Jessica McKimmie

Jess McKimmie is the kind of person who seems to measure a life not by what it avoids, but by what it is willing to sit with.

Warm, playful, and naturally at ease beside the things most of us spend our lives trying not to think about, Jess also brings a rare understanding of how healing actually works. Jess does not simply comfort people in the moment; she holds a space where sorrow and laughter are allowed to sit side by side. One person who came to Jess after their father's sudden death said they did not expect to laugh in their first session, and they did not expect how much it would help. A Marine sergeant Jess cared for as a chaplain put it even more simply: calmer and clearer. There is wisdom in that approach: when grief is met with warmth instead of fear, it becomes something a person can move through.

That way of being was not learned in a classroom. Jess grew up in North Seattle in a house full of music, laughter, and hippie-ish love, and left home planning to build a business someday. Grief had other plans. It arrived twice by telephone, once in college with news of her father's cancer, and again in 2012 with news about her mother that no one saw coming. What those losses built in Jess, slowly and at great cost, is the very thing people now seek her out for: someone who is not afraid to sit close to death, and who knows from the inside what it takes to keep living. These days that means keeping company with people in their hardest hours, young people in juvenile detention, veterans in hospital beds, youth experiencing homelessness, families keeping watch at a bedside, and anyone in the LGBTQ2IA+ community, Jess's own community, who needs care that meets them exactly as they are. Peace Through Grief, the practice Jess built, is simply that promise with a name on it: no one should have to face death, loss, or grief alone.

Still, Jess is more than the titles attached to the work. She is a sister and sibling, an auntie-uncle, a forever student, and the friend people turn to when they simply need someone to listen. The kid who loved inventing games and making people laugh never really went anywhere; these days you will find her chasing sunsets, watching birds, and soaking up the nature she loves. It fits that Jess describes herself, simply, as a lover of life and people. Sweet and salty, she calls this path of life, and she walks it the way she always has: laughing, exploring, and loving the people beside her.

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.