Why & How To Become A Grief Counselor

Nothing in Jess McKimmie's plans pointed toward grief counseling. The plan was business school, college basketball, and someday a company of her own, and for a while she was living it: a spot on the San Francisco State roster, a business degree, a marketing career that ran from New York to San Diego. Then two phone calls, years apart, changed everything. The first came in her sophomore year, her mom, saying her dad had cancer. He held on for three years. Jess was 22 when she said goodbye to one of her favorite people in the world, and death, she wrote, has been part of her daily consciousness ever since. She grieved out loud, the first of her friends to talk about death like it was allowed, and then went back to the life she had planned, pouring herself into her business until, by her own admission, it nearly suffocated her. Workaholism, she says, was one of her ways of coping with grief.

The grief did not stay quiet. Years later, a breakup brought the loss of her father surging back, losses bring up losses, she says, and it sent her searching. She tried nearly every healing door a grieving person can open, bodywork, reiki, sound healing, long miles on a bicycle, and the one that stayed open was meditation, a practice she had first brushed against as a college student in San Francisco.

Then came the second phone call. February of 2012, her sister's voice, their mother gone with no illness and no warning. Within minutes Jess was sitting in deep meditation, the only place she could still feel connected. In the months that followed she closed her business, and on the first anniversary of her mother's death, she moved back into the North Seattle house she grew up in, leaning now in earnest on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and Roshi Joan Halifax.

Her website says she spent the years that followed unknowingly developing a chaplain's heart. The evidence agrees. She ran support groups for LGBTQIA+ teens, taught mindfulness to schoolchildren, and served as a chaplain in juvenile detention centers and VA hospital wards. So when she entered the two-year Buddhist Chaplaincy program at Upaya Zen Center in 2017, the training founded by Roshi Halifax herself, it was less a decision than an admission of where her life had been pointing all along. Crisis intervention training came next, then Death Doula training with Going With Grace, and in August of 2022, Jess was ordained a Buddhist Chaplain in the White Plum Asanga lineage, taking the title Reverend.

Peace Through Grief is what happened when all of that came together: a Seattle practice where Jess now counsels people in every stage of grief and bereavement, some in the raw first weeks after a death, others carrying losses that are years old. Her goal, in her own words, is to hold a space for those who have faced, or are facing, death, loss, and grief, and the people who have sat in that space describe compassion with firm guidance, and even laughter where they least expected it. More than twenty years separate the first phone call from the ordination, and Jess spent them learning, the hard way and then on purpose, how to sit with what hurts. She did not choose grief work. Grief arrived first. She just decided, eventually, to answer the door.

Jo-Ann Lautman is the kind of person who notices when someone is standing alone and decides to do something about it. Not once, but for the rest of her life.

Warm, persistent, and deeply rooted in her city, Jo-Ann is a native Angeleno who still lives in the home her grandparents built in 1936. She went to school in Beverly Hills, spent her college years in Boston, and came right back. She calls herself a "grief maven," and there is something about the way she says it that tells you she earned the title through decades of sitting with people in the hardest moments of their lives rather than through any credential on a wall. She has carried that belief through more than forty years of grief work, and it is the reason people who have worked alongside her tend to describe her not just by what she built, but by who she helped when no one else was paying attention. She is a breast and lung cancer survivor whose own family knows the disease too well. She co-authored a novel called Tears and Tequila that brought the grief group experience to fiction. And she is still, after all of it, the same person who saw a need no one was filling and refused to look away.

Her path into grief work started with a young widower in one of the Mommy and Me classes she was leading in West LA, whose wife died without warning. It continued at Cedars-Sinai, where she watched a bereaved family member walk out of the hospice and just stand there on the sidewalk, alone, with no place to go. People assumed young grievers would bounce back, find someone new, move on. Jo-Ann saw something different. The pain and confusion of those young people, she has said, was the most profound she has ever seen. So she built a place for them. She called it OUR HOUSE because she wanted the people who came to feel it was really their own. "Their House?" she once said. "No, Our House. It belongs to all of us." The first office had two improvised living rooms and a trompe-l'oeil window where a painter changed the scenery each season, because even at the beginning, Jo-Ann understood that a place meant for grieving people should still feel like someone cared about making it beautiful. More than thirty years later, the room she made is still open.

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.

Most people who become grief counselors set out to become therapists. Mira Masukawa got there the long way around. She came to the work as a second career, going back to school as she neared fifty, after a divorce and while raising two children largely on her own. She already held a bachelor's in psychology from San Francisco State University, earned years earlier with a minor in World Religion, a quiet early sign of the respect for faith and ritual that now shapes how she sits with the grieving. The rest she built the hard way, logging her clinical hours while working and parenting, graduating Summa Cum Laude from Touro University Worldwide, training in EMDR, and later returning for a doctorate in marriage and family therapy.

