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A patient dies quickly, a family can’t agree, a nurse goes home and still can’t turn it off. That ethical weight has a name: moral injury, and it doesn’t belong only to the battlefield.

We sit down with Kelly Edmondson, a trauma ICU nurse, healthcare executive, certified grief counselor, and founder of Timely Presence, to talk about what COVID looked like from inside hospital walls: constant uncertainty, fear of exposure, rapid loss, and the shock of feeling mistrusted in a profession that’s usually deeply trusted. From there, we get into the quieter, daily moral injuries of critical care and end-of-life decisions, where clinicians are asked to do painful work while wondering if the system is serving the patient, the family, or neither.

Kelly also shares the story of her son Darius, who died after an epilepsy-related seizure in his sleep, and the moment she realized grief isn’t the notification. Grief is the lived absence that returns on Mother’s Day, birthdays, and holidays. That insight led her to build Timely Presence, a grief aftercare service that helps people show up all year long on the dates that hurt most. We close with concrete guidance for leaders and employers, including her Presence Framework: regulate, respond, remain, plus why bereavement policies often fail the moment an employee returns to work.

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Learn more at: Timely Presence

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