What happens when you put a room full of strangers together to talk about death?

Contemplating mortality doesn’t have to be a downer or some lofty philosophical exercise. Discussing death can be as natural and pleasant as drinking our morning cup of coffee. It’s a simple ritual, but one that ripples through every corner of our lives.

Last Sunday, I facilitated a Death Over Coffee salon—our monthly virtual gathering for Hello Mortal paid members—where we converse about life, death, impermanence, and everything in between. I’m always delighted to be greeted by a mix of new and familiar faces. Together, we share stories, reflect on mortality, and explore the deeper questions that help us live more meaningful lives. If you’re looking for a space to connect with like-minded mortals and engage in thought-provoking discussions that remind us of what truly matters, consider upgrading your membership today.

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In this particular session, one of our members mentioned they’d been keeping a running journal of every person they know who has died. This reminded me of an exercise I did during my death doula training with Alua Arthur through her Going With Grace program.

Death doula training is as much about facing your own mortality as it is about helping others face theirs. Before you can help guide and support someone else’s dying journey, you have to reckon with the deaths that have already taken place in your own life—from the losses you’ve carried to the ones you have been avoiding.

The course I trained in put self-awareness first and taught me that unless you’re constantly bringing your own subconscious beliefs about death into the light, you risk projecting your fears and beliefs onto the people you’re there to serve.

One of the first exercises we did—the one that reminded me of the death journal entry—was to answer the question: “What was your most impactful death?“ My mind went immediately to my mother, Maureen. Then to all my grandparents, and other relatives like uncles and cousins, and friends. Eventually, though, as I let my mind wander, I realized that I had also experienced the death of identities, former versions of myself, as well as places and things. I thought about how we carry far more grief than we give ourselves credit for, because we’ve been trained only to count the deaths that come with a funeral. This exercise also made me realize that I had already survived more endings than I thought, and that death isn’t something waiting for me at the end of my life—it’s been with and always will be with me.

Humans have always kept lists of the dead

Jewish communities dating back to 13th-century Europe maintained the memorbuch—a communal record of every name lost to persecution and martyrdom, read aloud at memorial services throughout the year. These lists of the dead, the tradition held, were meant as inspiration for the living.

In Chinese households for over two millennia, wooden spirit tablets inscribed with the names and stories of deceased ancestors sat in a dedicated room in the home, providing physical proof that the dead still belonged to the family. In America, before states kept official records, families wrote their dead (generation after generation) into the margins of Bibles—inserting themselves into what one historian called “an immortal narrative.“

And it’s not just a historical practice. I recently finished HBO’s Season 3 of Euphoria (and, just to warn you, if you watch the show and know the characters, there’s a spoiler ahead in this paragraph). After finishing Season 3, I was surprised to see that a character named Ali, a former addict in recovery, kept a similar practice. In what I can only describe as his “book of the dead,” a small personal notebook, he wrote down the name of every person he sponsored who died as a result of relapse or overdose. It was his way of remembering them and making sure they weren’t forgotten.

You don’t need a sacred space, teacher, or death doula training to participate in this type of practice. All you need is a pen and some quiet time.

A mini death contemplation exercise

Listing out all the deaths you’ve experienced is a powerful death-contemplation exercise that can rewire your brain and provide a valuable shift in perspective. Maybe you’ll finally give yourself credit for how much you’ve already survived. Whatever the outcome, there’s no right or wrong way to approach this, or a specific goal or result that needs to occur.

So grab a pen and paper. Find a quiet spot—outside if you can, or somewhere that feels grounded and settled for you. Light a candle, if that helps. Put on some soft music in the background. Then write down every death that has happened in your life.

Perhaps, like most, you’ll start with the people. A parent. A grandparent. A friend. Then move on to pets, places, and things. Let your mind do what it naturally wants to do, which is wander.

Pretty soon, you realize the list is longer than you thought. You’ve grieved versions of yourself —the person you were before a diagnosis, a breakup, a marriage, a move, a child. You’ve lost identities, relationships, and places that mattered. Jobs you thought would define you, and futures you’d already fantasized about in detail.

If you want to go deeper, once you have the list, try mapping it horizontally. Create a visual timeline to give those deaths shape, rather than keeping them abstract in your head. You might notice patterns—losses that clustered around a particular season of life or deaths you never fully processed. Or you might notice grief you minimized because it didn’t feel “legitimate” enough to count.

When you’re done, you have two choices: keep the list and let it grow, or give it its own death—burn it, bury it, release it in whatever way feels right.

I’m curious: have you done anything like this before? Does the thought of partaking in the exercise sound healing or morbid? If you do partake, I’d love to know what comes up for you when you make the list. Share in the comments.

— Maura

As humans, we are wired to make things that will outlive us—art, architecture, children. Anthropologist and author Ernest Becker called these our “immortality projects.” We spend an extraordinary amount of time, money, and energy trying to make beautiful things last longer than they were designed to.

So, when it comes to contemplating how to live well in the face of impermanence (Hello Mortal’s mission), how to be more present, and how to enjoy something or someone knowing it won’t last, flowers might be our oldest and most patient teachers.

Take cherry blossoms, for example. Native to Japan, these beautiful flowers bloom on trees once a year for about one week. People travel from all over the world to see them. The brevity of their existence is celebrated, not mourned.

Cherry blossoms are a type of perennial. Unlike annuals, which complete their life cycle in a single growing season and must be replanted each spring, perennials come back every year. They die in the cold months and return from the same root system each spring. And some perennials—like peonies—are even known to outlive the people who plant them, sometimes blooming in the same spot for 50 to 100 years. Even though perennials return each year, their bloom time is fleeting, only to be enjoyed for a certain amount of time each spring or summer before we have to say goodbye until the next year.

