Grief is not a problem to solve. It is a wilderness that we enter.
Grief companioning for people ready to go deeper.
If something on this page feels meaningful & you’d like to explore working together, the intake form is below. I will read it carefully and be in touch.
Most people who find this work have already tried other things.
They've read the books. Talked to friends until the friends didn't know what else to say. Many have seen a therapist.
But something is missing in the care they’ve been receiving. Something in them is still searching for something more. More honest, maybe. More resonant. Something that meets grief at the depth where it actually lives. That is what I aim to offer you in this work.
What this work is:
Grief is not a linear experience that can be described in stages or phases. Grief is messy and often confusing. It circles. It sometimes deepens as time pulls you forward. It’s like being adrift in the ocean, there are waves you can see coming and others that seem to pull you under without warning. You can feel unmoored and lost. Left with more questions than answers and nowhere to grapple with them because the only person who would really understand what you’re going through is the one who is gone.
This work gives you a dedicated space to explore all of that.
This is an uncommon space.
One that can be hard to find in our mourning-avoidant culture.
What happens in session?
What that looks like practically in session is that, sometimes we’ll be sitting with the rawness of what has happened to you. The way the world keeps moving when yours has stopped. The absence that seems to impact every corner of your life. The way grief seems to hurt more as time pulls you forward and people start expecting you to be ok. We won’t rush past these things because staying with what is true, even when it is difficult is how things that once had sharp edges begin to soften.
Other times we might follow the deeper questions that grief invites you into. Questions you may have around identity and belonging, around meaning and the afterlife. We might explore all of the ways love persists when the body does not. These are not questions that have easy answers but we sit in them together.
Often, the exploration is the destination.
And sometimes we simply witness. Your grief. Your love. The enormity of what you are carrying. Without trying to make it smaller or more manageable or more acceptable to the world around you.
My name is Marie Goudreau. I am a certified Death and Grief Doula, trained by Dr. Alan Wolfelt at the Center for Loss and Life Transition. I have spent years studying grief, its complexity, its terrain, its capacity to undo and remake a person. Thinking deeply about what it means to live with loss and sitting with bereaved individuals is my life’s work.
I often say that I didn't choose this work but rather, this work chose me. In 2017, my partner died of pancreatic cancer. I was his caregiver through his illness and walking him on his journey between this life and the next was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. What followed was not a process I always navigated gracefully, but one that cracked me open to questions I would never have asked otherwise, that dismantled assumptions I didn't even know I was holding, that ultimately altered the trajectory of my life.
What I have come to believe, both from my own experience of loss and from years of sitting with the bereaved, is that grief, when it is truly met, puts us in touch with our humanness. It opens us to a depth of presence and aliveness and reverence for ordinary beauty that nothing else quite reaches. The people who surrender to the experience of being bereaved often find that it shapes them into someone wiser, more present, more awake to what actually matters.
That process is slow. It is not always comfortable. But it is profoundly meaningful.
My approach to this work is grounded in Dr. Wolfelt's companioning philosophy. I do not walk ahead of you or guide you through grief like an expert because I firmly believe that only you are the expert of your own experience. I do not have a destination in mind for where your grief should arrive or how long it should take to get there. I walk beside you in the wilderness of your loss, in ways that help you meet yourself with more support, patience and compassion.
I don’t believe that grief heals in traditional ways or that this work is about helping you get back to “normal”. To me, healing means finding your sense of wholeness once again as you learn to navigate a changed world as a new version of yourself.
I am the founder of Empowered Through Grief, a grief support practice and community that has provided a space for education & companioning for people grieving all types of losses since 2020.