Mary grew up in the Bay Area and has over 35 years-experience working with older adults at all ages and life stages and consulting for businesses serving Baby Boomers. Her expertise is in senior housing, care communities, senior and adult-day-care centers, senior nutrition and education programs, and now provides late-life transition and grief support to individuals and their families throughout the aging process. Her business experience includes organizational management, program development, marketing, community relations, and non-profit fundraising.

For over a decade, Mary also worked part-time as a parent advisor and family-centered care (FCC) educator at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, where her son received his life-saving cardiac care. She partnered with parents, specialty clinics and healthcare teams to improve services, hospital processes and care outcomes. These team efforts ultimately resulted in robust, nationally recognized FCC programs that helped usher in a new era of family inclusion and improved healthcare outcomes in hospitals across the nation.

Through her years of education and personal experience, Mary’s compassion and insights have deepened, particularly as it relates to the unique issues of advanced aging, complex family dynamics, acute-care pediatrics, and the multi-faceted world of death and dying. In 2019, she became both a certified end-of-life doula and dementia care practitioner and has added grief coaching, healthcare advocacy, end-of-life education and planning to her service offerings.

Today, Mary sees herself as a Life-Transition Specialist, which encompasses support and guidance for people regardless of their ages or health status. She considers Beacon Light Doulas (BLD) as the next right step in her life-long career of caring for others. Along with her partners, they are building a unique company that offers compassionate services which are so greatly needed at this time. Through birth, life and death, BLD is there to partner with families, communities, businesses, care providers and the healthcare system, and encourage people to talk about what matters most to them, document their wishes and embrace both the living and the dying process with less fear and more understanding.