Then there are the flowers we cut, the ones we sever from their roots, remove from the outside, and keep in artificial containers for our own use. At some point, most of us have stood in front of a flower display—at the grocery store, a farmers market, a florist—and talked ourselves out of buying a bouquet: “They’re too expensive. They’ll be dead in a week...They feel wasteful.” These statements are all true. The blooms are beautiful for about a week, then they die and are discarded. And that’s ok. If all you want is a week with something beautiful on your table, a bouquet of flowers is perfect. Not everything needs to be made to last. Some things just need to be enjoyed while they can be.

What I found in the dirt

Flowers have been on my mind lately, because my husband and I potted some on our porch last weekend. Nothing elaborate, just boxes on concrete. Here’s a before and after (we have a lot to improve upon to reach my porch goals, but for now, I’m just enjoying the flowers ).

While we were discarding last year’s dead flowers and replacing them with new ones, I got emotional. My mom was a gardener. Sometimes I wonder if she planted anything that’s still blooming somewhere. I used to watch her plant flowers in our backyard as a child, not really paying attention, the way you don’t when you assume someone will always be around to teach you. She died when I was twenty, and I never really learned how to garden or develop a green thumb.

But I’m learning now. Slowly and together with my husband, both of us consulting AI because we have no idea what we are doing. It’s fun to get our hands in the dirt and figure it out.

And in the flowers, I find my mom. She’s gone, but not gone, at the same time. Like a perennial flower that goes underground in winter, I can’t see her, but her roots are still there, and in the right season, something about her resurfaces. Her essence, her love, her memories, and her beauty have just changed form.

Stop and smell the roses

Flowers remind me that nothing lasts, and everything transforms. When the bloom ends, when the person you love is no longer here, something remains. A feeling, an imprint, energy.

And it’s not just flowers. Certain fruits don’t last even two days after being picked. Take mulberries, for example. This fruit is so highly perishable that you won’t typically find it at a grocery store. And by the time they are ripe enough to eat, they’re also ready to fall apart. The best way to enjoy them is to stand under the tree they grow on and eat what you pick, right then, with whoever happens to be standing next to you. It’s one of Mother Nature’s most deliberate designs: forcing presence and making now the only option.

Take the Tibetan Buddhist monks who spend weeks painstakingly creating intricate sand mandalas, composed of millions of grains of colored sand arranged by hand into breathtaking, precise designs. The monks’ focus is entirely on the act of creation. And, after creating something beautiful, they intentionally sweep up the sand and release it into a body of water to disseminate blessings into the world and practice non-attachment.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy built an entire practice around this same idea. He creates sculptures made from leaves, ice, and stone, shaped by hand and then left to melt, decay, or be swept away by nature. He doesn’t fight the impermanence. He collaborates with it.

Across nature, traditions, and centuries, the same lesson keeps returning: the most beautiful things are not meant to be preserved. They are meant to be witnessed and enjoyed in the present moment.

And so are the people in our lives. In this particular season, maybe they are just starting to bloom, or maybe they are thriving, or perhaps their season is coming to an end. No matter the situation, it won’t look exactly like it does right now, ever again.

The old saying “stop and smell the roses” is not just a reminder to slow down—it’s a reminder that presence matters more than preservation. Because when you’re present, the memory of beautiful things endures, even after they’re gone.

What in your life right now deserves more of your presence than preservation?

— Maura

And if you needed an excuse to buy some flowers, take this as your sign!

The science of cellular rejuvenation is advancing fast. The philosophical questions are just getting started.

Last week, I came across an insight that blew my mind: An embryo appears to reverse its biological clock early in development.

I learned this on the podcast episode Can We Reverse Aging? from The Daily, and whether or not you follow longevity science, I promise it’s worth the 30-minute listen.

The episode looks at cellular rejuvenation—the idea that we can take a cell that has aged and make it function like a younger version of itself.

Here’s why scientists think it’s possible: Every time a baby is made, something remarkable happens. I don’t mean childbirth, though that is, indeed, a miracle. This happens shortly after a sperm joins an egg. Essentially, all sperm cells carry the signs of aging inherited from the man who created those sperm. Those are then inherited by the embryo that forms. If those aging markers accumulated unchecked, our species would eventually go extinct! So nature, as it does, invented a fix: shortly after a sperm joins an egg, the embryo sheds those aging markers, and it actually gets younger(!) — briefly — before it resets to ground zero and begins aging forward.

So basically, life begins with a small reversal of aging.

Scientists have spent decades trying to harness that same process. And a breakthrough came from a researcher named Shinya Yamanaka. In 2006, he discovered that by applying genes highly expressed in embryos to aged cells, he could revert them to their embryonic state. He won the Nobel Prize for it. Since then, the research that has followed, led separately by scientists Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte and David Sinclair, eventually led to FDA-approved human trials using a refined version of this approach to reverse blindness caused by glaucoma. Suggesting we are closer than ever to real treatments that don’t just slow aging, but partially reverse it. It sounds nuts because mice trials rarely translate into human trials, which is exactly why you’ve got to take a listen.

This is where the philosophical questions start to roll in.

If humans can live 50, 100, or 200 more years, how does that change our world? Does the retirement age increase, making sure people hold jobs for at least a century? Does innovation — the freshness, the disruption, the new perspectives that come from new people — slow to a crawl? What happens to Social Security systems designed for a different lifespan? Can the people driving and funding this research guarantee quality of life and not just length? And, perhaps the most relevant question here: if death is what gives life its meaning and urgency, what happens when we push the thought of death far enough away that it starts to disappear from view?

