Meet the Author & Grief Coach
Jessica Lloyd is a grief coach, creative practitioner, and founder of Grey Collective, a creative healing studio devoted to helping people live in honest relationship with grief. Her work emerges from the belief that grief is not something to resolve or overcome, but something to accompany—a presence that reshapes a life, and one that deserves space, steadiness, and care.
Her approach was shaped through lived experience. After her husband was diagnosed with brain cancer, Jessica spent six years navigating the long, uncertain terrain of treatment, caregiving, and anticipatory loss. Over time, she found herself moving through roles she had never imagined inhabiting—wife, caregiver, and eventually widow—while raising their three young children and continuing to orient herself inside a life that had irrevocably changed.
In the absence of clear language or resolution, creative practice became a place for her grief to exist outside her body and mind. Through writing, making, and returning to small, contained acts of creation, she began to develop a way of relating to grief that was neither avoidant nor overwhelming. This practice formed the foundation of the Companion framework, a creative grief method that invites people to build a steady, ongoing relationship with loss rather than seeking closure.
Through her coaching, workshops, and writing, Jessica works with individuals navigating grief in its many forms—death, illness, identity shifts, caregiving, and the quiet losses that often go unnamed. Her work is rooted in creating spaces where grief can be witnessed without urgency, and where creative practice becomes a way to externalize, honor, and live alongside what remains.
Jessica’s background as a maker and studio founder informs her deeply tactile and relational approach. She believes that the act of creating—whether through words, objects, or simple marks on a page—offers grief a place to land, and offers the person carrying it a way to remain present inside their own life.
She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she continues to develop creative grief practices, teach workshops, and support others in building sustainable, compassionate relationships with loss. Through her work, she hopes to offer what she once needed most: a way to stay.