About Cindy Olney

Hi, I'm Cindy.

I founded my practice, Shadowlands Grief and Eldercare Coaching, to help people face the far-reaching impact of a loved one's death. 

I help adult children, spouses and significant others, and other family members reconcile this difficult experience.  I also support family caregivers who are coping with the anticipatory grief and daily stress of caring for a loved one who's at end of life.  

I have a PhD in Educational Psychology and am certified as a life coach and an end-of-life doula. 

More importantly, I know firsthand the pain of losing a loved one. My mother died in 2018, after a long year of illness. It was one of the loneliest and most painful years of my life.

That's why I founded Shadowlands Coaching

I wanted to provide the type of grief support I couldn't find when I lost my mother in 2018. 

Getting through grief and loss, is difficult to manage alone.  It's better to lean on someone who understands the path you're walking. Who listens to you, supports you unconditionally and helps you develop ways to navigate your way through loss.  

The methods I use and practices I teach you came from my own, self-directed training and study. I've used them with all of my clients. 

More importantly, I used them to heal myself. 

My own roller coaster ride

My own grief journey began when both of my parents started having life-changing health conditions.

It all started when my father had a failed back surgery that put him in a wheelchair and forced him into a seven-month rehab stay in his retirement community’s nursing home.

My mother then began to develop complications from colon surgery performed a decade earlier. Then heart problems. Then strokes. She was in and out of the same nursing home, a couple doors down from him.

When my father returned to their apartment seven months later, he  adapting beautifully to life in a wheelchair.

As for my mother, his ability to adapt to his new circumstances meant she could stop worrying about him. And start letting go.

I felt it in my soul when she stopped fighting

I remember the moment the realization hit me that my mother was not going to recover. Ever.

 Ironically, I was sitting on the edge of Savannah’s historic Colonial Cemetery. My husband and I were in the charming southern city, celebrating my birthday. We took a break from sightseeing so I could do my nightly check-in with my parents.

I was on edge that whole day. My frail mother had been feeling poorly for weeks, but stubbornly refused to see a doctor.

That night, I asked her if she remembered my birthday was the next day.

She said no, then started to cry.

I was flooded with grief. She never forgot my birthday. Her birthday cards always included a recounting of my birth. She laughed at how my birthday made her feel old.

We both knew her forgetting was significant.

The long trail to the end

Her dying process unfolded over 10 months. Frequent hospital stays. A merry-go-round of living arrangements, from nursing home to independent living, back to nursing home, to assisted living, back to nursing home. A different room every couple of months.

She had a stroke on Palm Sunday and seemed to step over the threshold. A risky drug brought her back to life.

Mostly.

My father and brother were the home team. My brother lived near them, so he helped my dad manage the day-to-day upheaval.

I lived two states away, doing what I could with phone calls, vacation leave, and frequent flyer miles. I struggled constantly with guilt over not doing enough.

Then, December 26, after a gentle holiday celebration with our immediate family, my mother slipped into a “deep sleep” and finally entered hospice service.

I sat vigil for six days, relieved to finally have a role in her end of life.

And finally, a turn toward peace

When she went on hospice service, I felt a release. Finally, I and everyone around me stopped resisting death.

Then a funny thing happened.

My acceptance opened me up to the small graces that surrounded me.

The gentler medical care of hospice. Compassion of the nursing home staff. Bonding and sharing stories with friends and family.

I was sad, but I also felt so grateful to be there.

The six-day vigil gave me a lot of time to reflect.

Truth was, things hadn't been going well in other areas of my life

It was my job.

I’d worked for 15 years with an organization I loved, doing work that meant a lot to me. But big organizational and leadership changes led to turmoil and conflict that kept me up at night. I dreaded checking email each morning, never knowing what confusing scrutiny or sudden chaos would await me.

For the entire two years my parents were ill, my work life kept me spinning with stress, fear, and burnout. I could barely balance my responsibilities with monthly trips to visit my mother.

But as I sat with her over the holidays, work stress seemed far, far away.

Like, in a completely different dimension of reality.

A dimension I didn't want to return to.

I turned in my resignation soon after my mother died.

My New Chapter

I had a direction in mind for my new work.

I just didn't know exactly how to get there.

I wanted to provide support to those who’d lost loved ones. And to those doing the hard heart-work of accompanying their beloved ones through end of life.

I wanted to provide support, of course. But, because of my educational background, I also wanted to teach my clients skills that would help them cope and heal themselves. I wanted to see my clients create meaning from their experiences and discover futures they could love.

I had an idea of what I needed to learn. I just didn’t know anyone who did what I wanted to do. So, I had to design my own training.

I started with a solid educational and professional background to draw on. My PhD in educational psychology provided me with knowledge of how people learn and mature over a lifetime. I put that education and doctoral-level research skills to good use for over 25 years in my previous career, helping various organizations develop training and outreach programs for many types of people.

What I needed was coach training so I could work one-to-one with grieving people. I needed to learn how to facilitate their ability to tap into their own innate wisdom and find the answers unique to them.

I had high standards when it came to coach training.

That’s why I chose Martha Beck’s Wayfinder Life Coach Training program, which I believe is the best in the business. Her techniques are rooted in science, and her values and beliefs about her fellow human beings meshed perfectly with mine.

I also knew from personal experience that her methods worked. Her books offered the best self-help tools I’d ever seen. For me, they were life changing. I used them often throughout my life, but particularly during my mother's dying year and the year following her death.

I also wanted to help clients process their actual experience of a loved one’s death.

I knew some of my clients would be facing unfinished business around a loved one's passing.

Possibly the chaos of their loved one's final moments left them with nightmarish memories.

Maybe death caught them by surprise. There were things they did or didn’t do that left them with haunting regrets.

I became a certified end-of-life doula because I wanted to have an educated perspective on the dying process. I received training and certification through The School to Accompany the Dying, created by pioneering EOL doula Deanna Cochran. At her encouragement, I also became a hospice volunteer to get practical experience supporting dying patients and their families.

Want to know more?

People say you never get over a loss. And that's true.

But grief, like all emotions, shifts and changes. Not just year by year, but moment by moment. If you learn to flow with it, time and attention eventually soften the sharp edges of grief.

Plus, if you choose to look for them, you'll find opportunities for incredible self-growth and understanding as you transition through loss. It's possible to get to the other side and say, “That was the hardest thing I ever did. But it was the most meaningful!”

When you're ready, I offer complimentary discovery calls. I'd love to talk further with you to discuss how grief or eldercare coaching might benefit you. Just click the button below to schedule a call.