These are questions philosophers, economists, scientists, and all of us should be thinking about right now.

The comment section of The Daily’s episode was as thought-provoking as the episode itself. One listener put it simply: “Our obsession with longevity is a testament to our spiritual impoverishment.” Another shared: “I would only opt for reverse aging if we could reverse death. If a loved one died, I would not want to grieve for the next couple of hundred years.”

Both of those comments point to the same thing.

Most of us don’t actually want to live forever. We want to live better and well — fully present, physically capable, mentally sharp — for as long as we’re here. Those are different goals. That’s healthspan vs. lifespan.

Our society has been so focused on not dying that we forgot to ask what living well actually looks like. But don’t we already know how? Less screen time and more time in nature. Less time alone and more time in community. Eating whole foods and not junk food. Getting enough sleep and water. And I’ll add one more: contemplating death, because it will help clarify what matters to you and how you want to spend your time while you’re alive.

Whether or not cellular rejuvenation becomes widely available, the pressure to reverse, optimize, and biohack our way through life is getting louder.

The question of how we age gracefully — in a world that’s increasingly telling us we don’t have to — still lingers.

I want to age well just as much as the next person. But I also don’t want to spend the years I have fighting the ones I’ve lived. There’s a difference between aging well and being at war with aging.

Does the idea of extending the average human lifespan excite you or unsettle you — and what does your answer reveal about how you’re living right now?

— Maura

There are some deaths of public figures that really hit you. For me, there were two: Robin Williams and Ram Dass. Perhaps not coincidentally, both remind me deeply of my own father — the humor and the wisdom, the fun-loving warmth and the depth of sensitivity. What they shared: profound empathy and a radically open heart. Both had a healthy dash of what the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called “crazy wisdom”: awakening that arrives through sometimes unconventional means.

I loved the model of spirituality that Ram Dass embodied: somewhat renegade, yet deeply grounded and authentic. His one true message: how to love. The simple message of loving one another, and loving the world, is captured in what became his most iconic words: “We’re all just walking each other home.”

Formerly Dr. Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist, Ram Dass was one of the most important figures in bringing Eastern spirituality to the West. He left behind the trappings of academic life to explore psychedelics with Timothy Leary in the 1960s, and adopted yogic spirituality after traveling to India in 1967 and meeting his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. He shared his journey in the cult-classic 1971 book, Be Here Now, which has inspired generations of spiritual seekers. Later in his life, he became particularly interested in dying, and was by Leary’s side at the end of his life in 1996, saying, “It’s been a hell of a dance, hasn’t it?” (There’s a beautiful documentary, Dying to Know, about their longstanding and complicated friendship, as well as their views on death and dying, that I highly recommend.)

Ram Dass died of a stroke in December 2019, due to an infection following a severe stroke. Before his own death, he spoke of dying as the most important act of our lives. His book Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, co-authored with Mirabai Bush, shares his wisdom on dying and the spiritual opportunity it presents—an opportunity that, he reminded us, requires preparation.

“If I’m going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart,” he said, as quoted in Walking Each Other Home. “If I’m going to live, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart.”

But he wasn’t only speaking of spiritual preparation as we tend to think of it: meditating on impermanence, confronting our fears around our mortality. He also meant the practical work of preparing for death: making a will, creating advanced care directives and getting your affairs in order.

For him, the practical and the spiritual were not separate. They were two sides of the same coin, both essential to honoring and moving as gracefully as possible through the final transition of life. He described writing a will as a way to die peacefully, knowing that everything important had been taken care of. He also saw it as an act of love for the people we leave behind, calling it a “spiritual ceremony.”

While he didn’t love having to deal with practical details and logistics, he approached those details with humor and care, according to Bush, his lifelong friend, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, and co-executor of his will.

For instance, when asked what he’d like done with his ashes, he requested having them scattered in the ocean in Maui (where he lived and taught in his final years), with some taken to the temple of Neem Karoli Baba, his guru, in New Mexico—then added: “Just put them in one of those little white takeout boxes from a Chinese restaurant.”

This blend of the spiritual and the practical is classic Ram Dass, and it’s part of what makes his teaching so brilliant and enduring. As he famously said of psychedelic experiences, “When you get the message, hang up the phone!” In other words, don’t get caught up chasing spiritual wisdom and insights. The most important work is the weaving of those insights into your day-to-day life, your relationships, the job you don’t like, the things you know you need to take care of but you keep putting off (you know, like making a will).

Ram Dass believed that taking care of our own “unfinished business” and making practical arrangements can help us to die more peacefully, without fear—which benefits both the dying and the living.

“He considered making a will a part of the letting go process,” Bush said in a conversation recently shared by the Love Serve Remember Foundation, Ram Dass’s legacy organization. “As he said, you need to be able to leave this world feeling that you’ve done everything you needed to do. And making a will is part of that.”

For more guidance on how to start planning for death, check out our most popular and most-shared Substack piece, 10 questions to answer before you die. And if you’re ready to take the next step, join our waitlist to be among the first to access our end-of-life planning platform.

— Carolyn

Imagine if every single person you’ve ever met has been your mother.

I know, kind of a weird and wild thought, but stay with me…

The notion that “all beings have been your mother” is a concept that Buddhist practitioners have sat with for thousands of years. The idea: through samsara—the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—every being you encounter has, in some past life, been your mother. These mothers have carried and fed you from their own bodies. Cared for you day and night, keeping you alive.

The meditation traces back to a teaching attributed to the Buddha himself. A text called the Mātā Sutta—mātā means “mother” in Pali— teaches that because the cycle of birth and death stretches beyond memory, everyone alive has, at some point, been your mother, and you theirs.

