Hi, I’m Ty.
I’m an end-of-life doula, a mother, the eldest of four, and someone who has spent a lifetime close to hard goodbyes. JustForty is where I share what they’ve taught me.
Forty was never just a number to me
My father died at forty. I was twelve. So when my own fortieth birthday came, it didn’t feel like a milestone. It felt like a question.
“I’m just forty. There’s time.”
It’s one of the most reasonable-sounding things we tell ourselves, and one of the most common reasons we put off the conversations, the decisions and the clearing out. I know how unevenly time is given. So I turned the excuse around: just forty, and still time to change how the years ahead are lived.
JustForty began as a personal project, just for Ty: a way to sort my own grief, my own house, and my own excuses. It grew from there.
The boxes are rarely just boxes
Clearing a parent’s home is never only about the stuff. The boxes in the garage hold the conversations we keep postponing, the guilt we haven’t named, the grief that hasn’t had anywhere to go, and the old family roles we fall back into the moment we walk through the door.
The physical clutter and the emotional clutter are the same pile. And when a space gets lighter, people usually get clearer, too.
A long road to this work
I didn’t arrive here in a straight line. I lived on the other side of the world for a decade, and worked in corporate offices and in medical offices.
In health care, I came to know patients beyond their charts: their histories, their families, the people who sat by their beds. I watched people take in a terminal diagnosis, and I watched their families struggle with everything that came after it, often all at once and often too late to do it gently.
Loss wasn’t only something I saw at work. It ran through my own life too, long before I had words for it. Over the years, those two kinds of grief, the ones I witnessed and the ones I carried, kept pointing me the same way.
So I did the hard work of following it. In 2025, I trained and became certified as an end-of-life doula, so I could sit with families at the end of life. Again and again, I’ve seen it: doing the hard part now makes room to be present for the conversations that matter and the moments you can’t get back, today and tomorrow.
- LivedAbout ten years in Australia, the rest in Canada
- WorkedFrom corporate offices to healthcare centres
- CertifiedAs an end-of-life doula in 2025
Four things I hold on to
The home is theirs
It belongs to the person living in it. Family is there to help, not to take over.
The conversation comes first
What gets said matters more than what gets cleared. The clean-out can wait for the talk.
One space at a time
Clear one drawer, one shelf, one room. Each one makes the next a little easier.
Make room to live well
This isn’t only about endings. The point is the room it makes for the life you’re living today.
Clearing what’s in the way, one layer at a time
Each one follows the same idea: clear what’s in the way, and the rest gets clearer.
-
Your space Available November 16
Making Room, a workbook for clearing a parent’s home, and the things left unsaid, together.
-
Your digital life Coming later
A guide to clearing the accounts, photos and files that quietly pile up.
-
Your paperwork and wishes Coming later
A way to get your affairs in order on paper, as a workbook or a workshop.
You’ve probably read a lot about this already. Most of us have. Reading is a fine start, and I’m glad you’re here.
But at some point the reading has to become a conversation, with a real person, in a real kitchen.
Making Room is built to get you there: eight short modules, scripts for the hard parts, and a plan you can follow. You don’t have to do it all at once. Forty minutes at a time is enough.