How Pat Day-McCray Turned Personal Loss Into a Life’s Work 

Earlier in December, I interviewed North Lawndale businesswoman Pat Day-McCray, 65, the founder of PDM Journey Coaching LLC and the nonprofit A Pathway From Grief. Day-McCray, a grief and journey coach, has been working with individuals, families, organizations, and corporations for more than three decades, formally operating her business since 2017. Her work focuses on helping people address unresolved grief connected to loss, trauma, parenting challenges, workplace stress, and generational experiences. 

“My belief around grief is to be grief-free,” Day-McCray said. “I take people on a journey of gratitude. Grief is not always about death. It can be your job, your health, your relationships.”

She said her work includes supporting parents with limited parenting skills, focusing heavily on communication and on reducing discipline-based violence in the home.

“We have all these programs for children, but then we send them back home into the lion’s den,” she said. “Everything they learned from nine to five is easily dismantled. So I also work with parents, giving them the support they need to parent better.”

Day-McCray operates primarily from North Lawndale, conducting sessions virtually and in person, and is transitioning from one-on-one coaching toward group sessions through partnerships with organizations.

“Sometimes I’m working not just with the people an organization serves, but with the staff themselves,” she said. “You have people who are supposed to be helping others who are so bogged down by their own trauma that they’re not able to give their best help. I tell them, ‘Put the light on yourself.’” 

She described her approach as faith-based and rooted in personal experience. In 1987, her daughter, Alicia Yvette Day, died at 18 months old after complications from a rare medical condition called gastrointestinal duplication. 

“My daughter was born with an extra piece of intestine,” she said. “As she grew, it wrapped around her good intestines and cut off circulation. By the time they operated, over 90 percent of her intestine was gangrenous. The last two months of her life, I was feeding her through a machine. And then she passed.”

After Alicia’s death, Day-McCray joined a group of grieving mothers.

“I was watching them and thinking, ‘What’s the plan? What do we do?’” she said. “There was no plan. The plan was just to grieve. I felt like I was watching people tumble over a cliff with no destination.”

She said that experience pushed her to seek a different understanding of grief.

“I started unpacking my grief with God, and that’s when I was introduced to this idea of being grief-free,” she said. “Unless you’re in a place where you can truly say you’re grateful for someone’s life and grateful for their death, then you’re still grieving.”

Day-McCray said her daughter’s life and death reshaped her sense of purpose.

“The experience of being Alicia’s mother was bigger than having her physically on this earth,” she said. “My journey with her wasn’t just about me or her. It was about me getting the message and taking it to people who are stuck in dark places.”

She said she has been doing this work informally for more than 30 years and formally for about 20, launching PDM Journey Coaching as a private business in 2017 after completing an online business program that introduced her to branding and entrepreneurship.

“Most of my friends worked nine to five, so I didn’t have people to ask about starting a business,” she said. “My first group of clients ended up being in California. A grocery store corporation reached out after one of their employees passed away.”

That experience, she said, shaped how she works with employers.

“When someone dies, corporations usually move on and fill the position,” she said. “But people need space. Even if it’s just 24 hours. Put a ribbon on the chair. Let employees know that person mattered.”

She said many people she works with are not dealing with mental illness but with unaddressed emotional weight.

“I call it emotional constipation,” she said. “People are filled with unresolved emotions that have never been acknowledged.”

Today, Day-McCray limits group sizes to ensure she can engage directly with each participant.

“I truly want to help these people,” she said. “I need to lay eyes on everybody.”

Through her nonprofit, A Pathway From Grief, she focuses particularly on the Black community.

“Our grief is inherited,” she said. “Passed down through generations. We were never taught what it really is or how to release it.”

Her goal, she said, is not to teach people how to cope indefinitely but how to reach an endpoint.

“So many coaches and therapists give people coping skills,” she said. “But they never give them an end goal. People walk around wearing grief like a cloak around their neck. I want to show them they don’t have to live that way.”

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