EverTree Hope Management
EverTree Hope Management
New & Upcoming Releases
January 2026
I Should Wake Before I Die
When linguist and educator Elisa Everts was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, doctors told her she had less than a year to live. (Spoiler alert: she’s still here—and mildly annoyed by expiration dates, platitudes, and people who whisper about cancer like it’s Voldemort.) Yet I Should Wake Before I Die isn’t merely a story of surviving illness—it’s a chronicle of resurrection: rising from the layered grief of losing a brother, a best friend, and nearly, herself.
With humor as rebellion and wonder as prayer, Everts invites readers into a luminous reckoning with loss and joy. Equal parts irreverent and reverent, this book is a love letter to life—proof that resurrection is real, sometimes quiet, sometimes ridiculous—and that even in the valley of shadows, healing, laughter and grace can still wake us up before we die.
About me
Hope After Loss:
My Journey as Your Companion in Grief
Hi, I’m Elisa.
My grief story began in early childhood when my little brother died, but I didn’t understand how deeply that wound lived in me until much later. I carried it quietly for decades—buried beneath humor, achievement, faith, and sheer determination—never imagining it would come roaring back.
Then my dear, dear friend Diane died.
Her death didn’t simply break my heart; it broke me. It ripped open the old wound I had spent my entire life trying to outrun. All the grief I had buried as a little girl came rushing to the surface, and I cried—for her, for myself, for the child I had been and for my little brother—for seven long years. Grief gutted me. Depression hollowed me. I felt that I had fallen into a hole and I didn’t know where the bottom was.
Therapy began to stitch me back together. Slowly. Imperfectly. Miraculously. With help, I learned to stop outrunning my pain and finally turn toward it. That’s when hope—quiet, tentative, and wholly unexpected—began to return. Not as a feeling, but as a practice—actually a whole set of practices, which I outline in my book. These were a lifeline.
By 2019, I was the happiest I had been since childhood. Whole in a way I had never known. Which is exactly when life handed me the trash sandwich of a stage IV cancer diagnosis.
And yet—this time, I didn’t collapse. I did not fall back in my hole. Everything I had learned about grief, love, presence, and healing carried me. Survival changed me, but awakening changed me more.
Now I write, teach, celebrate my beautiful life and companion others through the landscapes of grief and healing. My work is shaped by personal experience, trauma therapy, spiritual practice, and a fierce belief that meaning grows even in the hardest soil.
I hold a certification as a grief coach through David Kessler. I’m also currently studying thanatology and training in grief support—not to claim expertise, but to be a steadier, more compassionate presence. What I offer is not a cure or a map. It’s story, accompaniment, and the lived truth that small resurrections are real. And they may lead to big ones.
If you are grieving—or loving someone who is—you are welcome here.
Let’s walk this rocky road together, awake.
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