ABOUT ME
How I came to this work.
I'm Maggie. I lost my sister in 2018, spent years finding my own way through, and now I sit with other people in the same stretch of road.
A SHORT INTRODUCTION
Hi, I'm Maggie.
I'm a grief coach based in the Cotswolds, working online with clients across the UK and beyond. I spent fourteen years as a marketing director — useful skills, the wrong life — before grief rearranged everything and I went looking for what would actually help. Most of what I found didn't fit. The pieces that did, I trained in.
Now I run a small, careful practice from a stone cottage in Stow-on-the-Wold. My work is slow, attentive, and unhurried — built around the fact that the people I sit with aren't problems to be solved. They're people in the middle of something hard, who deserve company that's done the work itself.
THE LONGER VERSION
My story.
My sister Eleanor died of pancreatic cancer in October 2018. She was forty-two. I was thirty-eight, married, mid-career, half an hour from her hospital bed for the last six weeks of her life and convinced — the way you convince yourself of things when the truth is unbearable — that we were going to be the family that beat the statistics.
We weren't. The statistics knew exactly what they were doing.
I went back to work nine days after the funeral. My boss was kind about it; everyone was kind about it; kindness, I learned, has a half-life of about six weeks. By Christmas the casseroles had stopped and the texts had thinned out and the world had quietly agreed that I should be coming out the other side. I wasn't coming out the other side. I was still standing at the entrance, waiting for someone to tell me which way to walk.
How I came to this work
The first year I tried to grief my way through it the way I'd done everything else — efficiently. I read the books. I went to the therapist my GP recommended. I joined a bereavement group at the village hall in Cheltenham and lasted three sessions before I couldn't stand the way grief was being talked about: as a project, with milestones, that you could complete if you applied yourself.
I quit the marketing job in the summer of 2020. The pandemic was a useful cover; everyone was making strange decisions. The truth is I'd been sleepwalking through meetings since Ellie died and I couldn't pretend any more that the job mattered to me. I didn't know what came next. I just knew it couldn't be that.
What changed wasn't a moment. It was a woman called Bridget, who I met at a writing retreat in west Wales in the autumn of 2020. She was a coach who'd lost her son. She didn't try to help me. She just sat with me on a wet bench overlooking the sea and said, very quietly, "There is no other side. There's just the rest of your life, and you get to decide what to do with it." It was the first true thing anyone had said to me about grief in two years. I cried for about an hour and then I started training.
How I trained for it
I'm a certified Grief Recovery Specialist, trained through the Grief Recovery Institute in 2021 — the only formal grief-specific qualification I found in the UK that didn't pathologise the experience. Useful framework, good language, real method.
I trained in Somatic Experiencing between 2022 and 2024 because grief lives in the body and I needed to know what to do when a client's nervous system was running the show and words weren't going to help. I'm an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) with the International Coach Federation — the qualification that says I know how to hold a structured coaching conversation without imposing on it.
What I didn't train in: anything that promised to help my clients "move on," "find closure," or "complete" their grief. Those frameworks exist; they're not mine. I'm not interested in helping people get over the people they love.
How I work
I work slowly. A typical session is ninety minutes — long enough to settle in, short enough not to leave anyone wrung out. I never work with more than eight one-to-one clients at a time, so the people I see get my full, unhurried attention.
I don't believe in the five stages of grief. I don't think you'll be "back to normal" by any particular date. I think grief is a relationship — with the person you lost, with the version of yourself who knew them, with the future you'd assumed — and like every relationship, it changes shape over time. My job is to be useful company while that's happening.
I'll be honest with you when something isn't going to help. I'll ask harder questions than you're expecting. I won't tell you it gets easier, because that's not quite true; what's true is that you get more skilful at carrying it, and the life you build around the loss can be a good life. A different one. Still good.
Outside the work
I live in a 1740s stone cottage on the edge of Stow-on-the-Wold with my husband Tom and a brindle whippet called Pearl. I grow more vegetables than we can eat, swim in the river at Bourton most mornings between April and October, and am slowly, badly, learning the violin — which Eleanor played beautifully and which I never wanted to touch while she was alive.
I keep a small letterpress in the garden shed and print poems no-one asked for. If you ever work with me long enough, one of them will probably end up in the post.
THE PRACTICE
Work with me.
One-to-One Coaching
Twelve weeks of weekly sessions, online. For people who want consistent, focused support while they find their footing. Includes between-session notes and unlimited messaging.
The First Year
A longer container — six months of fortnightly sessions — for people in the first year after a major loss. Slower pace, more room.Designed to hold the anniversaries.
Single Session
A standalone ninety-minute call. For when you need to think out loud with someone who understands the terrain. No commitment beyond the conversation.
"There is no other side. There's just the rest of your life, and you get to decide what to do with it."
— SOMETHING BRIDGET SAID TO ME, THAT I NOW SAY TO MY CLIENTS
FROM CLIENTS
What clients say afterwards.
She made room.
I'd been to two therapists who wanted to fix me. Maggie didn't. She just made room for what was actually happening. Six months in, I'm not the same person — and that's the point.
Helen, lost her husband
Steady ground.
What I needed wasn't strategy. It was steady ground. Maggie was that. The work was quiet and slow and exactly right.
James, lost his mother
Permission to grieve.
Everyone in my life had moved on three months in. Maggie was the first person who said: it's been three months. Of course you're not okay. That alone changed things.
Priya, lost her best friend
She gets it
She's been through it. You can tell. There's no performance in her — just someone who's done the work and knows what it asks of you.
Daniel, lost his sister
SOUNDS LIKE A FIT?
You want this too?
If you've read this far, something in you is paying attention. That's information worth listening to.
You don't have to know yet whether you want to work with me. You just have to be willing to talk for half an hour. I'll tell you honestly whether I think this is the right work for you. If it isn't, I'll point you toward what might be.
LETTERS & NOTES
Read the blog.
FREE GUIDE
The First Hard Anniversaries
A short guide to the dates that catch you off guard — birthdays, anniversaries, the random Tuesday. What helps, what doesn't, and how to ask for what you need.
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Stillwater
Grief coaching, at a pace that holds. Based in the Cotswolds, working online with clients across the UK and internationally.
Location
The Old Mill
Stow-on-the-Wold
Gloucestershire GL54
Contact
hello@mysite.com
+44 1234 567 890
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