And the only reason this is even possible is because of death. The reason every being has been your mother is because nothing lasts. Every one of those mothers lived, loved, died, and was reborn as something else entirely.

So when you sit with this idea, you’re not just opening your heart to the stranger in front of you. You’re sitting inside the reality of infinite deaths—and discovering that what is shared between beings outlasts the body that gave it. Death, in this view, isn’t a wall or the end. It’s the very thing that makes connection possible.

Death as the starting point

I’m not a practicing Buddhist, but I find that many of their teachings resonate with me, including this one.

We live in a profoundly polarized world, one where compassion can feel like a radical act, where the distance between us and the people we disagree with can often seem impossible to cross.

This meditation is, at its heart, an antidote to that. It doesn’t ask you to agree with anyone. It doesn’t ask you to forget harm that’s been done. It just asks you to consider:

What if that person I am at odds with right now, at some point in the long chain of existence, held, cared, and loved me without condition?

The driver who cut you off last week. The person with different political beliefs. The teacher who gave you a bad grade. The boss who fired you. The ex who broke up with you.

Yes, all of them…

What if every single one of them has been your mother?

How does that change the feeling in your body when you think about them?

Maybe it’s relief, sadness, joy, or just plain creepy. Maybe all of the above!

If this idea feels forced or impossible, that’s normal too. Many people who sit with this describe spending months or years with it before it lands. You can’t muscle your way through the meditation. Sometimes the practice just needs to live in the back of your mind until something breaks it loose. If the idea that someone truly evil could have once loved you unconditionally feels like too much, that resistance is worth sitting with, too. The discomfort is part of the contemplation.

You don’t have to take this literally for the practice to do its work. You don’t have to commit to rebirth as a metaphysical fact for the contemplation to make an impact. It’s a contemplative metaphor—a way of feeling into impermanence: that no role is fixed and no self is final. The mother is simply the most visceral image for unconditional love, and therefore the most powerful lens through which to see everyone. But we have been the mother, the child, the stranger, the enemy. And in the end, we can’t really point to any one of those roles and say that’s the real me. We are, all of us, just passing through, playing different parts in a story much longer than any single life.

Buddhism holds that all beings are interconnected. That we have been cycling through lives together, in and out of each other’s stories, since before time as we understand it. We have all been each other’s parents, each other’s children, each other’s most devoted caretakers. When we hold the world that way, the distance between us collapses. We are not strangers, but rather, in the longest possible view, family.

This meditation is meant to help you feel your own infinity as a being—the vast, connected, invisible thread of existence you are part of—and it asks you to extend that same recognition to everyone around you.

If you want to sit with this practice yourself, here’s a simple place to start, from Lodro Rinzler.

On a day when we honor the mothers we had, and those we have, maybe it’s worth sitting with the mothers we don’t remember, and the ones we’ve yet to meet.

I’d love to know how this resonated with you. If you have something to add about this meditation—a personal experience, or a correction, I’m all ears.

— Maura

Sometimes the universe sends you signs, and it’s best not to ignore them.

Recently, I received such a sign when a book I’d had on my radar for years but never purchased found its way to me. A friend spotted The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson in a Little Free Library near her house and asked if I wanted it. Of course, I took it as a sign and said, “yes, please!”

As I started reading, the timing of receiving this book began to feel a little eerie. At the core of Magnusson’s philosophy is the idea that you should go through your belongings before you die and decide what to keep, what to pass on, and what to let go—so the people you love don’t have to do it for you. I had just done a big spring clean, so much of what she said about getting rid of things resonated with me. She even makes a point about how to give your books away so they can find new readers.

When I went to look Magnusson up, I discovered she had died just weeks ago, on March 12, at 91.

Her book left someone’s shelf, landed in a little wooden box on a sidewalk, and made its way into my hands just at the right moment.

Spring vs. death cleaning

Every spring, like clockwork, I find myself with an unavoidable urge to purge my living space. I pick one weekend, and spend the entire time cleaning and organizing.

As I went through my things—holding up a jacket I hadn’t worn in two years and a pair of heels I’ve been keeping “just in case,” I found myself asking the question I always ask during these sessions: Why am I holding onto this? Why is this meaningful to me?

It turns out, there’s a word for it—Döstädning, combining the Swedish words dö (death) and städning (cleaning), which translates to “death cleaning.”

While the act of death cleaning predates Magnusson, she is widely credited with giving this concept a name and a voice (she started the book in her 80s)—describing döstädning as what you do “when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet.”

Spring cleaning and death cleaning look almost identical from the outside. Both involve going through your stuff, making piles, and letting things go. The difference is what’s driving the intention. Spring cleaning asks: Does this still serve me? Death cleaning asks: When I’m gone, will anyone I love be glad I kept this—and have I told them why it matters?

Magnusson wrote that death cleaning ultimately serves two purposes: to make us less afraid of death, and to remind us that even after we’ve done it, life keeps offering new discoveries, new pleasures, new ways of seeing everything we’ve already lived.

A brief history of death cleaning

The idea of getting your affairs in order before death appears in cultures across time. In earlier Christian tradition, this was part of the Commendation of the Dying, the rituals of preparing one’s soul and relationships before the end. In Japan, there is a similar concept of danshari—the deliberate letting go of possessions as a spiritual practice. The Stoics wrote extensively about memento mori, remembering that you’re going to die as a tool for living with intention.

What’s different now is the sheer volume of stuff we accumulate and have to sort through. As Lynn Åkesson, a professor of ethnology at Lund University, has argued, death cleaning emerged when it did, and not in the 1950s, because we’ve never lived in a more cluttered world.

