic mix, and that's exactly what gives me a different way of seeing this work.
What I kept noticing wasn't a lack of care. It was a lack of consideration.
I don't believe aging is something to dread. I believe it can be one of the most meaningful territories of a life. That the person at the kitchen table trying to find the right word is still entirely present. Still worth knowing. Still holding a story that deserves to be held.
The conditions for that are designable. That is what I do.
A Closing Thought
That is the work. It is worth doing carefully.
That belief shows up differently depending on who I'm sitting with. A family trying to hold someone's story before urgency arrives. An organization trying to close the gap between what it intends and what it actually delivers. A room full of people who do this work every day and need a different way to see it. Wherever it shows up, the question underneath is the same one.
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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