Why I do this work.

Just ten years ago, I was a Scrum Master. My days were full of complex deployments, software releases, and major account relationships. My weekends were full of something else entirely — 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, and adventures with my corgi, Maggie. Life was ticking along happily, the way it does when you assume it always will.

Then, in 2016, one phone call changed everything.

It came from England. My only sibling,  my older sister, Lisa,  had just been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a rare, incurable blood cancer. It had taken over six months of searching just to get an answer for why she was so unwell.

Our family was small. Just my mum, my sister, and me. So when the call came, there was no question about what I needed to do.

Within 24 hours, I had packed up my computer, dropped Maggie with friends, grabbed my passport, and was on a plane home.

I was there when Lisa received her prognosis: six years. And I already knew, knowing her, that she was going to defy that number no matter what it took.

Building a Life Around Loss, Not Despite It

What followed was six years and one month of learning how to hold two lives at once, a career on one continent, and my sister on another.

My company supported me through it in ways I'll always be grateful for. Each trip home meant four weeks away: two weeks in quarantine once Covid hit, which I never once treated lightly, and two weeks actually with Lisa. I worked to US hours the entire time. Only three people in my office knew where I really was. I wanted my team to feel none of the disruption. I understood what a privilege it was to even have the option to go, and I wasn't going to let that privilege cost anyone else anything.

Being a Scrum Master, oddly, had prepared me for exactly this. High-stakes, high-uncertainty situations don't run on hope alone. They run on structure: a plan, clear communication, a way to hold everything together even when the ground keeps shifting. I brought that instinct home with me, and it became the thing that let me function,  and support my team, while my world was quietly falling apart in the background.

The Ordinary, in the Middle of the Extraordinary

It wasn't all painful treatments and hospital corridors. Some of my favourite memories live in the strange, in-between hours.

The time difference, which should have been a burden, became an asset. When Lisa was awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep through her treatment cycles, she had me. Our calls were hysterical — she'd tell me about things she'd ordered online and completely forgotten about, only to be baffled when the delivery turned up at her door. Chemo brain, we called it, laughing every time.

Often our calls were about baking. Mum, Lisa, and I had spent years building muscle memory over Skype, baking together from opposite sides of an ocean  from simple traybakes to elaborate three-layer cakes with fillings, buttercream, toppings, and garnishes, all made by our own hands, guided only by video calls and trust.

Lisa had better periods too, and during them, she came to me. In one trip we covered New Hampshire,  Ohio, Maine, and Boston together, Lisa proudly sporting her new hair growth after her stem cell transplant — a small, visible sign that she was still in treatment, and still herself.

And Then There Weren't Better Periods Anymore

Lisa died on October 3rd, 2022.

I felt numb. Untethered. My world would never be the same shape again. I understood that immediately, even before I understood much else.

I never expected this to be my story. But it is.

Why This Matters to You, Too

It may not be a sister for you. It could be a parent, a divorce, downsizing, the loss of a beloved pet. Loss takes countless shapes, but it is, without exception, something every single one of us will face. No amount of hoping it skips past us, no amount of believing it will happen to someone else, some other family, some other time, changes that.

What I learned, living through the hardest years of my life, is this: big change, even change we never wanted, is something we can navigate. Not without pain, grief doesn't work that way, and it shouldn't. But with a plan. With structure. With a way to communicate and to connect, so that instead of feeling swept away by life's hardest moments, we feel resourced enough to move through them with some measure of grace.

I'm a Scrum Master at heart, and I always will be. Give me a plan and a framework, and I can hold almost anything, including grief.

That's the work I bring into organisations now: helping leaders and teams build the structure to genuinely support people through loss, because grief doesn't stop at the office door. Pretending it does, doesn't protect anyone, it just means people suffer quietly, alone, while trying to look fine.

This work takes courage. It changes you. And it changes your team, inside and outside the workplace, in ways that last far longer than any single difficult season.