My Story

Hi, I’m Kelly Norton. And this is a little about my story of becoming a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist.

If you’re like me, you’re always curious how people decide to do what they do. Was it a childhood dream? A midlife shift? Or something they fell into serendipitously? When I tell people that I am a grief recovery specialist, the question is always: “How did you decide to do that?”

For most of my adult life, I had been a stay-at-home mom to my four daughters. As they grew up, I began taking on more and more volunteer work — helping out at school, doing service in my church, and I even ran a youth symphony for a few years.

At one point, I had the opportunity to do volunteer work with older adults, and I absolutely loved it. I’ve always had an affinity for older people — it’s kind of where my heart is. These older people were wonderful human beings with challenging life experiences and many stories to tell.

Their life experiences led most of them to have great needs. Those needs ranged from medical to physical to financial to social to spiritual. I knew that I didn’t know enough to help them fully, so I decided to go back to school to get a master’s degree in gerontology, which is the interdisciplinary study of aging. I thought I would go on to get a law degree and practice elder law, but soon decided that law wasn’t a good fit for my personality.

Through my master’s program at the University of Southern California (Fight on!), I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my degree, but I was loving each class I took. I place a high value on education, and being able to sit at the feet of true experts in the field was inspiring and enlightening. I was soaking it all in!

One semester, I was in a class on managing geriatric symptoms, which ended up being mostly on palliative care. On a particular day, we had a guest lecturer in class, and he said something that changed my life: “If you really want to help people, you should look into training with the Grief Recovery Institute.”

I’ve told people it was like a light went on and a gong went off. I immediately looked up The Grief Recovery Institute and knew instantly this was what I wanted to do. During my master’s program, I had the opportunity to research grief and how it affects the body and the brain, and this was further confirmation to me that grief recovery was where I wanted to be.

I realized, too, that each of the older adults I had been working with prior to going back to school had been greatly impacted by unresolved grief. And oh, if I had only had the tools to help back then.

So, after graduating, I got certified as a Grief Recovery Specialist through the Grief Recovery Institute. And then I turned around and immediately completed their advanced certification process so that I could have even more skills and knowledge to help people.

I didn’t come to this training as a griever. I didn’t think I was grieving at all. This was something I wanted to learn about on a professional level. But, part of the training process is that we go through the Grief Recovery Method ourselves. My first thought was “uh oh, I don’t have anything to work on here.” Little did I know! Everyone experiences loss. It’s a universal part of our human journey.

I uncovered unresolved emotions and things I had been grieving for years without ever realizing that’s what those feelings were. We finished the process, and I felt physically lighter, freer, happier, and more at peace than I had in a long time. What really clicked for me was how much better I felt when I didn’t even realize I had been carrying this burden, so how much could this help someone who did know, every moment of every day, the weight of the grief they were carrying? Spoiler alert: It’s a huge impact!

When I told my husband that I wanted to do this, he was supportive but concerned. “It just sounds so sad.” And I worried about that for a little while but kept following my heart. And here’s what I know. This is not sad. Grief Recovery is not sad. This is joyful, hopeful work.

Unresolved grief is what is sad. Feeling hopeless is sad. Feeling like the world has kept going but you haven’t is sad. Feeling paralyzed by grief and not knowing how to move on is sad. Avoiding talking about your loved ones and your memories because they’re too painful is sad. Feeling like you’ll never be okay again is sad. Feeling guilt because sometimes you’re happy again is sad.

There is so much sadness that goes along with grief. But recovery? Recovery is not sad. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that it’s not emotional, or that it’s not ongoing. But recovery is where we find hope, peace, and completion. It’s an opportunity to set our burdens down so we have room to carry more love, more compassion for ourselves and others, and more happiness. For me, it’s a complete privilege and joy to walk with people as they discover that and gain the tools to heal their hearts.

Grief is universal. You don’t have to walk through it alone.