About Me

I don’t fit very well into a box.

(Actually, I suspect none of us do.)

Over the course of my career I’ve been

  • A licensed counselor for over 20 years

  • The first editor of a daily devotional magazine

  • A chaplain resident in a Level 1 trauma center and a chaplain in a small community hospital

  • An ordained woman serving a church back when such things were almost never done

  • A leadership coach

  • The author of half a dozen books

  • A speaker, preacher and retreat leader

  • And then, perhaps the most surprising thing… I was personally invited to train with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ staff and then to staff grief workshops with them across the country and across a decade or more. When they retired I worked with a group carrying these workshops forward.

Along the way, I hiked up Mount Moses in the Sinai Desert for the sunrise, was hit by a car while biking, remembered great trauma from my past and then healed from it, was surprised by the blessing of most exceptional friends, was a caregiver for my aging parents until the time of their deaths, and both welcomed and grieved a number of rescue dogs and cats, most of whom were the very best boys and girls.

I’d be hard pressed to say which experience shaped me the most.

All I know is that they mattered. All of them.

Call, text or email Peggy Haymes.

Here’s the thing with not fitting into a box. You can see a lot more of the landscape. In all of the variety of my jobs my work has always been about one thing: listening to and talking about what matters.

Such conversations can be uncomfortable and sometimes downright hard. But that’s no reason not to do it.

Grief is one of those hard conversations that we gladly avoid. Meanwhile, businesses across the United States lose billions of dollars because they haven’t prepared for employees who lose loved ones. People at work and people at home are secretly ashamed of their foggy brains and unproductive days, believing they are the only people who are flunking grief.

Meanwhile life keeps bringing us small goldfish grief and days in which we are anything but thankful and those things can be the oddest sort of gifts but we’ll never know.

Because we never mention it.

Maybe it’s time to talk.