I did not come to grief work from a distance.

Rose Gichure was thirteen years old the first time loss and grief visited her home and never really left. She lost her father in her teens in the early 200s. her younger brother Mwai who died at the age of 20 in the early 2010s. In her mid-twenties, Rose lost her mother Wangui Mwai in 2015 and then in 2023, her older brother Wachira, rested.

Each loss —very different fom each other— arriving before she had finished carrying the one before it. Nobody around her had the words. Nobody knew what to do. And neither did she  because nobody had ever taught her how to grieve. She was just expected to keep going.

For years she did. And then in 2015, after losing her mother, something shifted. She started writing, a quiet blog, just her and her grief and the memory of the KNH corridors which had become a second home due to the frequent dialysis runs. The blog? It was not polished. It was not planned. It was just honest. And slowly, the honesty became a podcast. The podcast became a community. The community became something she could never have imagined,  a space where people finally felt permission to grieve out loud.

Rose went on to train as a Certified Grief and Loss Specialist  not to become an expert looking down at grief from a distance, but to better understand what she and so many others had been living through. She is not someone who has arrived. She is someone who keeps going, keeps learning, and keeps building the space she once desperately needed. Grief Angels exists because Rose refused to let loss have the last word.