When a Hospice Nurse Lost Her Father
Rachelle spent 15 years helping others die with dignity. Nothing could have prepared her for losing her dad.
If you are reading this in the middle of grief — the kind that makes getting out of bed feel impossible, the kind that makes you feel like nobody around you truly understands — this story is for you.
Rachelle knows that place. She has lived it. And she found her way through.
The Daddy's Girl
Rachelle grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and from the very beginning, her dad was her person.
He coached her through childhood, took her everywhere, and made it his mission to make sure she always knew her worth. Not just on the easy days — but especially on the hard ones. He reminded her constantly how much God loved her and who He had created her to be. When her parents divorced, Rachelle didn't hesitate about where she wanted to go. She chose her dad.
She carried everything he poured into her straight into adulthood and into the career she built — as a hospice nurse. For 15 years, she sat with people in their final hours. She held space for families in the most painful moments of their lives. She knew what loss looked like up close.
She thought she understood it.
Valentine's Day
Rachelle flew home on Valentine's Day. Her dad had been having stomach problems, so they ran some tests and waited on a biopsy. Two days later, the results came back.
Stage 4 pancreatic and liver cancer.
For most people, that diagnosis is devastating and disorienting — a terrifying unknown. For Rachelle, it was something different. Fifteen years in hospice meant she didn't have to wonder what it meant. She already knew the timeline. She already knew what was coming.
Knowing made it harder, not easier.
When she sat down with her dad and asked him how he was really feeling about it all, he stopped her with a kind of peace she wasn't prepared for. He told her he trusted God no matter what — that either God would heal him here, or God would heal him on the other side. Then he reminded her of something she had said herself many times over the years, in hospital rooms and at bedsides, to grieving families who needed to hear it.
All healing doesn't come in a lifetime.
He was quoting her own words back to her.
In that moment, Rachelle had to do the hardest thing she had ever done. She had to take off the medical hat she had worn for 15 years and step fully into the only role that mattered in that room. Not the nurse. The daughter.
She made sure he was comfortable. She made sure he was at peace. And he was — in a way that she found both heartbreaking and holy.
Her father passed away on March 10th, 2024.
The Days After
If you have ever lost the person who was your safe place in the world, you know what came next.
Rachelle stopped getting out of bed. She stopped wanting to do much of anything. The grief was heavy and she let it sit on her. She was angry at God. She was not okay, and she wasn't pretending otherwise.
It was her son who eventually broke through. He sat with her and said something simple — that he knew she missed her dad, but that they were still here. Her husband. Her kids. Her family, still present, still loving her, still needing her to come back.
Something about hearing it that plainly clicked. She knew her dad would not have wanted this for her. But knowing that and actually being able to move were two very different things. She needed something more than willpower. She needed help.
The Door She Almost Didn't Walk Through
Rachelle found Grief Share while searching online late one night. There was a location nearby. She decided to go.
She walked in expecting — she wasn't sure what. Maybe something clinical. Maybe something uncomfortable. What she found instead was a room full of people who wrapped around her like she had always belonged there. Strangers who showed up for her in a way that people who had known her for years had not.
She almost felt like she was in the wrong place. Nobody had ever made her feel that at home that fast.
That is what grief does, though. It reveals who shows up. And sometimes the people who show up are the ones sitting in a circle in a room you almost didn't walk into.
What Rachelle Wants You to Know
Rachelle has spent her career on what she calls the front row — present for death, present for grief, present for the rawest moments of other people's lives. She knows better than most that grief is isolating in a specific and particular way. That you can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel completely alone in it. That unless someone has truly sat where you are sitting, the well-meaning words often land hollow.
She has sat where you are sitting. In hospital rooms for 15 years — and then in the most personal front row of her life, watching her father take his last breath.
Out of that experience, she felt called to do more than survive it. She got certified as a grief coach. She began leading others through the same darkness she had walked through herself — facilitating the very kind of community that had held her when she needed it most.
She didn't ask for this path. But she stopped being surprised by it.
Starting Over
Through the community, through the grief, through the anger and the long slow climb back toward living — Rachelle came back to her faith.
Not the untested kind. The kind that has been broken open and rebuilt. The kind that has earned its footing.
She rededicated her life to Christ and was baptized shortly after beach retreat. She described it not as a dramatic moment, but as a quiet and overwhelming feeling of relief. Like she had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had finally been allowed to set it down.
She felt like she was starting over.
Her dad had told her that all healing doesn't come in a lifetime. Standing on the other side of the hardest year of her life, she finally understood — in her bones, not just her head — exactly what he meant.
If You Are Grieving Right Now
You do not have to have it together. You do not have to be over it on anyone's timeline but your own. The anger is allowed. The bed is allowed. The days when you can't quite make yourself believe it gets better — those are allowed too.
But you do not have to stay there alone.
Rachelle didn't. And the community that caught her — the room full of people who felt more like family than anyone she expected — it exists for you too. Grief Share has groups meeting across the country. You can walk in not knowing a single person and walk out feeling, for the first time in a long time, like someone actually understands.
You are not alone in this. And your story is not over.