Bonnie Herrmann

Bonnie Herrmann is the kind of person who leans into the conversations most of us spend our whole lives avoiding, and somehow makes them feel less frightening. She talks openly about illness, dying, and grief, not because the subjects are easy, but because she believes we lose something when we only speak about them in whispers. Her own words say it best: she wants to talk about death and "gently push the euphemisms aside." That comfort with hard things started early. Her mom was a hospice nurse when Bonnie was growing up, and the compassion she watched in her mother is something she says she has "proudly absorbed." While she is fortunate to still have her mom with her, she has now counseled many who cannot say the same.

Thoughtful, warm, and unafraid of the dark moments, Bonnie has carried that inherited compassion through her entire professional life, and it is the reason someone who has worked with her describes her as an incredibly thoughtful clinician, skilled at sitting with clients in their hardest moments and offering compassion and sincerity. This is not work she found later in life. She was sitting with grieving children at summer camps in Texas before she was old enough to have a license to do it, and she never really left. In the years since, she has kept company with people facing cancer, dementia, and the end of life, and she says she has dedicated her entire career to this work. She means it. There was never another career.

Map Your Care is what happened when all of that came together. The idea, she has written, had been stewing in her brain for years, building a little more with each hike and each backpacking trip. Nature is what drew her to Colorado in the first place, and the longer she sat with the dying, the more she saw the two speaking to each other: the aspens connected underground by far more than we can see on the surface, the forest devastated by fire until it grows anew. So she built a practice where those lessons come along, where a session might weave in mindfulness, storytelling, or even a guided hike.

Outside the office, you will find her camping, backpacking, biking, packing a good picnic, or hunting down the most beautiful Colorado sunset spots. It fits. Bonnie has spent her whole life helping people find their way through unfamiliar territory. She just happens to love maps, trails, and open skies in her own life too.

Most people find their way to grief work through a loss of their own. Bonnie Herrmann found it at home. Her mom was a hospice nurse when Bonnie was growing up, and watching that daily, unshaken compassion for people at the end of life left a mark she has never tried to shake.. She calls it something she has "proudly absorbed." While she is fortunate to still have her mom with her, she has since counseled many who cannot say the same, and she credits that early example for a career she describes as the only one she ever wanted.

The path started before the credentials did. As a teenager in Texas, she spent six summers volunteering at grief camps for children ages six to thirteen, sitting with kids who were carrying losses far too big for their age. By the time she enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, the direction was already set. She earned her Bachelor of Social Work there in 2011 and stayed to complete her Master of Science in Social Work in 2013, then took her training into the places where grief actually lives: a dementia care community near Chicago, six years as a hospice social worker and bereavement specialist in Denver, oncology at a Colorado cancer center, and palliative care teams along the way. She became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Colorado in 2016, and later earned the Advanced Certified Hospice and Palliative Social Worker credential, a recognition reserved for clinicians who have made end-of-life care their specialty rather than a sideline.

More than a decade in, she says she enjoys leaning into some of the toughest conversations most of us will ever have. That is not something a person learns in graduate school. It started with a hospice nurse who came home every night still caring, and a daughter who was paying attention.