Meet Colin
Someone to walk
beside you
For more than thirteen years, Colin Lounsbrough has sat with families through the hardest and most tender seasons of care. He comes to this not as an expert on a pedestal, but as someone who has been in the room many times, ready to step into yours.
Where it began
Colin was in middle school when his grandfather died at home, surrounded by the people who loved him. His grandfather was his best friend and his first teacher, the one who showed him how to pay attention to the world.
There was grief in that room. There was also something Colin has spent his life trying to understand. A passing met with tenderness, with dignity, with a quiet kind of beauty. No one rushed it. No one looked away. The family simply stayed, present to the very end.
He walked out of that house changed, as though a baton had been placed in his hands. That moment is the seed of everything Calm Waters would one day become.
Death, and all the care that surrounds it,
can be approached with grace.
The road since
In the years that followed, Colin gave himself to the work. More than thirteen years of caregiving, through dementia and memory loss, through the long patience of elder care, through physical and psychological struggle, through the end of life itself.
He worked in nursing homes, memory care facilities, and assisted living communities, gaining insight into the system from the inside. When COVID first reached Seattle, he met the full complexity of caregiving, providing intimate care for elders while wearing a hazmat suit, goggles, and a respirator.
There has always been something to learn by being with someone in the dying process. Bearing witness to the rawness at the end of life keeps him connected to his own humanness, and to the fragility of life itself.
What he believes
Rebuilding the village
Colin believes caregiving was never meant to be a solitary job. For most of human history it was a shared practice, held by a whole community of neighbors and elders and willing hands. We lost that village somewhere along the way. He wants to help rebuild it.
This work is for the kids.
Care for our elders with dignity, care for the people who care for them, and the next generation inherits a kinder way to love each other all the way through.
Come as you are
If any of this resonates, that is reason enough to reach out. There is no pressure here. Only an open door, and a place to begin whenever you are ready.