28/09/2026
Death and I have had a long, complicated, beautiful relationship.
It began at 18, here on Maui, when I helped my Aunt Lynn transition to the next portal. I didn’t have language for what it would mean. I only knew I was called to be present for someone I loved as she left this world.
It transformed me.
Looking back, I see how much of the healer I became was born there. Aunt Lynn knew my path before I did. She trusted something in me I hadn’t discovered yet. I love and miss her still. She was one of my first teachers.
At 19, I began working in hospice. Later I became a birth doula, work I’ve done for over 23 years. Somehow this life has placed me beside both portals—coming and going.
I am a healer through and through, and so blessed to have this gift. I’ve learned there isn’t always something to fix. Sometimes the medicine is comfort, touch, silence, witnessing, or simply being present.
Our dead don’t simply disappear. They become ancestors. We speak their names, honor them and continue loving them beyond the physical.
Recently, I had the profound honor of helping usher Mikey Boi toward the ancestor realm, Hawaiian style. There was ceremony, community, reverence and aloha, but also the simplest form of care: being present.
He was so deeply loved and will be missed by so many. I’m honored to have been part of his journey home.
None of this makes grief easier. I’ve seen too many people die before they should have, especially people failed by systems meant to care for them. I don’t romanticize preventable death.
Death doesn’t scare me the way we’re taught it should. I respect it. I grieve it. Sometimes I’m fu***ng angry at it. And I’m still curious about it.
Maybe being so close to death is why I love being alive so much. I love hard. I tell people what they mean to me. I notice ordinary moments while they’re still ordinary.
After all the births, bedsides, bodies, goodbyes, altars and ancestors, I believe love has never been particularly obedient to the boundary between the living and the dead.
Rest well, Mikey Boi. You were loved here. May the ancestors receive you with that same love. 🤍
