Your grief doesn't fit in a 55-minute box. Neither do you.
Aperture is one-on-one grief therapy for people whose lives split cleanly into Before and After. Sessions are 60, 90, or 120 minutes, held entirely online and built around what your grief actually needs. Not what others think it needs.
The scene doesn't change. The light does.
You haven't left the house in a week.
You finally stop moving. The dishes are (mostly) done, the laptop is closed, and you sink into the couch with the remote in one hand while the other scratches your dog, Murphy, behind the ears. The two of you pick up your ongoing conversation exactly where you left off. He's a great listener. Terrible at advice, but a great listener.
Then it lands like a punch to the gut. You haven't actually left the house in a week. The mailbox at the end of the driveway counts as a field trip, and the only humans you've talked to were on a Zoom call about Q4 deliverables. Huh. That can't be good.
It's year two. The casseroles are a distant memory, and everyone seems to think you should be doing better by now. You had a plan. A whole future, built with your person, and in one swipe it was gone. Some days you can't tell which part is the surreal one: this life without him, or the life you had with him, which is starting to feel like something you dreamed. Because if it really happened, how could he possibly be dead? Him? It doesn't make any sense.
Meanwhile, every chore you used to split is now yours. All the laundry. All the dishes. The bills, the lawn, the bathroom, feeding the dog, feeding yourself, plus a full-time job. How do people do this? Every morning is a decision about which balls you're dropping today. Clean the house, earn your paycheck, or lunch with a friend. Pick one. Whatever you choose, it will feel like failing, because it isn't how you used to function.
You've tried. The other widows in your family love you, but they're twenty or thirty years older, and their version of this looks a lot more like The Golden Girls than your life does. You've heard enough stories about grief support groups doubling as somebody's personal Tinder to skip that option entirely. And if one more friend says they know exactly how you feel because they lost Grandma, or Uncle Rick, or their cat Mr. Sprinkles, you're going to get stabby. Those losses are real. They hurt. They just didn't erase an entire future or turn your whole life upside down.
Your best friend even sent you the meme. "When you can't see the light, I'll sit with you in the dark." Then the second you started ugly crying, she tried to make you laugh. Or reminded you that at least he isn't suffering anymore. (Cool. Super helpful. Thanks.)
His fight with cancer ended. Yours didn't. He got handed the secrets of the universe that only the dead know, and you got the shaft.
And under all of it sits the thought you haven't said out loud to anyone: some days, you're a little jealous of him. He doesn't have to do any of this anymore. That thought gets a seat here too.
You know the five stages. You've read the Joan Didion. Twice. What you don't know yet is what it's like to be met in this without anyone flinching.
You don't know what it's like to have someone sit with you in the dark and actually stay there.
You don't know what it's like to fall apart without apologizing for it.
You don't know what it's like to talk to him, not just about him.
That's what Aperture is for.
(If your person was your parent, your child, your sibling or your best friend, stay with me. The details change. The Before and After doesn't.)
You finally get to the real thing. Then it's time to stop.
You've done the therapy thing before. You spent the first twenty minutes giving a tidy little status report on how you're "holding up" before you finally inched toward the thing. The voicemail you still can't delete. The hospital smell that apparently lives in your nose now. Then you spent five more minutes making sure your therapist was okay after hearing it.
And right as the lid finally starts to lift, the therapist glances at the clock. "Let's pick this up next week." Cool. Cool cool cool. Now you get to close the laptop and carry an open wound through the rest of your Tuesday, leaking everywhere.
That's not a you problem. The standard therapy "hour" is 55 minutes because that's what fits neatly into an insurance billing code. Grief has never once checked a billing code. Aperture gives it room.
Death does not need to be made presentable. Neither does your response to it.
Where's your aperture set right now?
Aperture is named for my late husband. He was a talented photographer who took in the world in a way all his own, and he never needed his subject to be beautiful for it to be interesting or worth looking at. Calling this work Aperture is how I keep him in it.
On a camera, the aperture decides how much light gets in. No setting is the correct one. Each lets in something different and makes its own kind of image. The scene doesn't change. Grief works the same way. There's no aha moment. The experience doesn't change. The perspective does.
