Karen Austin, CT

Karen Austin is a certified thanatologist, grief educator, and writer who has been a student of grief and mourning her whole life. Mostly because life kept insisting.

For more than nine years she has been writing about death, grief, and mourning with the kind of honesty that makes people exhale. Her framework, None of Us Are Getting Out of Here Alive, distills a lifetime of loss and learning into nine truths about death and grief that nobody teaches us. And that everyone needs.

Before she turned 25, she had lost all four grandparents and her mother to natural causes, and her brother Butch to suicide. In 2017, she said goodbye to her husband and best friend Tracy after a nine-month beautiful horrid journey through pancreatic cancer.

She has spent years alongside grieving people in support groups and knows that the thing we most need is someone to tell the truth about loss. It is also the thing we most lack.

Karen doesn't approach grief as something to solve. She approaches it as a teacher and a willing student. She believes grief doesn't need to be fixed. It needs to be witnessed and companioned.

She is currently completing two books and building a speaking platform rooted in a single belief: when we stop running from death, we can choose to start living.

And she’s funny.