Anne-Marie Lockmyer

Anne-Marie Lockmyer knows what it is like to say the wrong thing to someone in grief. Before she lost her husband, she was the one saying it.

Warm, direct, and completely honest about her own pain, Anne-Marie is a widow who found her way from barely surviving to helping others do the same. Pain is real, she says, but so is hope and healing, a belief she offers as someone who once could not imagine either. She has carried that openness through more than a decade of grief work, and it is the reason people who have sat with her tend to describe her not by her credentials but by how she made them feel. Lori Gill, a clinical director who has worked alongside her, calls her a kind, authentic healer whose deep compassion is felt in the support she provides. She is an award-winning author, a foster mom to rescue dogs and puppies, and a wife again after meeting her husband Ron through their shared work with grievers. And she is still, after all of it, someone who believes no one should have to grieve alone.

Her path into this work began with the worst day of her life. Anne-Marie was away on a business trip overseas when she learned that her husband Mark had died suddenly at home, and nothing about the pain that followed made sense to her. No one around her seemed equipped to sit in it with her, so she went looking for a way through on her own, on what she has called a mission to learn about grief. What she learned, she did not keep to herself. She built a free online grief support program so that anyone, anywhere, could find help without cost, and she began guiding widows through intimate healing retreats where laughter, eventually, finds its way back into the room. Asked once how she can spend her days in so much of other people's pain, she explained that she does not see people where they are in the hurt. She sees where she knows they can be.