The benefits of death cleaning

Magnusson’s book is worth distinguishing from the popular Marie Kondo method. Where Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant behind The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, asks whether something sparks joy, döstädning asks a deeper question: Is this meaningful to me or to someone I love? And if it’s meaningful to someone else, have I told them that, and given them the chance to have it?

The döstädning method asks you to go through what you own with intention. The benefits of this practice are similar to death contemplation and include:

Clarity and lightness: There’s a reason spring cleaning feels so good. Reflecting on your belongings and letting go of what no longer serves you creates physical and psychological space for new energy.

Stronger relationships: Deciding who gets your stuff, and telling them why, opens conversations that don’t usually happen naturally. It’s an invitation to share stories, acknowledge relationships, and say what typically goes unsaid.

Less conflict for the people you love: Grief is disorienting, and objects become proxies for love and loss. So when someone dies, families tend to fight over belongings. Leaving clear wishes in a will, or better yet, having the conversations before you die, removes a major source of tension later.

A more intentional life: Döstädning isn’t just about preparing for death, it’s about living more deliberately right now. When you hold something and ask, “Would I want someone to deal with this after I die?” you’re also asking whether it deserves a place in your life today. That’s a clarifying question at any age.

At the end of the day, death cleaning is about sharing pieces of your life with others and ensuring that no one else is saddled with picking up after you when you die.

It’s a love letter, not a death march

One of the stories that stood out most to me in the book involves a woman who went through her home and placed Post-it notes on her belongings—labeling each item and what should be done with it, or who should have it—her husband, her children, her friends. When she died, her preparation made it possible for the people she loves to grieve her without fighting, without guessing, without the chaos that so often follows when plans weren’t made and conversations weren’t had. It was as if she were still there, helping them from the other side.

That story really stuck with me because it’s a great example of how preparing for death doesn’t have to be a morbid exercise. Rather, it’s about love, and consciously deciding what you want your presence in the world to look like, even after you’re gone.

When to start death cleaning

Death cleaning brings up memories, regrets, stories, fears, and sometimes unexpected joy. And it’s never too early in adulthood to start practicing it.

Whatever age you are, the question is the same: Will anyone I know be happier if I save this?

If you're in your thirties or forties, you might feel like it's too early to start death cleaning. But I urge you to reframe it as a ritual to help you contemplate mortality in a healthy way. This is especially true for parents. Once you have kids, stuff multiplies fast: baby clothes, artwork brought home from school, furniture that gets outgrown. Being intentional now about what you actually want to pass down, versus what you're just holding onto by default, saves everyone a lot of pain later.

If you’re in your fifties or sixties, you’re likely starting to feel the weight of accumulation, and possibly the first losses in your close circle. This is a great time to start thinking about what you want to do with your stuff.

And if you’re in your seventies, eighties, or beyond: the time to start is now. The gift you give the people you love by doing this work is enormous. But you don’t have to do it all at once. Start with one room, and once you finish, move on to another. And ask for help!

When you have to clean after a death

My mother, Maureen, died in my childhood home in 2011. A few years later, we sold that house. With the sale came all the decisions that follow: what to keep, what to give away, what to do with a lifetime of accumulated belongings. None of us were ready for it, but because of timing, it had to be done.

I wasn’t there for the going-through-things part. And sometimes I look back on that with regret. Not having a chance to say goodbye to the home I grew up in, the room my mom died in, and the things that filled it.

In talking to others who have gone through the process of sorting through a loved one’s things, the hardest part isn’t the sorting or the decisions, but the recognition that the person who has died is never coming back. That the person who wore these clothes, who picked out this furniture, who hung this artwork, is gone.

To those who are in the middle of this process right now, or will be soon, I just want to say you are allowed to go slowly. Do not let anyone rush you through your grief.

Your invitation this week

Pick one thing. An item you haven’t used in a year, a piece of clothing that doesn’t fit anymore, a book you’ve already read. Then do one of the following: donate it, sell it, or give it to someone and explain why it’s meaningful to you or why you want them to have it.

That’s it. One thing, one conversation, one step.

If you’re not ready for that, then start by ordering Magnusson’s book.

Have you gone through a loved one’s belongings after they died or done some death cleaning for yourself? How did it go?

Your experience might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.

— Maura

When Nicole Kidman says she is taking on a new career as a death doula, people pay attention.

In case you missed it, Kidman shared this news at the University of San Francisco’s Silk Speaker Series. She admitted it “sounds a little weird,” but revealed her interest stems from her feelings of profound grief since her mother died at the age of 84 in 2024.

But, while everyone’s talking about Kidman becoming a death doula, no one’s talking enough about why death doulas are so vital or what Kidman’s newfound interest signals. Because wanting to become a death doula isn’t weird at all—it’s one of the most human things I can think of.

Kidman isn’t the only one leading this, dare I say, trend. Over the past few years, celebrities like Chloe Zhao, Rainn Wilson, and Riley Keough have all mentioned a desire to become a death doula.

What exactly is a death doula?

For as long as women have been giving birth, communities have gathered to help usher new life in. Someone prepared the space, held the mother’s hand, and knew what to expect and what to do when things got hard. We may not have always called that person a birth doula, but that’s what they were.

Death is no different. For as long as humans have been dying, someone has stepped into that same role at the other end of life—sitting with the dying, holding their hand, preparing the body, and helping the family. We didn’t always call that person a death doula, but that’s what they were.

As death moved out of homes and into hospitals in the last century, the role of a death doula took a backseat and, in some cases, disappeared entirely. What was once intimate and communal became institutional, managed by professionals behind closed doors. Death stopped being something sacred we participated in together and became a failure that happened to us.

