About
Composing Life equips your organization with 24/7 resources and technologies to help your families cope with serious illness, hospice, and grief. We help you …
- Reach and Teach: effectively, efficiently, memorably
- Improve Quality: compliance, communication, and collaboration
- Cut Costs: increase 24/7 distribution and access while cutting costs
- Compose life moments that matter, when life matters most
Mission
Equipping end-of-life care organizations with empathic, 24/7 resources to improve quality, increase access, and cut costs.
Vision
To be a catalyst that fuels empathy, education, and excellence throughout end-of-life care.
Values
Integrity, Service, and Excellence
- Compo = To arrange parts into a new whole; compose, composition, compost
- Comp = To companion, accompany; in jazz, to support the soloist’s improvisations with underlying harmonies and rhythms, sensitively tuning in and playing in sync
- Com = To gather together; communication, community, comfort
- Sing = To voice within; to claim one’s story; to proclaim to others
- Life = It’s about Life
Composing life moments that matter, when life matters most …
Through Serious Illness, Hospice, and Grief Care
Joy Berger, DMA, FT, BCC, MT-BC
Dr. Joy Berger is the founder, owner, and CEO for Composing Life Out of Loss. Joy is a prolific, passionate, creative educator, specializing in end-of-life care. As our logo voices, “It’s about life!”
Joy brings 30 years of end-of-life and grief expertise: providing direct patient care with all types of hospice teams; leading hospice and palliative care educators nationally and internationally; developing strategic partnerships; teaching, writing, and publishing. Paired with these, she’s always been a creative soul and tech-geek, finding relevant ways to improve communication and efficiency.
As a direct patient/family care professional with Hospice & Palliative Care of Louisville, Joy was honored with the National Heart of Hospice – Psychosocial/Spiritual Caregiver Award, given by the National Council of Hospice and Palliative Care Professionals.
Joy’s unfolding journey of “composing life” always has visionary pieces that serve as a catalyst for timely growth: developing and delivering CE education for professionals (live, online, virtual); creating Composing Life’s video libraries for caregivers and families; providing contracted leadership for organizations in the midst of change; and more.
Additionally, Dr. Berger serves as Editor in Chief for Hospice & Palliative Care Today, a national newsletter for hospice and palliative care leaders.
Previous leadership roles include having served the Association of Death Education and Counseling as Executive Director through their changes from association management into self management; Weatherbee’s Hospice Education Network (HEN) as Director of Education for their premier, state-of-the-art online CE education for all hospice employees and volunteers (acquired by Relias); and Director of Hospice Institute for Hospice & Palliative Care of Louisville (now Hosparus).
Joy is a life-long teacher via conferences, workshops, classroom, 1:1, webinars, videos, and writing. She authored Music of the Soul – Composing Life Out of Loss, published internationally in Routledge’s Series in Death, Dying and Bereavement. Explore Composing Life’s Videos for your organization. Engage Joy for live, interactive teaching and/or consult for your organization.
What connections do you see? Visit the Contact page to call, leave a message, or schedule a meeting.
Composing Life’s Core Story
Joy’s first career was as a musician. (You knew the name “Composing Life” had meaning behind it?) Hear Joy’s more personal story of loss, grief, and healing here, told with the backdrop of Joy performing Debussy’s “Reflections in the Water” (“Reflets d’ans leau,” from Images pour piano). Click on the image below.
Are you looking for Joy’s specialty education about music with the seriously ill, dying, and bereavement? (Or other types of loss and grief?)
Check out Joy’s book, Music of the Soul – Composing Life Out of Loss