Hi, I'm Katie Louise Cooper.

It is my gift and honor to sit with what most people turn away from death, grief, and the losses that quietly reshape a life and help you find what's waiting there. Something quieter and more lasting: a different relationship with the fact of your own mortality, and through it, a fuller relationship with your life.

I work with people at a particular kind of threshold. Something has shifted a loss, a diagnosis, a season of life that has made time feel different. Grief has arrived, or is arriving for a person, a version of yourself, a future you held. You may not have words for it yet. That's often where we begin.

I am a mortality wellness guide and certified death doula based in Mill Valley, California. I offer one-on-one coaching for those ready to build an authentic relationship with death and dying; bedside doula care for the dying and their families; and group programs and workshops for those ready to explore what it means to live in the full presence of death.

My approach

My training is rooted in East-West psychology, eco-psychology, depth psychology, and contemplative practice — all fields that understand the human being not as separate from nature, but as part of it. Death, in this framework, is not a failure or an ending. It is what every living system does. The leaf falls. The tide pulls back. The body returns.

That understanding is not just philosophical for me. It is the ground I work from. When we sit with mortality through the lens of the natural world, something often loosens. The fear doesn't disappear, but it becomes more permeable. Death begins to feel less like a wall and more like a threshold, one that the rest of the living world has always known how to cross.

I don't bring a framework and hold you to it. I bring attention to what you're carrying, what you can turn toward, and what's trying to emerge.

My background in contemporary art taught me to sit with ambiguity, to look steadily at what's difficult without rushing to resolve it. My study of eco-psychology at CIIS taught me to follow the intelligence of living systems — in nature, in the body, in grief itself. I am also part of the death positive movement — a growing cultural shift that holds death as a natural part of life, and believes that open, honest conversation about dying makes us more present, more connected, and more human. That movement is the broader community this work belongs to.

I also hold this work within a larger frame. Who gets to die well with support, with their wishes honored, with grief that has somewhere to go is not a neutral question. Access to death literacy and end-of-life care breaks along lines of race, class, and culture in ways that are stark and well-documented. I carry that awareness into my practice, and it shapes the community programs and group offerings I develop alongside individual work.

This is not therapy. It is a different kind of care, one that works alongside clinical and medical support, not in place of it.

Training & credentials

• MA in East-West Psychology (with study in Eco-Psychology), California Institute of Integral Studies

• Certificate in Spiritual Counseling, CIIS

• Death Doula Certification, DDLA

• BA in Art History, New York University

Based in Mill Valley, Marin County · Available in person and virtually