When Sarah Gwilliam lost her mother as a young adult, she found herself navigating a kind of pain that the world around her seemed reluctant to acknowledge. Years later, after losing her father — this time as a mother herself — she turned that experience into something she wishes had existed during her darkest moments.
Gwilliam, a Santa Monica-based grief coach and facilitator, is the founder of Solace, which she describes as the first AI grief coach — a digital platform designed to offer compassionate, on-demand support to anyone navigating loss.
"Like so many people who end up working in this space, I came to grief work through my own grief," Gwilliam said. "Experiencing loss changed how I understood identity and memory; it changed my values and it changed my understanding of grief."
What struck her most, she said, was the silence surrounding bereavement in American culture — an unspoken expectation that mourners should recover quickly and move on.
"What stayed with me most was how invisible grief can feel in our culture, yet how everpresent it feels and how universal it is," she said. "There's an expectation that people 'move on,' even though grief doesn't really work that way."
That observation became the driving philosophy behind Solace. The platform is built on the premise that grief is not a problem to be solved on a schedule, but an ongoing experience that can surface anywhere — at midnight, in a grocery store aisle, or in the middle of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.
"Grief arrives in the in-between moments — late at night, in the grocery store, or in the middle of ordinary life — when people often don't have anywhere to put or share what they're feeling," Gwilliam said.
Solace's AI coach is designed with emotional safety as its foundation. Rather than dispensing advice or offering false resolution, the tool validates users' emotions, poses reflective questions, and mirrors back what someone shares in a given moment. Gwilliam is deliberate about what the platform does not do: it does not encourage dependence on technology, and it routinely nudges users back toward human connection — friends, family, and therapists.
"Empathy has to be intentionally designed," she said. "The goal isn't dependence on technology, but support that complements human connection."
Gwilliam is equally candid about the limitations of existing mental health infrastructure when it comes to grief. She argues that bereavement is frequently overlooked in broader conversations about mental wellness, and that access to consistent support remains out of reach for many people.
"Like much of mental health care, many people don't realize that grief itself deserves ongoing support and care," she said. "It is not just something we navigate during the moment of loss but something that continues to shape daily life."
That gap feels particularly acute in the Los Angeles area, where the devastation of last year's wildfires left thousands grappling with a form of loss that many did not immediately recognize as grief — the absence of a home, a neighborhood, a sense of safety and routine.
"We're seeing how grief shows up collectively, including for people impacted by last year's fires who may be grieving homes, routines, safety, or a sense of stability," Gwilliam said. "Loss doesn't always look the same, and many people don't immediately recognize these experiences as grief, which can make support harder to find."
Alongside Solace, Gwilliam hosts in-person workshops in Santa Monica designed to make grief feel less isolating. The gatherings are intentionally intimate and may incorporate writing prompts, breathwork, gentle yoga, shared storytelling, and other somatic or creative practices — a recognition that people process loss in vastly different ways.
"I see grief processing as dynamic and broad, not only emotional or intellectual, but also creative and somatic," she said. "Some people process through words, others through movement, ritual, or shared presence. Some people need to cry, others to laugh."
For many attendees, she said, the workshops represent the first time they have ever been given explicit permission to sit with their grief rather than push past it.
Gwilliam frames Solace not as a replacement for any single form of support, but as one component of a broader ecosystem — one that includes therapists, community, ritual, and human relationship. Technology, in her view, is a doorway, not a destination.
"Grief needs more places to land," she said, "and I think technology can be one of them."