Death doulas are a return to something ancient we have lost.

There is no one way to doula

Depending who you talk to, someone in this doula position may refer to themselves as a death doula, an end-of-life doula, or a death midwife. Personally, I go by the term death doula because it feels simple and straight to the point, similar to a birth doula.

The variation in naming isn't just semantics. Some doulas deliberately choose to avoid saying the word "death" to soften the language for people who aren't ready for it. But I believe part of this work is embracing the word because the more we say it, the more we help ourselves and others come to terms with the reality of our mortality.

Ask a death doula what they do, and you’ll likely hear some version of this:

We advocate for and provide non-medical support to the dying and the people who love them. That means they provide practical, emotional, and spiritual care—everything that medicine alone cannot address.

But this work looks different for everyone. Some doulas focus entirely on the time before death— helping someone with practical logistics like downsizing, completing their advance directives, or pre-planning a funeral or celebration of life. Others focus more on legacy work: recording life stories, writing ethical wills, creating something tangible for the people left behind. Some specialize in vigil work, offering a calm, steady presence during the final hours of a person’s life, when family members are often overwhelmed and can’t simply sit 24/7. And some doulas prefer to step in after death, supporting families through home funerals, after-death body preparation, or the early days of grief.

Many death doulas, including myself, move fluidly across all of these areas of support. Whatever form the work takes, the goal is the same: to make the time with death a sacred experience that the people present will carry with them forever. And that’s only possible when people know what they’re allowed to do, and have someone in their corner to help them do it.

Most people don't know they can wash their loved one's body after death, hold an intimate home funeral, or simply sit together in silence without being rushed out—small acts that can profoundly shape how they grieve, honor, and remember someone.

A death doula provides that knowledge and advocates for what someone wants before, during, and after death.

The loneliness of death

For Kidman, the need for a death doula became obvious as her mother was dying.

“As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide … Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world anymore, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.”

Kidman’s experience is a common scenario for many families ... not just celebrities.

Carl Jung wrote in his autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections in 1961, that loneliness isn’t about being alone. It’s what happens when you feel invisible, when there is no one to hear your thoughts or feel how you feel. And he identified two kinds of loneliness: the loneliness of being unable to express your feelings to others and the loneliness of holding in ideas you believe others will find inadmissible—thoughts buried out of shame or fear that fester in silence.

Often, death brings both types of loneliness in full force. The dying person and the people they love can’t find words for what they’re experiencing, or they don’t want to burden anyone with their ideas, thoughts, and feelings. Everyone is silent, thinking they are protecting the people they love, and no one is truly being seen, in a time when they need it most.

That’s exactly where a death doula can step in to help. They are the person in the room—sometimes the only one—whose entire job is to provide support without an agenda. They don’t try to fix, treat, or rush through grief. Rather, they listen, witness, and hold space without needing to fill it.

Why we need death doulas more than ever

There are now 63 million family caregivers in the U.S.—roughly 1 in 4 American adults—and the oldest baby boomers are just now entering their 80s, the decade when most serious care needs begin. By 2034, there will be more seniors in this country than children. We are not prepared for what is coming.

Death doulas won’t solve a systemic caregiving crisis, but they fill a real and urgent gap—one that medicine, for all its advances, was never designed to fill.

Most doctors are not trained to support people through death. They are rigorously trained in how to delay the onset of death—how to fix and heal. And physicians are judged on how well they do that, which means death, in many medical cultures, is still treated as a failure rather than a natural inevitability of the human condition.

A study in 2016, found that 88% of medical residents reported little to no training on end-of-life care.

“The medical model treats the disease that people have,” said palliative care nurse and end-of-life educator Barbara Karnes. “End-of-life care treats people who have a disease. We tend to get that confused.”

The hospice nurse checking vitals, the doctor reviewing the chart, they are doing their jobs, but walking in, saying a few words, and walking out is not end-of-life care. It’s not their fault—it’s the system.

But the need isn’t only demographic. We are also living through a meaning crisis, and a loneliness epidemic all at once. People are searching for ways to live with more intention, to face loss without being destroyed by it, to show up for the people they love in the most important moments of their lives. When people can’t find meaning in how they live, they often find it in how they show up for death—their own, and loved ones. Death doulas exist at the intersection of all of that.

Is everyone fit to be a death doula? The answer might surprise you

Nicole Kidman says that only certain personalities are fit to be a death doula. While that’s not totally wrong—just like any profession, some people are more suited to certain skillsets than others—I wholeheartedly believe that everyone, should take a death doula course. It doesn’t matter if you want to be a death doula or not, the training is basic education for your future death and for the deaths of the people you love.

I certainly didn’t think or know if I had the personality to become a death doula when I took my training with Alua Arthur, founder of Going With Grace. However, since then, I’ve come to understand what actually makes someone suited for this work. For me, talking about death and grief comes naturally, and it doesn’t unsettle me the way it does for many people. I can sit with someone in silence without needing to fill it, and I genuinely love hearing people’s stories. But my favorite part of death doula work is being able to support people through discussing end-of-life options and helping them think through their choices—like watching someone change their mind on how they want their body to be handled after death once they learn something beyond cremation or burial exists. I’m also able to set my own feelings aside and show up for whoever is in front of me—even in hard situations. I once cared for a woman whose values were the opposite of mine in almost every way, and I still showed up fully for her—that can be a lot of the work.

One of the most profound parts of this work is the privilege of being present when someone takes their last breath—especially those who have no one else. There are no words to fully capture what that experience is like, except to say that it changes you forever.

