Meet the Mortals Behind Good Grief

Most people avoid talking about death but we started a whole company to do just that.

We’re the founders, Carrie and Emily, of Good Grief—a resource, a rally cry, and a lifeline for people navigating the administrative burden of loss. Americans mourn 3.4m people each year. And it takes over 540 hours to settle the affairs of the deceased.

Good Grief exists to create more space for grief by easing the bureaucratic burden that comes with loss. This isn’t traditional grief support—it’s about preparation, proactive conversations, and a straightforward, personalized roadmap to navigate the post-mortem journey. We help you navigate the administrative chaos with clarity, curation, and just the right amount of dark humor.

We come to this work not as clinicians or clergy but as humans who’ve walked through the fog ourselves and lived to tell the tale. We hope to be your practical, death planners. 

So who are we?

Carrie Costa 

Forest Gremlin/Death Geek/Content Strega

As an elder goth, “future corpse” (hat tip to Caitlin Doughty), Halloween devotee, and someone with dark taste, Carrie has a knack for keeping it weird. Her 15th birthday cake was a cemetery decorated with fictional headstones for family members and their hilarious causes of death. 

With an academic and professional background in writing and technology, a lifelong planner,  and with an affinity for the macabre - she feels mostly qualified to help people better navigate the challenging logistics after death.

Any real goth, romantics that they are, knows that a true act of love is a selfless one -  like making sure the people left behind aren’t also left alone holding the proverbial (body) bag.

Emily Kyle

Witchy Mermaid Creature / Dr. Frankenstein

Good Grief was conceived by a woman who loves Halloween, horror, and humor.

Halloween has always been her high holiday, horror movies, her lullabies, and whimsy her natural state. She laughed through life, full of delight and never once stopping to consider the ticking clock behind the curtain.

Then, quite suddenly, her father died.

The world, once bathed in mischief, turned gray and surreal.

Every ring of the phone felt like a bad omen.

She found herself not only grieving, but drowning—in logistics, in questions, in eerie silence where guidance should have been.

But she survived it.

And in surviving, she discovered something quietly profound:

Loss is the great connector—proof that we are all, in the end, gloriously human.

And, if we let it, it can shine a flickering light on what really matters.

Good Grief was born from this haunted heart.

A place not for mourning in the traditional sense, but for preparing—with grace, humor, and a little gothic with a touch of red flair. ☠️🖤☠️🖤☠️🖤