Julie Keon

Julie brings a wealth of experience to her practice as a dying and grief therapist. For the past 27 years, Julie has supported people through life’s most profound transitions and milestones from birth to end-of-life and everything in between.

With a strong desire to work with people as they moved through life and its various challenges, she graduated as a Social Service Worker in 1994 however, she has worn many hats since then: labour, birth and postpartum doula, Life-Cycle Celebrant (rituals and ceremony for end-of-life), death doula, death educator, workshop facilitator, speaker and presenter.

After over two decades of supporting individuals, families and communities through life’s endings and beginnings, Julie came full circle and successfully registered with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers.

Meeting clients on a foundation of presence and compassion comes from her vast experience in holding space for people in life’s greatest and most devastating moments. Her role is not to minimize, change, fix or find solutions to grief. Instead, Julie offers something radical and unconventional: she creates a space of safety and connection so that her clients can give voice and expression to their deepest, primal grief without stifling, avoiding or numbing it.

Julie deeply trusts in each person’s ability to grieve fully in their own unique way.  She does not pathologize a client’s grief experience or grief expression and instead, provides non-judgmental support and guidance to make the necessary journey of mourning bearable.

As the Grief & Bereavement Counsellor at a 6-bed, rural hospice from 2020-2024 and through her community work, Julie has supported hundreds of dying and grieving people. Her private practice, therefore, focusses solely on end-of-life matters including but not limited to:

• Terminal diagnosis of self or a loved one

• Grief and loss (anticipatory, disenfranchised, death and non-death loss)

• Traumatic loss

• Preparing for the dying and after death care of a loved one including medically fragile children

• Navigating the decision to access MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying)

• Coping with the unique grief that follows a MAiD death

• Struggling with witnessing the death of a loved one

• Living with the grief of living losses that comes from caring for and loving a child with medical fragility, disabilities and/or short life expectancies

She is continually honing her skills as a therapist through ongoing professional development; participating in the most up-to-date, researched and evidence-based trainings available and specific to grief counselling.

Julie supports her clients virtually.