Practice Stories
Grief therapist (LCSW) · telehealth across six states
A grief therapist explains why the rocks never get lighter — you just learn how to carry them.
Kat spent seventeen years as a professional dancer in New York City, and she planned to keep going until her body made the decision for her. "My body was like, please stop doing this," she says. Facing retirement, she went to a program called Career Transitions for Dancers, run by the actors' and dancers' union, where personality testing pointed her toward physical therapy or psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, she decided immediately, was not for her: "I do not want to be a psychotherapist. I think I would take too much of that home with me. I'm too sensitive." Physical therapy felt safer. She completed her prerequisites and was accepted, early decision, into an occupational therapy program that wouldn't start until September.
In the gap between acceptance and the first semester, she was stocking fish in the freezer at a Trader Joe's in Danbury, Connecticut.
Her boss asked if she'd drop flowers at a hospice facility opening down the street, and take a tour while she was there. Kat's mental image of hospice was bleak — "old people moaning and the smell of urine" — and her instinct was to decline. But she was tired of the fish. "I really didn't want to stock any more fish. So I was like, okay, yeah, I'll totally take a tour." A social worker who split her time between the bereavement center and patient families led the walkthrough. Kat, who describes herself as spiritual rather than religious, felt something shift. "I had like a spiritual calling moment and I just knew it was for me. I signed up on the spot to be a family support volunteer and just completely dove in."
From that volunteer post at Regional Hospice of Connecticut, she found her way to Fordham University's palliative care and hospice track — the same program she now teaches in.
Today Kat runs a fully telehealth private practice, licensed across six states, much of it built around a population she understands intimately: healthcare workers carrying "professional grief" from their own jobs. Telehealth, for a self-described technology skeptic, turned out to be the thing that let her do the work at all. "Technology has impacted me personally in an such an important and valuable way because my practice is entirely telehealth," she says — she can see a client in New York at 9pm their time, and another at 6am hers.
Most of what she teaches, though, is not technology. It's a vocabulary most people never got. She rejects the popular image of grief moving in five tidy stages — that model, she explains, was built from research on the dying, not the bereaved, and grief doesn't resolve, it cycles. She offers her own image instead: "when you grieve, it's like somebody hands you a bag of rocks. This is what I tell my students. A bag of dirty, jagged rocks. And as soon as you get them, you now have to carry them for the rest of your life... the work of grief is learning how to live with it and take it forward with you, instead of getting over it." She teaches "continuing bonds" — the idea, borrowed in spirit from Tuesdays with Morrie, that "death ends a life, not a relationship" — and two concepts she wishes more people knew: disenfranchised grief (losses society quietly refuses to validate, like a death from overdose) and ambiguous loss (grieving someone who is physically present but psychologically gone, or the reverse). "I think it's very important for people to know these types of grief," she says, "to make them feel less alone, to know they're not nuts."
Ask her for her best professional moment and she doesn't point to a session. She points to the classroom. "I actually think that my best experience has been teaching grief at Fordham... giving my students language to take out into wherever they practice... to be able to help their clients feel less alone, feel like they're not crazy and understand themselves a little better."
Kat is not anti-technology — she credits telehealth with making her practice possible and her life sustainable. But she is candid that AI is a different question, one she hasn't resolved. "I'm just a little wary about AI because of HIPAA and I want to make sure I'm protecting my client's privacy and I just don't know how AIs are trained." She's open to a scheduling assistant. She's read the coverage — "I believe it was in the New York Times" — suggesting AI can be dangerous for some people's mental health, and helpful for others, and she's not willing to guess which side her own clients would land on without better evidence. "I would still be wary of using those tools, but I am glad for the people that they're helpful for." It's the same instinct that sent her toward the hospice tour and away from stocking fish: she moves toward the thing she can trust, on a timeline she sets herself, not one imposed on her.
She closes with the message she gives every new client carrying a fresh loss: "if you're new to grief and you feel completely overwhelmed, I want you to know that you are not crazy." Watch the conversation to hear her walk through what that overwhelm actually looks like — and what to do with it.