The best-kept secret in the business is that working in death is one of the most life-affirming things you can do! One of the most unexpected experiences I had while working in hospice was laughing constantly, but there were tears, too.

Not everyone wants to or can work with death and dying every day, and that’s completely okay. But if you find meaning in supporting people during a vulnerable time when most people look away, that’s a sign worth paying attention to.

Death doula work is demanding, messy, and intimate.

Do I think Kidman will take on paying clients? Probably not, and that’s completely fine. Taking a death doula course alone changes how you show up for the people you love. She’ll now be better equipped to support a friend through grief and sit with a family member in their final hours. And the spotlight she is shining on the profession is incredibly valuable—it’s naming a gap most people never or only discover in crisis.

If you’re feeling called to become a death doula

Here’s my advice, plain and simple: do it—but don’t quit your day job.

Death doula work is profoundly meaningful, but it’s still an emerging profession, which means building a client base takes time, and the pay reflects that. Most doulas spend a significant portion of their early years doing the work for free—volunteering, hosting workshops at community centers, churches, and hospices, and simply educating people they exist as a means of support. And some hospices are still slow to collaborate with doulas, though that’s changing.

I could write an entirely different piece on how to choose a death doula training program, so if that’s something you’d find helpful, let me know in the comments.

What I will say is this: the best thing you can do before—or alongside—any training is find a local hospice to volunteer with. No program replaces real-world experience, and most will tell you that themselves. And the process to become a hospice volunteer can be surprisingly time-consuming, so start reaching out early. The real education is in the doing.

What questions do you have about death doulas? Or have you worked with a death doula and had a good (or bad) experience you want to share? Drop questions and insights in the comments and I’ll reply.

— Maura

Around 173,000 people across the globe will die today—and most of them will be buried or cremated.

The reality is that most of you reading this will also default to burial or cremation when you die (and that’s fine if that’s what you want), but you have other options, including ones that might feel more aligned with your values.

Conventional burial has long been one of the main methods of body disposition. But that is changing as more Americans identify as non-religious (now up to 28% from 16%), live farther away from family, strive to live more eco-friendly, and deal with the rising cost of living. Conventional burials can also be more expensive than other options because they typically include embalming, a metal or hardwood casket, a concrete vault (to keep the ground level and the cemetery looking nice), a headstone, and grave site maintenance. A shortage of land is also a growing concern, as many cemeteries reach capacity.

With the decline in conventional burials, we’ve seen an increase in cremation. In 2025, the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) stated the cremation rate in the U.S. is projected to be about 63% compared to 32% for burial. And by 2045, cremation is expected to reach 82%. This swift shift is driven mostly by lower costs, greater flexibility, desire for simpler arrangements, and an often-misguided assumption that cremation is eco-friendly. But a single cremation releases more than 534lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of driving over 600 miles in a standard passenger vehicle.

The funeral industry—one of the last great consumer spaces to be disrupted by tech—is now seeing demand for modern and eco-friendly options. According to the NFDA 2025 report, 61% of Americans are interested in green funeral choices. This desire has led to innovations such as human composting and water cremation, as well as an emphasis on green burials and home funerals, which were the norm before the funeral industry existed. With this evolution, we’re also seeing a rise in death-tech startups developing software to improve logistics for both funeral directors and families.

If having your final act on earth be one that will benefit the planet is enticing to you, I’m excited to introduce you to three eco-friendly body disposition methods you may not have heard of before.

Eco-friendly final disposition options

Green burial

Green burial (or natural burial) aims to return the body to the earth with a minimal ecological footprint, making it a meaningful and often intentional choice for those who place a high value on environmental impact and connection to nature.

This type of burial is “a return to how humans have buried their dead for generations, and how many cultures bury their dead today,” states the Green Burial Council. These kinds of burials often align with religious traditions (such as Jewish and Islamic funeral rites) that emphasize simplicity and continuity between the body and the earth. No embalming chemicals or elaborate caskets are used. It’s a straightforward choice that honors both faith and environmental values.

Green burials might involve different types of rituals based on the individual’s spiritual beliefs, traditions, and personal preferences. The burial itself involves either a simple, biodegradable container for the body or no container at all, and instead just a shroud, allowing direct contact with the earth. The body is buried in a shallow grave, typically in a green cemetery. In some states, burial on private land is also an option—with legal and practical considerations worth researching carefully. This method allows the body to return to the earth faster than conventional burial, nourishing the soil, supporting new life, and completing the cycle of life in the most eco-friendly way possible.

It can also pair naturally with a home funeral, where loved ones—often with the support of a death doula—may participate in after-death care rituals: washing and anointing the body (often with essential oils), dressing or shrouding, creating an altar, and laying flowers or meaningful objects nearby. Many families report that these intimate rituals are a profound experience that supports their grieving process and honors their loved one.

On a practical level, a green burial can simplify the process of handling and preparing the body for burial, and potentially reduce costs by eliminating the need for expensive metal or finished-wood caskets, and depending on the cemetery, requirements like a concrete burial vault, perpetual lawn upkeep, or traditional headstones.

To find green burial cemeteries in the U.S. and beyond, click here.

Human composting (terramation)

Human composting (also known as natural organic reduction or terramation) is a newer and innovative body disposition option that uses controlled natural decomposition techniques to gently turn the body into nutrient-rich soil over the course of several weeks.

This option is typically chosen by people with strong values around ecology, transformation, and continuity of life systems. Aligning with a deep respect for the planet, human composting allows one’s remains to nourish new life and contribute to the infinite cycle of nature (similar to green burial, but offering more flexibility in terms of what you can do with the soil).