Tap the setting that feels closest to today.
You'll probably move through all of these, and not in order. Sometimes in the same week. Sometimes in the same afternoon. Every setting is welcome here.
No waiting room. No drive home with mascara on your chin.
Aperture is entirely online, and honestly, grief work is kind of made for it. You get to do some of the deepest work of your life in sweatpants, wrapped in the blanket that still smells like him, with a full box of tissues you didn't have to fish out of a stranger's lobby.
Your space, your rules.
Light a candle. Turn the lamp down low. Lie on the floor if that's where your body wants to be. Murphy can sprawl across your feet. Nobody's judging your throw pillows.
Nowhere to be afterward.
When a session ends, you can take a bath, crawl into bed or stare at the ceiling for an hour. No pulling yourself together for traffic.
He can be in the room.
His photos, his handwriting, his coffee mug, the playlist. Everything that holds your life together is already within arm's reach.
Your body knows it's safe.
Nervous systems settle more easily in a place they already trust. That makes it easier to go deep, and easier to come back up.
Grief needs to be tended, not fixed.
A grieving heart isn't broken.
Grief is what love and attachment look like when the person is gone. There's nothing here to repair. The work is to make room for it, not to make it smaller.
It lives in your body.
At first it tears through skin and organs. Later it soaks into your bones. It's in your clenched jaw and your wrecked gut, so your body gets a voice in this work too, not just the story.
Every part of you gets a seat.
The rage at cancer, at the universe and, yes, at him. The numbness. The laugh that escaped at the funeral. None of it needs to change, conform or stay hidden to be welcome here.
You don't have to find it beautiful.
Beauty in sadness, grief as a sacred journey? Some days, fuck all of that. And sometimes there's still something primal and true in it that ties you to every living thing that has ever lost someone. Both are allowed. I'll meet you in whatever spiritual or religious place you bring, including none at all.
Built around you, not a billing code.
60, 90 or 120 minutes
We choose it together and revisit it as your grief shifts. Early on, an hour may be plenty. Around the one-year mark, longer sessions often make room for deeper work.
Weekly, ideally
Grief work is depth work. Weekly sessions keep momentum going and keep insight from weakening between appointments. At minimum, we meet every other week.
In the room, not as homework
We practice skills together in real time instead of talking about them and sending you off to figure them out alone. Anything you take home grows out of what we did together.
What can happen at minute 80 that never gets to happen at minute 55.
Where you are, right now
We start with exactly where you are today, not where you were last week or where you think you should be. Then we build on the skills you already have for riding the waves when they hit, and slowly start getting curious about what's underneath.
Beyond the story
This is where 55-minute therapy runs out of road. With time to spare, we move from what happened into meaning-making: what it means to keep a relationship with him without his physical presence, and what the version of you that was lost with him needs now. No losing momentum. No getting cut off at the good part.
Some of what we might do together
Letters across time
To the part of you holding the first, most brutal days. From that part back to who you are now. To your future self, about what she must not forget and what you hope for her. Then we find meaningful ways to keep them.
The rage page
An unedited, uncensored letter to cancer, the universe or him. When you're ready, and only then, we release it: burned, shredded, given to the wind or water, or buried in the earth.
Altars and memorials
Places to honor him, and the version of yourself that was lost with him. She deserves a memorial too.
Rituals with his things
Objects that hold your life together become part of rituals we do in session and ones you can do on your own, so the connection has somewhere to live.
Movement and breath
To help grief move through your body, and to find where it's getting stuck. (Spoiler: probably everywhere.)
Visualization and clinical hypnotherapy
Guided techniques that calm your nervous system in the moment, so you can go deep without getting flattened.
EMDR
When parts of the loss still feel stuck or traumatic, EMDR helps your brain process them so they stop hijacking the present.
Silence
Sometimes the most useful thing in the room is nobody talking. If a session needs to be mostly quiet, that's what it is.
All of it happens at a pace your nervous system can tolerate. Nothing rushed. Nothing forced.
Aperture might be your kind of room if…
Things you won't hear from me.
Everyone around you means well. They also panic and grab the nearest greeting-card sentence.
Here, nobody is going to tidy your grief up so it's easier to look at. Including you.
