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.
Picking up donations for Flower Friday and prepping for a cyanotype workshop at The INN Between
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.
The text on the pages 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
Pisces sun
Virgo moon
Sagittarius rising
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
I am an ex-Mormon
And it’s important for 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.
I view death work as inherently political
I have worked with many good teachers, all of whom have taught me to uphold one central truth: the person who is dying is the expert on their own death.
Additionally, I am upheld by not only the ADEC code of ethics but also the NEDA code of ethics to protect client self-determination without imposing my own values, beliefs, and expectations. As such, I take this boundary seriously.
However, when speaking to my own history and reason for being here, there is a deep philosophical pull to death work that extends far beyond the individual experience.