Dorothy Deasy

Dorothy Deasy serves as a Home Hospice Chaplain, bringing eight years of experience in the field. She started as an acute care chaplain working in hospital emergency rooms, ICUs, and other settings including family birth visits, and has spent the past year and a half in home hospice. Her earlier career focused on research, design research, and design consulting, where she specialized in ethnography and qualitative depth interviewing centered on conversations about the meaning of products and brands. Dorothy made the transition from the corporate world to healthcare to apply her skills in person-to-person conversations that align with her personal values, taking on a spiritual role that is not theological. In her current work, she meets individuals and families where they are during life-changing moments such as new diagnoses or coming to terms with dying, helping them put their lives in context, express their feelings, and explore what their life means, what brings them joy, and their inner resources. She attributes her success to a natural curiosity about others' experiences, comfort with silence, presence as a good listener attuned to both spoken and unspoken words, and taking the concept of meaning seriously. To maintain healthy boundaries amid this heavy work, Dorothy engages in her own spiritual practices including monthly soul collage with friends, participation in a dream group, regular journaling, and a monthly spiritual writing group focused on topics like grief and forgiveness. She advises those considering a similar shift to examine their motivations for wanting to help, do their own inner work on beliefs about life, meaning, death, and grief, and embrace superpowers such as intuition and empathy that may have been downplayed in corporate settings.