Clearing the Heir didn’t begin as a business plan. It began with loss.

Right after September 11, 2001, my father died unexpectedly. The next day my divorce was finalized. I moved back to Northern Virginia to help my mother and start over. Everything in my life pointed home.

From there, I spent the next decade helping my mother, my father’s mother, and my mother’s mother downsize homes they had lived in for over fifty years. We went through everything. Their belongings. Their parents’ belongings. The layers of what had been inherited, preserved, avoided, and quietly carried.

My mother managed the estates. I helped her execute them. I was an executor. I sorted, documented, preserved, released. We didn’t order dumpsters and make it all disappear. We handled it with care. With history. With meaning.

Between 2001 and 2011 both of my grandmothers died, and then my mother died. I remarried during that time, and in that chapter I helped navigate the loss of a mother, a father, and a grandmother in that family too. Loss became the constant.

While I tried to build different careers along the way with my jewelry line, floral design, transforming a garden center, renovation projects , I found what I was really doing was learning. Refining my eye. Understanding systems. Seeing how environments reflect what we are holding onto and what we are afraid to face.

Because I lost my parents early, I became the friend people called when their parents died. The one who could sit in the middle of it and not feel shy or awkward. I became the one who could help them decide what to keep, what to let go of, and how to move forward without erasing the past through telling stories from what I experienced.

For years I thought I couldn’t have a “real career” because everyone kept dying. Now I understand something different. I was living the curriculum. I was learning how to help my own generation walk through what I had to walk through earlier than most.

Many people my age are now stepping into exactly what I did twenty years ago helping aging parents, inheriting homes full of history, feeling sandwiched between grief and responsibility. If I still had my parents, I would likely be in the middle of it right now too.

Instead, I can stand beside others and offer what took me years to learn — clarity, steadiness, reverence, and the ability to move without bulldozing meaning.

This work is practical, emotional, creative and honest.

We don’t wipe everything out or  build shrines to everything in our past either. We open it up and look at it clearly. We preserve what matters and release what doesn’t serve the life you’re stepping into.

I do this because it’s what life taught me to do.