By Thomas A. Parmalee
How does someone go from being a chef and owning a stake in a restaurant to launching a platform that seeks to transform the grief care landscape?
In Gabriel Rao’s case, it’s a heartbreaking story – but one that he hopes will help others cope with loss.
“My brother was killed in Afghanistan, Dec. 5, 2009, and my wife’s late husband, Sgt. Jack Martin II, was killed in the Philippines on Sept. 29 of that same year,” he said. Both were killed by an improvised explosive device.
The death of his brother has brought him to places he never imagined he would go.
“We spend so much of life keeping thoughts of death at bay,” he said. “Really meeting it head on and being present to it has made my life unrecognizable,” he said.
In a recent post on LinkedIn, Rao paid tribute to his late brother, Sgt. Elijah John-Miles Rao, on the anniversary of his death, stating, “His sacrifice has been a guiding light in my life, leading me to places I never imagined. In large part to his service and sacrifice, I co-founded Everly.”
The company’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Ben Harris, has also been hit hard by loss: His brother, Lance Corporal Michael W. Harris, who served in the U.S. Marines, died by suicide Feb. 6, 2012.
Everly, which Rao heads as CEO, offers a platform that supports individuals who preplan and their families, helping them navigate challenging moments and providing resources that they can use to pass on a legacy and help loved ones navigate grief.
With an empathetic and innovative approach, Rao is seeking to make a tangible difference in people’s lives.
Coping with Loss
Rao had what he calls “a relatively healthy” grief experience when his grandfather died a couple years before his brother. “I was there when he took his last breaths, and it was something I could understand,” he said. “But with Elijah, it was really different. It struck me to my core.”
It also made him question what he wanted out of life and who he was, he said.
“I ended up going to a national seminar (held by Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, also called TAPS), and I sat across from another sibling sharing his story, and it was the first time I felt seen and heard during my grief experience – and validated as well,” he said.
It was a “transformational experience” – one that compelled Rao to explore how he could give back to others coping with loss.
Even though he was a chef at the Four Seasons in Hawaii, when he had an opportunity to join TAPS full time, which is a national nonprofit that provides ongoing emotional help, hope and healing to all who are grieving the death of a loved one in military service to America, he jumped at the chance.
“I wanted to understand how to have an impact using a retreat-based model, how to engage in activities that foster community and connection,” he said. “And also, what subclinical grief support could look like in a grief support setting.”
While an expert through loss, Rao found his training as a chef also helped him support others in a grief setting.
Being a chef, he noted, involves having an ability to create environments where people feel comfortable. “I look at the sacred act of breaking bread as an opportunity to share yourself,” he said. “It is surprising how translatable a lot of those experiences were.”
Leaving that world was not as big a leap as you may suspect, since in his teens, he was torn between pursuing social work or becoming a chef, he said.
“I had success and became part owner of a restaurant in Portland,” he said. Later, he moved to Hawaii where he had the opportunity to join the Four Seasons.
“I was sitting there looking at a pod of humpback whales thinking, ‘Where is the dotted line?’” he said, explaining what it was like when he received the offer to become a chef at the hotel.
While he treasures his time at the Four Seasons, he said he knew there would be a moment when he’d be ready to step outside the kitchen and step forward – and it arrived when he had the chance to join TAPS.
Embarking on a Mission to Support Others
Rao led a men’s support group at the nonprofit and played a key role in building out and marketing various initiatives. He also helped launch an expedition program that focused on helping people who had suffered a loss two or more years ago.
He enjoyed helping people transition to a new life after loss – one where they realized that their existence was not defined by the death of their loved but how they incorporated that loss into their own story.
Along the way, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, got drenched while white water rafting and made some incredible friends. (The picture at the top of this article shows Rao giving a “gender reveal” of one of the two daughters he and his wife adore.)
“I used to do this retreat every year in Montana,” he said. “I would take 40 or 45 men there, and we would fly fish and go to Yellowstone. It was an opportunity for men to do an activity next to each other, and our most powerful words were shared in passing.”
It was a powerful experience for Rao, as when he and his brother were kids, they would fish and chat about what they’d like to do one day – and his brother mentioned going to Yellowstone. “And every year I was in Montana, I let the men know that this was something I was going to do with my brother … and although I never had the opportunity to do it in life, death ultimately brought me here … and how powerful that was.”
Rao spent more than seven years at TAPS, and he feels blessed for having had the opportunity to serve the nonprofit, even though it was the result of tragedy. “I fit a unique profile,” he said. “I had lost my brother in military service and was considered an expert by experience. I received specialized training in supporting the bereaved.”
Eventually, however, Rao felt compelled to try something new.
“TAPS was a wonderful chapter of my life,” he said. “It was incredible walking alongside thousands of fellow Gold Star family members. But I was ready to embark on building a scalable, market-based solution to have an even greater impact on how individuals and families prepare for the inevitability of death and how grief is experienced afterward.”
Launching Everly
Rao’s urge to build something led to the formation of Everly, which serves everyone – not just men.
With that said, Rao observed that it’s particularly common for men to struggle with grief, as they are not as quick to reach out to others for support than women.
