Kayla Bonkowski is a psychology graduate and MSW student working toward a career in hospice and palliative care social work. Based in Sterling Heights, Michigan, she writes about the places where emotional wellbeing, end-of-life care, human connection, and everyday life intersect — with the kind of specificity that comes from studying these things seriously and living them at the same time.
Topics
Palliative and Hospice Care
Kayla’s academic and professional focus. She writes about what palliative care actually means — and why so many people confuse it with hospice — what it looks like for patients and families navigating serious illness, and the role social workers play in a field that tends to be overshadowed by its medical counterparts.
Psychology and Social Work
Two disciplines that overlap more than their professional boundaries suggest. Kayla explores the case for integrating psychological frameworks into social work practice, what that combination looks like in real clinical contexts, and why the gap between the two fields is often narrower than it appears on paper.
Grief and End-of-Life Support
Grief is rarely what people expect before it arrives. Kayla writes honestly about the kinds of grief that go unacknowledged — anticipatory grief, complicated loss, the grief that families carry long before a death happens — and what families actually need that most support systems aren’t set up to provide.
Foster Dogs and Animal Care
Kayla fosters dogs and writes about what that experience has taught her. Not adoption advocacy in the abstract — the specific, practical realities of what a foster dog needs that a shelter environment can’t provide: consistency, quiet, time to decompress, and someone willing to meet the animal where it is.
Fitness and CrossFit
Kayla trains in CrossFit and takes an honest, non-promotional view of it. She writes about what CrossFit is and isn’t good for, why it isn’t a weight loss program, and how to think about strength training and community-based fitness without the hype that tends to surround both.