“I don’t believe grief is something we overcome. We learn to carry the love, integrate the loss, and make room for the life that is still asking to be lived.”
Marissa brings over a decade as an estate-planning paralegal together with hands-on work as a certified death doula and grief coach. Based in Jacksonville, she supports families across northeast Florida, southeast Georgia, the panhandle, and central Florida, a region with very few death doulas to meet the need.
Marissa Overcash
Death Doula
Certified, 2025
Grief Coach
Certified Excellence, 2025
Estate Planning
10+ yrs as a paralegal
My message
I don’t believe grief is something we overcome. We learn to carry the love, integrate the loss, and make room for the life that is still asking to be lived.
Marissa's focus is the caregiver as much as the patient. She works with families through anticipatory and disenfranchised grief, helping them process loss that begins long before it happens.
Her support spans the full arc of the experience, before, during, and after, including advance care planning, vigil sitting, legacy and life-review work, and walking families through funeral home services and the days that follow.
She's currently building on her existing workshops and group sessions to create an ongoing caregiver support course, layering anticipatory grief, disenfranchised grief, and practical guidance into a program families can grow with over time.
The people who find their way to Marissa
Caregivers facing anticipatory grief
Families beginning to grieve a loss that hasn’t happened yet. Marissa helps them name and process what they’re already carrying.
Complicated & disenfranchised grief
Loss that isn’t widely recognized or supported by those around them, or grief that hasn’t resolved the way people expected. Marissa creates space for both.
Families working with funeral homes
Marissa walks families through services and the days that follow, inside the funeral home and beyond it.
The Southeast, where doulas are scarce
Serving northeast Florida, southeast Georgia, the panhandle, and central Florida, a region with very few death doulas to meet the need.
Families needing a mediator, not just a mourner
When grief surfaces old conflict or hard conversations between family members, Marissa helps everyone stay in the room together.
Those who want legal clarity too
Her decade as an estate-planning paralegal means she can speak to the practical and legal side of a death, not only the emotional one.
Right for you if…
If any of these are true, you’re in the right place.
- You’re caring for someone who is dying and already feel the grief beginning
- You’re navigating complicated grief, or loss that others don’t fully recognize or make space for
- You’re grieving a spouse, child, parent, or significant other and want trauma-informed support
- You want support inside the funeral home, not just before it
- You’re in northeast Florida, southeast Georgia, the panhandle, or central Florida and have struggled to find a death doula nearby
How I work
Marissa works across the full arc of a death, before, during, and after, combining certified death doula and grief coaching training with a trauma-informed approach and the practical grounding of over a decade in estate planning.
Resources & education
You don’t have to carry it alone.
Otherside Life coordinates; care is provided by the practitioner.