ABOUT ANGELA PRATHER, LMHC, CLC

Angela Prather, LMHC, CLC, is a Florida-licensed mental health counselor, educator, speaker, U.S. Navy veteran, and founder of Carry Them Forward. Her professional work has centered on grief, trauma, mental health, relationships, and the deeply human need to be seen with honesty and compassion. She brings clinical training and practical experience to the programs she develops while holding firmly to something both her professional and personal experiences have taught her: grief cannot be reduced to a worksheet, a stage, or a timetable.

Beyond her professional roles, Angela is a mother of two, Alexander and Cellena.

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When Grief Became Personal

On April 5, 2025, Angela's son, Alex, died unexpectedly at the age of 34. In an instant, their family changed. Angela lost her son, and Cellena lost her brother. They share the loss of Alex, but they do not share the same grief. Angela grieves him as his mother. Cellena grieves him as her brother. Their experiences reinforced something Angela has come to understand deeply through both her personal and professional work: even when people lose the same person, grief is profoundly individual.

Angela was already a therapist when Alex died. She understood grief clinically and had spent years sitting with people through trauma, loss, relationships, mental health challenges, and major life transitions. Then she encountered grief as a mother living inside a loss that changed every part of her own life. In the months that followed, one question became central: How do I keep being Alex's mother?

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The Beginning of Carry Them Forward

The answer did not come through letting go. It came through discovering that a relationship can change without simply ending. Angela began learning how to carry her relationship with Alex forward through memory, meaning, stories, love, and continued connection while also finding the courage to remain engaged in the life still unfolding around her. That life still included people she deeply loved, especially her daughter. Continuing meant learning how to carry Alex while remaining present for Cellena, her relationships, her work, and eventually possibilities she could not yet see.

One of the lessons that emerged was simple but important: honoring the person who died and loving the people who remain are not competing acts of love. There is room for both.

That understanding became the foundation of Carry Them Forward and its guiding philosophy:

Carry • Connect • Continue.

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Carry — with what matters. The love, stories, lessons, traditions, values, and pieces of a relationship that remain part of who we are. 

Connect— with memory and meaning, with the person who died in whatever ways remain meaningful, and with ourselves and the people who are still here.

Continue—not because the loss is finished and certainly not because someone has “moved on,” but because life is still unfolding.

For Angela, continuing includes both of her children. Alex will always be her son, and Cellena will always be his sister. Alex remains part of their family story.

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Where Lived Experience Meets Professional Practice

Carry Them Forward grew from Angela's personal experience with loss, but the work is also grounded in her professional experience with grief, trauma, mental health, relationships, and major life transitions.

She understands grief as a clinician, but she also understands what it is like to wake up and remember. To encounter an ordinary moment that suddenly isn't ordinary anymore. To discover that laughter and joy can feel complicated. And to learn that grief and living can somehow exist in the same life.

That combination of professional practice and lived experience shapes the spaces Angela creates.

Through grief intensives, virtual groups, workshops, speaking, training, and educational resources, Her work provides space for grief to be honest, for love and connection to remain present, and for people to consider what continuing might look like for them.

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Why Carry Them Forward

Carry Them Forward is not about teaching people how to “get over” someone they love. It is built on the belief that continuing to live does not require erasing what came before. For Angela, that belief is deeply personal. Alex will always be her son. Cellena will always be his sister. Angela will always be the mother of two children—one through the life they continue to share and one through the love, memory, connection, and relationship she continues to carry.

It is from that understanding that Angela invites others to consider a different way forward:

Carry what matters. Connect with what remains. Continue living.

Carry • Connect • Continue.