- Everything happens for a reason.
- At least he's not suffering anymore.
- You're so strong.
- I know exactly how you feel.
- Time heals all wounds.
- So… are you dating yet?
- Closure.
No aha moment. Just a different Tuesday.
A year into Aperture, your Tuesday starts with "good morning" to him and a loving graze of your fingertips on his photo. The pang is still there, and it still hurts. But now it has a place of its own to live in your heart instead of taking over every room in the house.
The mail still sits in the box for a few days sometimes. The laundry doesn't always get done when it should. But it happens a little more often, and you've stopped reading the overflowing hamper as proof you're failing. Now it's information about what you need today.
You and Murphy still talk. It's less desperate now, and it happens alongside conversations with actual humans, not instead of them. You might even say yes to lunch, because you've told your closest friends exactly what you need, and the dreaded head-tilt of sympathy doesn't scare you anymore.
When you talk about him, there are still tears. You still miss him with your whole heart. But it doesn't take 100% of the oxygen in your lungs anymore. There's a little room to breathe. And you aren't only talking about him. You're talking to him, in a relationship honest and raw enough to hold your rage, and strong enough to hold the friendship that was always there.
What won't change
Grief doesn't end. Time doesn't heal all wounds. You will never get over it. And if one more podcast tells you life will grow around your grief, you might actually throw up (even if part of you kind of agrees).
Every year brings a little relief and also a brand-new way to hurt. The pain gets less traumatic, and then the amount of life that has happened without him becomes unbearably sad in its own right. You start getting used to doing everything alone, and that feels worse, because you don't want to be used to it. And yet, here you are.
Integrated doesn't mean fixed. It means grief becomes part of who you are instead of a cinder block tied to your ankles, dragging you under. (Real talk: sometimes it still is. That's part of it too.)
Hi, I'm Stacey.
I lost my husband, and then my father, in less than two years. I'm not telling you that so you'll worry about me, or so this becomes my story. I'm telling you because there are things you won't have to explain here. How the future you'd planned didn't just change, it vanished. How "Before" and "After" became the only calendar that matters. How everyone kept waiting for the old you to come back. I know that territory from the inside. So when you bring yours into the room, I'm not going to flinch, and I'm not going to make it about me. The time is yours.
Somewhere in all of that, I found myself intuitively drawn to the sacred space that profound loss carves open. It's the place where small talk stops working and something very old and very true starts to speak. That's where I do my work now.
I think of myself as a grief tender. Like someone tending a fire, I'm not here to put anything out. I'm here to keep it company, give it what it needs, and make sure you're not sitting in the dark alone. When you tell me the thing you've never said out loud, my eyebrows stay exactly where they are. I'll also laugh at your darkest jokes and probably quote too much TV.
Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Washington and Iowa · MS in Counseling Psychology · Advanced training in grief work · EMDRIA-approved EMDR training · Level 1 clinical hypnosis training, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH)
Aperture isn't the right fit if…
- You're in acute crisis or need after-hours support to stay stable. You deserve a higher level of care right now, and I'm glad to help you find it.
- You're looking for a quick fix, or a month or two of sessions to get "back to normal."
- You want therapy to teach you how to stop being sad, or how to be done with grief.
- You can't commit to consistent sessions at least every other week.
- You live outside Washington or Iowa.
Looking for something other than grief work? I also offer standard 55-minute sessions for talk therapy or EMDR, and clients can move between kinds of work as their needs change. Whatever you come in for, your treatment is built around you.
Priced by the length you choose.
Aperture is private pay. That's what keeps it flexible. No diagnosis has to justify your grief, and no insurance company gets a vote on how long you're allowed to need help.
There are no packages and no minimum number of sessions. Grief work is depth work, though, so it helps to come in knowing this isn't a five-sessions-and-done kind of thing.
| 60 minutes | $250 |
| 90 minutes | $375 |
| 120 minutes | $500 |
Superbills are provided upon request, so you can seek out-of-network reimbursement if your plan allows it.
Start with a conversation.
A free 15–20 minute video call. We'll talk briefly about where you are, where you're getting stuck, and what's bringing you in, even if your goals are still vague. Ask me anything about how I work with grief or how my practice runs.
