Before
A life we were still building
A marriage, a mortgage, a five-year plan written on the back of an envelope. Amanda was not writing a book. She was not coaching anyone. She was making dinner and assuming there would be decades of it.
She knows what it means to begin again.
Amanda is an author, speaker, singer/songwriter and grief coach. She writes and works for the woman standing in the middle of a life she didn't plan — because she once stood there herself.
Hi, I'm Amanda
I did not set out to become anyone's guide through grief. For a long stretch of my life I was simply a woman with a marriage, a mortgage and a five-year plan — the kind of ordinary future you assume you'll get to keep.
Then I lost my husband, and every part of that future had to be renegotiated. Not just the big things. The small ones too: who to call first, what to do with a Saturday, how to answer when someone asks how many people are in your family.
What I could not find in those first months was someone who would tell me the truth without rushing me. So I started writing it down. That writing became a book, and the book became this work.
Loss changed my life. it didn't end it.
There is no version of this where the loss stops mattering. There is a version where it stops being the only thing that's true about you.
The Long Way Round
How the story actually went
The year everything changed
Losing him — and the plan
Grief did not arrive alone. It brought paperwork, well-meaning advice, an identity that no longer fit, and a calendar full of dates that suddenly meant something else. The plan went in a drawer.
After
Writing to survive
The writing started at 3am, for no reader. It was not a memoir yet. It was the only place the truth was allowed to be ugly, unresolved and said out loud without anyone flinching.
Now
Walking it with other women
What began as survival became a bestselling memoir, a coaching practice, and a stage. Not because Amanda got over it — because she found a way through it, and refuses to make anyone walk it alone.
Why Messy
Not every loss is a simple one.
Grief is hard enough on its own. It gets harder when the relationship you are grieving wasn't what it looked like from the outside.
My marriage carried things most people never saw. Addiction was part of our story, and so was hope — I kept praying for a turnaround right up until there was no more time to pray for one. When he died, I wasn't only grieving him. I was grieving the life I had been waiting for us to have.
That is what I mean by messy grief. Loving someone completely and being hurt by them. Missing them and being angry at them. All of it true at once. If your loss came with complications you don't know how to say out loud, nothing about your grief needs tidying up before it counts.
What This Work Believes
Three things I won't move on
01
No tidy endings
Grief does not resolve on a schedule and it does not owe anyone a lesson. Nothing here will ask you to find the silver lining before you are ready.
02
Honest company
Not advice from the sidelines. Amanda has stood where you are standing, and she says the true thing even when the comfortable thing is easier.
03
Your story, your pen
The next chapter is not written for you or handed to you. The whole point of this work is that it stays yours.
grief → grace → strength → hope
Beyond the Bio
The parts that don't fit in a speaker bio.
I keep his handwriting on a note in my bedroom drawer. I am a bad procrastinator when it comes to my laundry — and I keep trying to get better. I enjoy my coffee in an oversized chair every morning with my dog. I attempt to take a walk each evening — in every weather, because it is the one ritual that survived. I question how well I'm doing as a mom. Every. Single. Day. I still have days that take my breath away when I remember everything I've gone through.
I tell you this because grief is not a topic to me. It's a room I live in — one that got bigger, and eventually got windows.
She never once tried to fix me. She just refused to leave.
— A coaching client, widowed 2022
Beginagain with me.
Read the book, book a call, or bring Amanda to your stage — whichever door is the one you can walk through today.