It was at a hospice that the work found its focus. Mira did the majority of her field training sitting bedside with patients in their final days, then staying close to the families they left behind. That is where grief stopped being one subject among many and became the center of everything. She kept noticing how often people could not find the words, for their loved ones or for themselves, so she started giving them some, writing a series of small workbooks clients could fill in between sessions. She even named the feeling she saw in the room again and again, love-grieving, the deep affection and the sharp sorrow arriving at once.

She became licensed during the pandemic, and rather than wait, she opened her own practice almost immediately, needing hours flexible enough to stay home with her children. Other working mothers in the field asked to join her, and a solo practice quietly grew into a group practice. When the calls kept coming from people who needed grief therapy but could not afford it, she founded a nonprofit, California Grief Therapy Center, so the work could reach them too.

Mira came to grief work later than most, after her own upheaval and the slow work of starting over, and that may be exactly why she is so at home in it. She knows what it is to have a life come apart and to rebuild it piece by piece, and she has spent close to a decade now sitting with other people while they do the same.

Mira Masukawa decided to become a therapist at fifty, in the middle of a divorce, raising two children with no family anywhere near San Diego to lean on. She does not look back on that stretch as the hard part. She says it made her a stronger person and a better therapist.

Warm, unhurried, and genuinely without judgment, Mira has a way of making people feel met exactly where they are. She is half Mexican-American and half Asian-Indian, and she carries a deep respect for the way culture, spirituality, and family shape how each of us grieves. Whether someone heals through ritual, faith, storytelling, or simply being heard, she meets them there. She has brought that same steady presence to every season of this work, and it is the reason that people who have known her for years describe her not just by her titles or her credentials, but by a genuine heart, a free spirit, and a gift for healing. She is also the first to laugh at herself, quick to admit that her love of gardening is still a work in progress, green thumb or not. But there is nothing distant about the way she works. Therapy with her, she likes to say, does not mean sitting in silence while she nods mysteriously. After all of it, she is still someone who would rather sit beside you than across from you.

Her path into grief work began at the bedside. Before private practice, Mira worked as a bereavement counselor at a hospice, sitting with patients through their final days and then staying close to the families they left behind. What she kept noticing was how often people could not find the words, so she started giving them some, writing a series of small workbooks people could fill in between sessions. She even coined a name for the doubled feeling she saw in the room again and again: love-grieving, the deep affection and the sharp sorrow arriving at the same time. Everything she has built since has come from that same instinct. She grew a group practice, so grieving people would not have to carry it alone, and founded a nonprofit so the ones who could not afford therapy could still find help. She has said the hardest years of her own life did not leave her with regret. They made her stronger, and they taught her how to sit with everyone else's grief.

Yet there is more to Mira than the practice and the workbooks she is known for. Before any of it, she was a mother, and she raised her two children largely on her own while building everything else, something she counts among the things she is proudest of. She loves old movies, and among her peers, she is a natural connector, quietly holding together a community of hundreds of Southern California therapists. She has spent years close to other people's grief, and through all of it, she has stayed warm, funny, and easy to be around.

Ron Gray had been a therapist for years before grief became his life's work, and back then grief was not the center of it. He built his practice around couples and families, the distressed marriages hoping to repair what had frayed, the parents and teenagers trying to understand each other, the individuals working through the hard transitions of a life. He did his graduate work at Chapman University, earned his license as a marriage and family therapist, and logged thousands of hours across a wide range of settings, with college students, the homeless, adolescents, blended families, and people in residential treatment. In 2014 he co-founded The Haven, a spiritual retreat center in Orange, California, built for people who wanted their faith woven into their healing rather than left at the door.

Then came the loss that redirected everything. When his wife of thirty years died of cancer after a four-year fight, Ron discovered what no amount of training had taught him, that knowing grief professionally is not the same as surviving it. His own way through began with a referral to a grief specialist whose tools made a real difference, and that experience pulled him toward deeper training in loss and trauma. Slowly he came to see that his whole practice needed to change, and he decided to specialize in grief, loss, and the related trauma that lingers long after a death, folding it into the Christian counseling he had always practiced.

That decision reshaped everything about how he worked. Grief and trauma became the center of his practice through Christian Grief & Trauma Counseling and the retreats he now hosts on the grounds of The Haven, where he facilitates recovery groups, leads healing retreats for widows and families, including The Next Chapter Retreat for Widows, speaks openly on grief and loss, and trains other therapists to offer the kind of help he once had to go looking for. It was this work that brought Anne-Marie Lockmyer into his life, a grief specialist whose story mirrored his own so closely that their collaboration became a marriage in 2020. Together they run the Grief & Trauma Healing Network, and out of the same conviction that drew them both to the work, they built MyGriefCare, a free online program for the people they kept meeting who could not find or afford grief support anywhere else.

Ron did not plan to specialize in grief. He was a skilled therapist who believed he understood loss, until it happened to him. What he learned climbing out of it became the work he now spends his days on, handing the same way out to the people who come after him.

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.