If we're a fit, we'll schedule an intake session. If we're not, I'll point you toward other therapists or offers that might serve you better.
Book your free consultYou can even bring Murphy.
Questions first? Email me at stacey@hearthandpathcounseling.com
Tell me the part you're arguing with.
That hesitation is usually worth listening to. Tap the one that sounds closest to see my answer right underneath it.
I'm not sure my grief is "bad enough."
There's no qualifying round.
Grief doesn't have to be the worst thing that ever happened to anyone to deserve care. If it's heavy for you, that's the only measurement that counts here.
Two hours sounds like a lot.
It might be, right now.
Especially in the first several months, 60 minutes may be all that's tolerable, and that's exactly right. Longer sessions usually start to make sense closer to the one-year mark. We decide together, and we keep revisiting it.
Weekly feels like a big commitment.
It is. On purpose.
I recommend weekly because momentum matters in depth work, and insight weakens when sessions are far apart. Every other week is the minimum. We'll find a rhythm your actual life can hold.
It's been years. Isn't it too late?
Grief doesn't expire.
It changes shape over time, and sometimes it comes roaring back at an anniversary, a wedding or a song in a coffee shop. Years later is a completely normal time to finally look at it.
I'm scared I'll fall apart.
Then you'll fall apart somewhere safe.
Coming undone in front of someone who isn't scared of it can be a strange kind of relief. And because you're home, you can curl up under a blanket afterward instead of facing a parking lot.
It wasn't my spouse I lost.
If your life split into Before and After, you belong here.
A parent, a child, a sibling, a best friend. This page talks a lot about losing a partner because that's a loss I know from the inside, but Aperture is built for any loss that rearranged your whole life.
Private pay is a stretch for me.
Let's talk about it honestly.
Money is real, and I won't pretend it isn't. This work is an investment in yourself: in the rest of your life, and in how you carry him through it. And the cost of changing nothing, another year of mailbox-only weeks, dropped balls and grief with nowhere to go, is higher than any session fee.
Your note includes whichever hesitation you last opened. Send it to stacey@hearthandpathcounseling.com and I'll write back personally.
The practical stuff.
How do we decide how long each session is?
We start that conversation during your consult and keep it going as your grief shifts. It's always a collaborative decision. Early on, 60 minutes is often what's tolerable. Around the one-year mark, longer sessions with more experiential work tend to help.
How often will we meet?
I recommend weekly, because momentum matters in depth work and insight weakens when sessions are far apart. Every other week is the minimum. I don't offer monthly sessions, except to help an existing client wind down as they get ready to graduate from therapy.
How long will I need Aperture?
There's no package and no minimum number of sessions. Grief work isn't short-term, so it helps to come in expecting that. We'll check in regularly about how it's going and what you need next.
Can I reach you between sessions?
Yes. You're welcome to message me, and I'll respond during business hours. I'm not able to offer 24/7 availability or crisis care. If you're ever in crisis, call or text 988 or go to your nearest emergency room.
Is there homework?
Sometimes, if it fits. Writing prompts or rituals to do on your own usually grow naturally out of what we did in session, and we decide on them together. You won't be handed a worksheet and sent off to figure it out alone.
Is it okay if I laugh? Or don't cry at all?
Yes and yes. Grief shows up as dark humor, numbness, rage, boredom and a hundred other things. None of them are wrong. I'm not grading your grief on how sad it looks.
Do you take insurance?
Aperture is private pay, which is what lets sessions run longer and be shaped around you. Superbills are provided upon request if you'd like to seek out-of-network reimbursement.
Is this in person or online?
Entirely online, through a secure video platform, from whatever corner of your home feels safest. I'm licensed in Washington and Iowa, so you'll need to be located in one of those states during our sessions.
Do I have to be religious, or not religious?
Neither. I'll meet you in whatever spiritual or religious place you bring, including none at all.
Do you only do grief work?
No. I also offer standard 55-minute sessions for talk therapy or EMDR that isn't specifically grief-related, and clients can move between kinds of work as their needs change.
Come as you are.
You don't have to make it pretty. You just have to show up.
Book a free consult