About Golden Thread Collaborative

Your interdisciplinary guide on your end-of-life journey.

Financial guidance, transition coaching and emotional support for individuals facing the end of life

Your interdisciplinary guide on your end-of-life journey

If you or a loved one have been recently diagnosed with a life-limiting, or potentially life-limiting, condition, we help you bring clarity and order to your finances, deeper connection to yourself and loved ones, and meaning in the time you have.

When a major diagnosis occurs, it doesn’t just interrupt routines — it alters time, identity, and priorities. We guide you and your circle of care through the financial, logistical, emotional, and existential transitions that follow, offering grounded planning, compassionate presence, and space for what matters most.

Meet Rose Zealand

Hi, I’m Rose Zealand, founder of Golden Thread Collaborative. My practice is devoted to guiding people through the intersection of money, meaning, and mortality. As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional, Certified Financial Transitionist®, and End of Life Doula, I help people navigate two of life’s most vulnerable realms—death and money—with dignity, empowerment, and intentionality.

This work is deeply personal for me. Within a few years, I lost my grandmother, father, and uncle, and I am now walking with my mom through her final chapter. Along the way, I’ve been both a working caregiver and an estate administrator in the fog of fresh grief. My parents’ very different end-of-life journeys — one marked by avoidance, denial and unfinished business, the other by courage, grace and intentionality — showed me how profoundly our relationship to money and mortality shapes not only our final chapter, but the legacy we leave behind.

My path to this work has been as winding as it is wholehearted. I have a degree in cell and molecular biology, worked as a birth doula through college and for a while after, and eventually found myself in financial services as a surprising fallout of the Great Recession. My career has come full circle now as a death doula. I believe deeply that I have a calling to walk with people through major life thresholds. There is no work that is more honorable and privileged than to be with souls who are coming and going through bodies.

Today, I bring the various threads of my life together in Golden Thread Collaborative: a place where financial wisdom and soulful care meet.

Outside of my work, I am an excellent cook, an avid learner, and a child-free cat-lady. I wear sensible shoes, love statement jewelry, and laugh and cry easily. I knit, bake, hike, backpack, birdwatch, swing in hammocks, write, garden, and travel. My favorite movie is Harold and Maude. I wish that someone else could be in charge of picking out my clothes every day (and also do the laundry). I believe that if everyone was required to work at least two years in food service or hospitality, everyone would be kind and we would finally have world peace.

Meet Pooh Cat

Pooh Cat, also known as Punky Brewster, Pookie Bear, and a hundred other names, is also an active contributor to Golden Thread Collaborative. Her calming presence and philosophical insights are woven into the fabric of our brand and services.

She is especially skillful at holding space for grief, having gotten Rose through many rounds of grieving various losses. Clients will primarily see Pooh Cat’s tiger-striped tail wandering past the camera, and may occasionally hear her chitter and trill in support of the conversation at hand.

When she’s not lending her various skills to business development and client meetings, you can find Pooh Cat gossiping with squirrels, birdwatching, following sunbeams, shouting “Get off my lawn!” to the neighborhood cats, and enjoying spontaneous fits of the zoomies.

Beyond One Role:

Helping you navigate all your end-of-life transitions

Whether you’re living with a terminal diagnosis or rebuilding your life after the loss of someone you love, I’m more than a financial planner, transition coach, and death doula. I’m an interdisciplinary guide weaving together technical expertise and grounded presence while connecting you to a network of personally vetted professionals who share my values and care deeply about your journey.

Grounded in Presence

My work is rooted in compassion, presence, and even humor, because in the midst of uncertainty and struggle, there can still be room for joy and levity. With Golden Thread Collaborative, you don’t have to carry it all alone.

The Golden Thread Vow

To walk beside you, not ahead of you. To meet you at the threshold of your new reality, with eyes that see your wholeness—not your diagnosis.

To hold space for both the plan and the mystery. To bring clarity when the path is foggy, and courage when decisions feel too heavy to bear alone.

To speak of money not as a math problem, but as a mirror of your values, your love, your legacy, and your life. To help you align your resources with what matters most, without pressure, without shame, without agenda.

To honor your time as sacred, your truth as sovereign, and your dying as just as holy as your living. To walk with reverence as you untangle, release, prepare, and become.

To weave a team around you, not just a plan. To connect you with hearts and hands — legal, financial, medical, and spiritual — so you are never alone in this.

To help you live with intention and die with peace. To witness your life as meaningful, your presence as enough, your leaving as a legacy.

Threads of
Insight

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