Alumna Spotlight: Michelle Desmond '88

A few years back, Michelle Desmond ’88 was asked by a career coach what was next.

You know the question. It can come in many forms, sometimes, it sounds like this...

Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Over the years, Desmond, who had spent the previous 15 years rising through the ranks in the corporate offices of Starbucks, had grown to dislike this type of question. 

“I am not a fan of that question because at any point in my life if you asked me that question, I would have gotten it wrong,” Desmond said recently during a phone interview from Seattle. “The coach encouraged me to think about my future in a way I had not thought about it before and all of a sudden it started to unlock something for me. … If I wanted to have a second chapter in my career, it is not to do it in five years. It is do it now.”

In March of 2022, Desmond celebrated her 15^th anniversary at Starbucks. A few months later, she was back in school as a full-time student, studying thanatology, the academic and scientific study of death and grief. After nearly 20 years in the business world, where she had seen tremendous success at both Starbucks and Verizon, she was starting over, or better yet, taking hold of all her life experiences and using them to help others in a new way as a grief expert.

“Life has brought me a lot of opportunities to understand loss,” Desmond said. “I was widowed about 13 years ago. My husband Rhone had cancer, and he died. I lost my best friend the next year. My mom [Viriginia] had died in 2020. After all of that, there was this internal thing that kept poking at me saying ‘hey you’ve had all these experiences, and you could do something with them. This could be your next chapter.’”

Fast forward three years and Desmond has not only started her next chapter – she is writing it.

Based in Seattle, Washington, Desmond has grabbed hold of this new phase of her life as a grief expert. Since making the decision to go back to school for thanatology, she has written a book on grief (Death and other stories: How a lifetime of loss inspired a transformation from griever to grief expert); presented on the topic at various colleges and conferences; taught a class on the role of technology in our modern experience of death and grief; and created her own company with the goal of helping others cope with loss and grief.

“My purpose is to use my own experiences to help others learn, grow and heal,” Desmond said.

It took Desmond a while to get here – a place of peace– but she is not willing to waste a moment.

“I just feel a confidence that what I am doing is needed and there is a reason I got into it,” Desmond said. “If we stay alive, we are all going to lose a partner, our parents – it just all happened for me, early on, earlier than most people experience it. And if I am kind of ahead of schedule, I can reach back and help people. The more people started to ask me questions, the more I thought what if I went and became a credentialed expert in these things, and it kind of seemed so natural to me.”

As an adolescent, Desmond lost her father, William, suddenly.

“A week after we moved into our house in Wethersfield, my dad died suddenly at home,” Desmond said. “He collapsed after dinner one night, and all of a sudden my whole life was upended.”

At the time, Desmond was in eighth grade and deciding on where to go to high school. She had taken the entrance exam at South Catholic and Mercy and was looking at a private school in West Hartford, but with the loss of her father, everything was turned upside down.

“My Dad died on March 1,” Desmond said. “For me, everything is marked as before and after March 1.”

About a month after her father passed, she visited Mercy because she had won a scholarship for scoring the highest on the entrance exam, along with another student.

“Man, I look at this picture, and this little girl is as pale as a ghost and terrified, but Sister Mary McCarthy took me under her wing in that moment,” Desmond said. “What led me to Mercy is such a complicated answer, but it is exactly what I needed. I was escaping a whole different existence.”

Sister Mary and the faculty and staff watched over Desmond for the next four years.

“I was completely unmoored by the death of my father, and incredibly sad and anxious, and I ended up in this place with this principal and these teachers and nuns and in this environment that was so supportive,” Desmond said. “Even though everybody was not best friends at Mercy, there was no bullying. I never once felt ostracized. I never got hurt again while I was at Mercy, and that made a very big difference for me. If anything, else had come my way emotionally, I do not know if I could have handled it. It was a very safe place for me. I cannot imagine any other environment that would’ve been right for me.”

It was far from perfect. Desmond was grieving throughout her high school experience, but she found her way through it at Mercy and she looks back on her time on Randolph Road with warmth.

“In a way, I look back and I see that I was a very sad and anxious child, but in another way, I look back and we took our senior trip to Washington, D.C., I went to proms, I had a lot of fun memories, too,” Desmond said. “It was a great high school experience.”

Looking back on it now, with all the knowledge and life experience she has, Desmond knows she made through based on one overriding quality: sheer will. But in her new position, she is hoping to help others not just power through loss, like she did, but find ways to get through it with others.

“I think what I would say to a young person facing it today is you are not alone, and you do not have to do it on your own,” Desmond said. “It can be very isolating and your peer-set generally doesn’t understand something like this and usually is afraid of it, but I think the good thing for young people today is that there is so much more access to peer support than what I had. You can join a group, go to a camp. You do not have to be isolated, and you do not have to white knuckle your way through it.”

After high school, Desmond went to the University of Richmond for business, and later, the University of Texas at Austin, where she got her MBA.

“From there, I spent a long time in corporate America. I worked at Verizon, I worked at T-Mobile, I worked at Starbucks, and I absolutely loved it,” Desmond said. “I had all kinds of different roles. I was a corporate leader, doing very corporate things.”

It was a rewarding career. However, as she dealt with the loss of her husband, her best friend, and her mother five years ago, she began to understand she could support others during their times of loss.

“If I could educate myself, I could really help people, and I could say it is not just my opinion on how we cope with these things, here is grief theory,” Desmond said.

Desmond went back to school for 18 months, and she credits Mercy for her willingness to make a change late in life.

“There was a seed planted for me that I didn’t know was planted when I was a student at Mercy,” Desmond said. “When I was a student at Mercy, I was so busy surviving and just trying to carry on as a high school kid, I did not understand that part of what I was taking in was this foundation of ‘you can do anything as a woman, and you’re a leader’ that not only influenced me to think I can go and get an MBA at a top school, but I can go after this job and I can do this but also at this advanced age of life, I can go create this whole career for myself. I can do this.’”

And she has.

Despite so much tragedy and sadness, Desmond believes she is right where she needs to be, doing exactly what she should be doing. And she is at peace.

“Each loss was different, and I can live with them,” Desmond said. “I am at peace with a lot of it, and that feels like a big gift because a lot of people are suffering and wondering if they are doing it wrong or what is wrong with them. I think once you understand how our minds and hearts cope and what happens to us as we grieve, I think you’re able to achieve a little more peace. I am fortunate to be there.”