About Amy

I am a former corporate copyeditor turned thanatologist

A shift that arrived by way of religious deconstruction, worker disillusionment, and political radicalization.

That is to say, a decade of non-death losses brought me here. And in composting old ways of being, I have found new clarity in purpose:

  • Serving the dying and the bereaved

  • Studying ex-Mormon grief and bereavement

  • Honoring death and grief as a life-affirming act of protest

Volunteer work that fires me up

End-of-life doula
The INN Between • 2024–present

  • Provide companionship to hospice residents, in close coordination with the on-site EOLD, nursing team, and social workers.

  • Offer activities that empower hospice residents and attend to their physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs.

  • Sit vigil with actively dying residents as a member of the facility’s No One Dies Alone (NODA) team.

I help with a lot of activities at the INN Between. Here I’m picking up donations for Flower Friday and prepping for a cyanotype workshop.

Support group volunteer
The Sharing Place • 2025–present

  • Attend a teen grief group twice a month to assist the lead coordinator with activities and group engagement.

  • Facilitate adult grief group when coordinator is absent.

  • Completed both an eight-hour children’s group training and a four-hour adult facilitator training.

My training

Master of Science
Thanatology: Death Education

Edgewood University
2024–2026

Thanatology is the cross-disciplinary study of death, grief, and bereavement. It inspects the many aspects of death to:

  • Understand how people experience death and the dying process

  • Help people cope with end-of-life challenges

Death doula training

Help From an End-of-Life Doula (HELD)
Jude Higgins
48 hours • 2025, 2026

Deathwives
Lauren Carroll, Erin Merelli
50 hours • 2023, 2024

Teachers and mentors

  • Narinder Bazen: Death work mentor

  • Janet McCord, PhD, FT: Academic advisor

Memberships

  • Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC)

  • National End-of-Life Doula Alliance (NEDA)

  • Home Funeral Alliance (HFA)

  • Funeral Consumers Alliance of Utah

More about me

Before I was a death worker or a copyeditor, I was a kid growing up in West Jordan, Utah

Four generations of my dead are buried in the Salt Lake Valley, a direct result of Mormon settler-colonization on Timpanogos, Eastern Shoshone, Goshute, and Ute lands.

My earliest memories revolve around my grandpa's death

For the first five years of my life, I watched my young mother take care of him all by herself, her own mother developing Alzheimer's in the middle of it all.

I wrote and illustrated a story about it a year or so after his death, when I was in first grade, and I believe it holds clues about why I'm here today.

These are cyanotypes I made of that childhood story. The typewritten text reads: “When we took my grandpa to the hospital, he was dieing. Me and my mom took good care of him.”

I lived in Seattle for nine years and never wanted to leave

I returned to Salt Lake City in 2023 for reasons I'm still figuring out. Death work definitely had something to do with it.

My chart is very mutable

I am a:

  • Pisces sun and Mercury

  • Virgo moon

  • Sagittarius rising, Saturn, and Uranus

I feel most alive when I am

  • Watching birds be birds

  • Singing communally (concerts, karaoke, etc.)

  • Listening to my favorite music, as loud as possible

  • Witnessing art

More activities at the INN Between. Here I’m running a paint spinning project, designed by a hospice resident.

I am an ex-Mormon

And it’s important to me to mention that, because I want to connect with and serve others who have faced mortality anew after a faith deconstruction.

Since leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 2010, I’ve had a strong research interest in exploring the layers of psychological, spiritual, and social grief ex-members experience after disaffiliating.

Further, as a result of this deconstruction, I view death work as inherently political. You can read more about my approach here.