“It’s not that men do not want or need help – they do,” Rao said. “I say marketing has never really been directed at men to reach them where they are.” He added, “One of the things we see as a unique opportunity is to be inclusive, encouraging and supportive and to honor the fact that there is room for more messages, more tones and more personalization — and technology allows us to do that.”
As to what makes the Everly platform different, Rao said the key word is experiential.
For instance, someone can find grief support videos from experts, activities that involve journaling or photography along with messages from a loved one who has prearranged – or a medium with which to share such messages.
Rao had facilitated numerous workshops and regional and national seminars to help people navigate grief at TAPS, but what he saw missing was a scalable solution to have maximum impact.
“The reason Everly is a company and not a nonprofit is that nonprofits are never meant to scale – they are always having to bring money in and never get large enough to meet the need,” he said.
He has only great things to say about his co-founder, Harris.
“He was a participant in a couple of events I led, and I knew about his entrepreneurial spirit,” Rao said, noting that they decided to team up together to do something to help those in grief. “Originally, we were looking at sibling grief as a stepping stone, as there is more complexity – they are often called the forgotten griever.”
Over time, they fine tuned their concept and began to look at funeral homes as a singular touchpoint where they could have a huge impact. “We really wanted to understand that environment as everyone has to navigate that experience,” he said.
Everly was incorporated in September 2021, and Rao and his team conducted market research, learning more about preneed. “Pre-care and preneed was a very interesting space that we wanted to dive into and understand,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to positively impact the grief experience for family members and to further deepen the relationship around a preneed purchase.”
The Everly team also looked at how it could help prevent suicides “as statistically speaking, you are at increased risk of suicide if your loved one died by suicide,” Rao said. “If you look at grief, it is reactionary … we are looking further upstream.”
Since introducing the platform, it has been offered to families through independent sales partners, including preneed sales agents and funeral directors.
Some partners – almost 7,000 of them, according to Rao – offer Everly as a core element of the service they provide while others offer it as an “add on,” he said.
The company employs seven full-time team members, dozens of contractors and a variety of partners, Rao said.
“We can work across various segments in the industry,” Rao said “Coast to coast, we are seeing a variety of partners, from the funeral director to preneed marketing companies to the insurance companies themselves reaching out. We have immense interest from international partners as well.”
Rao and his team enter the space with an acute awareness that grief is universal. “The way that cultures and various groups approach grief is inherently unique,” he said, adding, “There are enough complexities to allow us to dive in, develop our core understanding and better our service and product before we look at international expansion.”
The backbone of the platform is that it’s a community for grievers by grievers, which Rao said would have been so helpful to him and others who’ve lost loved ones.
For those who opt in to the Everly platform, the team looks at their individual grief profile. “You can look at it like a Netflix carousel – no two experiences are the same,” he said. “The content that will come onto their feed will be unique and different to help them go through the grief process.”
When it’s included in a preneed contract, anyone in the purchaser’s network gets a year’s worth of grief support. “That way, they are able to provide support for their families and communities – we help an individual to share their values and life experiences with those they love.”
Rao explained more about how the platform works.
“We offer a one-time pay for $500, or you can pay over time for $600. We try to make our services approachable for consumers and strive to not be a part of the subscription-based economy. We want our customers to have the peace of mind that once they’ve paid for Everly, they are guaranteed the services we provide.”
After purchasing Everly, the customer gets lifetime access to its digital time capsule service, he said. “What that customer dies, everyone they love — family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. — gets one year of access to Everly’s grief care resources.” He added, “Everyone they love, however, gets LIFETIME access to the digital time capsule contents left behind by our customer, to the extent that the contents were shared (/tagged) to that individual or made public.”
The goal is to help people experience a healthy death and for their loved ones to have a healthy grief experience, Rao said.
Grief content is regionally specific, so that those on the platform hear from someone that sounds like them in environments they know. “We feature individuals walking various journeys that are relatable,” Rao said. “We help strengthen relationships between a preneed purchaser and those they love ahead of their passing … once you are a griever, you are part of a larger community.”
The platform allows people to have their loved one’s grief and words in the same space, Rao said.
For instance, a preneed purchaser who does not know whether they will live long enough to walk their daughter down the aisle on her wedding day may record a message for what they’d say on that day – or someone might leave a message for their unborn grandchildren or share some words about their family history.
Or, the platform can give a son the opportunity to ask his father what their greatest memory is as a parent. Likewise, a son or daughter can ask their mom to tell them more about the day they were born.
“The platform creates opportunities for connection and engagement,” Rao said. “It provides an environment for a family to navigate the end.”
Everly views itself as being stewards of last words.
“If John says this is Jane’s video, we will deliver that and make sure that piece is there … we deliver those pieces as requested,” Rao said.
In a way, the platform is leveraging technology to bring back something that we used to have that has largely been lost.
“We used to have a will and testament … that was the norm,” Rao said. “But then we lost the testament. It could be that this is a modern take to share those words.”
While Everly currently focuses on offering pre-care (for those who preplan and their loved ones), it is working on introducing an aftercare solution to the market as well, Rao said.
“Aftercare will be coming in mid-2024,” Rao said. “Our primary focus right now is on the proactive nature of pre-care and how beneficial it can be to families. But we do want to make an impact on the at-need equation as well.”
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