HeldFast creates gatherings that help people tell stories, express gratitude, and create memories before and after the loss of someone they love
Thoughtful Structure for Onward Moments
While many of life’s gatherings are meticulously planned over months or even years, those that honor the end of a life are often not afforded the luxury of intention and design.
Weddings, baby showers, and graduation parties are planned over months with each detail carefully considered. Spaces are arranged, decor and activities are planned, invitations are sent.
By necessity, funerals and visitations usually take place soon after a death.
Loved ones are asked to come together and remember while still adjusting to the absence of a loved one.
HeldFast brings forethought to memorial occasions when time is limited and the capacity for planning is diminished by grief.
Gatherings designed to honor a whole life
HeldFast began with a simple observation: In moments of loss or when speaking of future leaving, words sometimes disappear.
When loved ones are asked to speak at a memorial or visitation, often there is a pause. It is not that people have nothing to say, but grief so close to the surface can make words difficult to reach.
This silence is an opening. HeldFast helps loved ones find, organize, and speak their thoughts and memories.
It gives space for the grieving to gather together, make connections, and honor a legacy.
Stories surface in fragments, recollections, and shared moments. Some are saved solely by the brains and hearts of those in the room, while others are shaped into written narratives that can be spoken aloud at a service, or printed to be kept or shared.
Where Memories are Moored
When you contact HeldFast, the first step is understanding your capacity for planning. Your HeldFast Guide will also help you set the tone or tones that feel appropriate for your vision of the experience. Support and personalization are shaped gently to meet your needs.
In the cases where immediacy is required, families might choose from a simplified menu of pre-planned activities that add meaning to remembrances without the burden of a great deal of time and effort on the part of the grieving.
Those with more time and energy to plan might engage in more personalization of the offerings they choose.
Your HeldFast Guide
I have spent most of my life listening to other people’s stories, as a teacher, a writer, and even during my days as a bartender. My work has always included making space for stories to emerge, guiding their telling, and finding ways to collect and share them.
Through HeldFast, I provide gentle structure while encouraging stories to unfold in ways that respect both the living and the departed, the people speaking and the people listening.
For nearly 20 years as an English professor, I have worked with students as they develop their voices and build the confidence to share their experiences with others. In the classroom, listening means offering guidance, asking questions, and helping students shape what they want to say clearly and with intention.
Before teaching, I spent nearly a decade working as a news reporter, where listening carried a different kind of responsibility. I was present with people during moments of change and sometimes crisis, then relayed events to readers as faithfully as possible. Reporting required accuracy and a commitment to keeping the person or situation at the center, even when material was difficult.
Even before entering the classroom or newsroom, I was learning how conversations move like water when people are comfortable, or break with a crash when they are uncomfortable.
Behind the bar, while in college, I learned about service while experiencing people in moments of celebration, disappointment, and sometimes grief. In that role, even before I knew where my career would land, I was learning how people tell stories, from the mundane to the fantastical, and everything in between.
Across all of these roles, I learned witness and stewardship. I learned what it means to hold someone else’s words carefully, without rushing or reshaping.
Beyond those professional experiences and credentials, like most people, I have experienced personal loss. That experience has informed this work more than any degree.
I hold a master’s degree in Composition and Communication and an undergraduate degree in Journalism and Public Relations. Along with my lived experience, my education provided me with many of the tools that brought me to create HeldFast.
I live in Michigan with my family and remain deeply connected to education, community, and the belief that when words are witnessed and held with care, they help us stay steady.
I am glad you’re here and look forward to meeting you.
Kathie Marchlewski
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Practitioner-Scholar Statement
HeldFast emerges directly from my work as an English professor specializing in rhetoric, composition, and narrative practice. For two decades, my teaching and scholarship have centered on how individuals use language to make meaning, negotiate identity, and participate in private, familial, and civic lives.
HeldFast extends composition pedagogy to our working lives and deaths by applying scholarly frameworks of oral history to real-world contexts of legacy and transition.
In the writing classroom, I guide students through reflective, narrative, and inquiry-based writing, helping them articulate experiences they did not initially believe “counted” as knowledge. This pedagogical foundation informs HeldFast’s methodology.
As a practitioner-scholar, I approach storytelling as an act of service, rather than an extraction or performance. My role to create conditions in which stories can emerge for oral or written preservation.This work reflects my belief that lived experience constitutes a legitimate form of knowledge, and that preserving it is a civic act.
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Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death, Simon & Schuster, 1963.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+American+Way+of+Death+Jessica+Mitford
Doughty, Caitlin. From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=From+Here+to+Eternity+Caitlin+Doughty
Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Link: https://www.thomaslynch.com/book/the-undertaking-life-studies-from-the-dismal-trade/
Lynch, Thomas. Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Link: https://www.thomaslynch.com/book/bodies-in-motion-and-at-rest-on-metaphor-and-mortality/
Gallagher, Tess. Dear Ghosts. Graywolf Press, 2008.
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Selected Scholarship
Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Cambridge UP, 2011.
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Oxford UP, 1998.
Frank, Arthur W. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. U of Chicago P, 2010.
McAdams, Dan P. “The Psychology of Life Stories.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, pp. 100–122.
Plummer, Ken. Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism. SAGE, 2001.
Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. SUNY Press, 1991.
Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2015.
Shopes, Linda. “Oral History.” The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 4th ed., SAGE, 2011.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Utah State UP, 1998.