ways you're honored here
Story Safety & Sacred Listening
Your experiences and memories deserve a safe landing place
Through cultivating trust, safety, and active listening, storytelling tools and the B.R.E.A.T.H.E. framework ensure every detail of your loss is met with embodied presence, non-judgment, deep listening, and reverence.
Specialized & Inclusive Care
Specialized & Inclusive Care
Open to all ambiguous, complex, or disenfranchised loss
& specialized in sibling grief
Bringing high ethical standards, humility, and a commitment to evoking awareness, anyone carrying grief that the dominant culture fails to understand or validate is welcome.
Honor & Cultural Caretaking
Specialized & Inclusive Care
Your stories
belong at the center
Facilitating growth on your terms, grief coaching is a form of stewardship that normalizes loss and affirms that your stories deserve space and remembrance.
more about krystle may
As the eldest daughter from a multiracial, blended family, my story of complex loss began when I was four years old, as my nuclear family split apart.
I lost the daily experience of living with my first and best friend—my older brother, BJ—and having both parents in the same home.
As my blended family grew across state lines,
while also being impacted by incarceration, addiction, and various levels of emotional, psychological,
and physical wounds, I deeply understand the complexities of loss. >
Then in 2019, when BJ was taken by police violence, grief burrowed a deeper, permanent, recurring role in my life.
As Mary-Frances O’Connor defines it,
grief is the intense emotion that crashes
over you like a wave, completely
overwhelming, unable to be ignored.
In those early months of raw grief,
I was woken up at 2:22 am
multiple nights in a row. >
Eventually, I dreamed of BJ and realized this awakening was BJ, nudging me to do
the one thing I knew how to do: write.
So I did.
But everything about how I wrote was different; my voice was mine but wasn’t.
This new-to-me voice led to self-publishing my debut collection of poems, Prayer for Relief, on BJ’s five-year deathiversay, which taught me that love and grief are the same verb. >
Long before I formally stepped into grief coaching, writing was a salve for holding what otherwise cannot be fixed.
I turned to community storytelling and facilitation, participating in storytelling trainings and workshops, and then creating the Sibling Storytelling Series in collaboration with The Grief House,
hosted during Worldwide Bereaved Siblings Month in November. >
Living in a dominant culture that often overlooks the emotional landscape of siblings, I believe we deserve more than the label of forgotten mourners.
We are still here, carrying the stories, memories, hopes, and dreams of siblingship, no matter how far away our siblings are.
Through facilitating these Sibling Storytelling sessions, I discovered my soulwork. >
While I was fortunate to be a participant in a sibling grief group led by OUR HOUSE Grief Support Center in Los Angeles, CA during the first year of my loss, I very quickly recognized how much more support is needed for siblings and the greater community.
This soulwork is my wave of light—unable to be ignored—pouring back into the community as a resource of care for bereaved siblings and anyone navigating the spectrum of loss.