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

The 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 copywriter, 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 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 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

For the astrologically minded, I am a:

  • 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

  • Witnessing the people resist a fascist state