The result at the end of the human composting process is soil, which can be returned to the family. In some states, the soil can also be used in conservation land restoration, depending on local laws and personal preference. You might be surprised by the amount of soil that gets returned—according to Recompose, the world’s first human composting facility, each body produces approximately one cubic yard of soil—or enough to fill the bed of a pickup truck. Families may choose to plant trees, nourish a garden, share with friends, or donate soil for conservation. It’s a full-circle return to the earth—one final act of care for the world that sustains us.

Unlike conventional burial, human composting doesn’t require purchasing a plot or reserving land in advance, which means pre-planning (while always a good idea) isn’t as logistically urgent. But finding service providers that offer this option and have availability is often a factor. If it isn’t offered locally, the body can often be transported to a state where it is available. Currently, human composting is only permitted in a handful of U.S. states, but its popularity is growing quickly.

On a spiritual level, human composting is likely to appeal (like green burial) to those who ascribe to Buddhist or Earth-based philosophies that emphasize interdependence and a belief in the sacredness of the natural world. If becoming nourishment for new life appeals to you, human composting may be an ideal choice.

For some, religious beliefs and traditions may be a factor. While some Catholic leaders have publicly opposed human composting on theological grounds, the church doesn’t universally forbid human composting the way it once did cremation. The practice is generally opposed by traditional Jewish law, which requires direct burial in the earth. However, those with progressive or reconstructionist views see it as an ethical burial alternative that aligns with Jewish environmental values. Religious stances will likely continue to evolve over time as the practice becomes more widely accepted.

For more on this topic, check out our interview with Katrina Spade, founder of the world’s first human composting facility. To find a service provider near you, please reply to this email.

Water cremation (aquamation)

Water cremation (also known as alkaline hydrolysis or aquamation) uses an alkaline solution to accelerate the natural decomposition of the body. The body is placed in a sealed stainless-steel vessel containing warm water and a highly alkaline solution, which helps break down soft tissue over a matter of hours. What remains are the bones of the deceased (which are processed into a fine white powder and returned as cremains), and a liquid byproduct of the process—made mostly of water and basic organic compounds with no tissue or DNA remaining.

Most providers will safely recycle the liquid byproduct into local wastewater. Where permitted, some providers may offer the option to keep a portion for ritual use—nourishing houseplants or outdoor soil. Or the provider will donate what families don’t take to local land partnerships, such as organic flower farms and nature preserves.

Like flame cremation, water cremation allows for flexibility of ritual and ceremony, which may be performed weeks or months after the cremation using the cremains of the deceased. Some people may pair water cremation with other symbolic rituals, scattering cremains at a specific location, releasing floating, biodegradable water lanterns (where permitted), lighting candles, or creating a memorial altar.

On a spiritual level, water cremation might be an aligned option for those who feel a connection to the symbolic significance of water as a source of life, nourishment, and purification.

Water cremation is often chosen for its significantly lower carbon footprint as compared to fire cremation—the total process uses up to 90% less energy—while still rendering the cremains for scattering or keepsakes such as diamonds or stones. Since most people who choose cremation—whether flame or water—don’t typically also pre-purchase burial space (either underground or above ground) for their cremains, the pre-planning logistics are simpler. That said, provider availability is often a factor, as water cremation is currently permitted in only a handful of U.S. states, but its popularity is growing quickly. And if it isn’t offered locally, the body can often be transported to a state where it is available.

It’s worth noting that regardless of which method you choose, you can opt in or out of viewing the body before it’s cremated, buried, or composted—but if circumstances allow, a brief viewing or time with the body can be a powerful way to initiate the grieving process for the people who loved you.

So, how do you choose?

There’s something profound in the fact that every living thing that has ever died has sustained new life, as the soil, water, and air. We don’t just live on Earth. We are made of it and return to it.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said he wants to be buried rather than cremated so that the energy content of your body gets returned to the earth—feeding the flora and fauna he has dined upon throughout life. Whereas if you choose cremation, the energy content of your body is released as heat into the air, which radiates into space, and your energy then scatters across the universe. He describes both as profound and poetic, but he resonates with burial more as representing the cycle of life.

Choosing how your body returns is one of the most intentional and loving decisions you can make. But it’s not always an easy decision. If you’re not sure which option is best for you, we’re building something to help—a contemplative quiz that matches you to body disposition options that also align with your values.

sign up to receive the quiz

And I’d love to hear from you:

Have you chosen a final disposition method for yourself? If so, which one, and why? Reply to this email or share in the comments below.

— Maura

There is something cosmically absurd about the world feeling like it’s genuinely unraveling, yet the IRS still needs its money by April 15th.

But as Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” And, he’s not wrong. However, I’d add a third thing to that list: Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and the human tendency to avoid dealing with both of them until absolutely forced to.

After Tax Day comes National Healthcare Decisions Day

Every year, the day after Tax Day—April 16th—is National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD). According to the Conversation Project, the day “exists to inspire, educate, and empower the public and providers about the importance of advance care planning.”

The irony of NHDD falling right after April 15th is not lost on me. One day is a deadline the government forces on you, with penalties for ignoring it. The other is an awareness day—no one is making you do anything. There is no fine or enforcement if you don’t have an advance directive, just great potential for significant emotional and physical consequences.

An advance directive provides instructions on what to do if you experience a life-threatening situation and are incapacitated. Without one, you may leave your next of kin to make impossible decisions, when that’s the last thing they need at that moment.

If you don’t have an advance directive (or are just learning about them), you’re not alone. Studies show that fewer than a third of American adults have documented their healthcare wishes—even though the vast majority say they think it’s important. That gap, between knowing something matters and actually doing something about it, is exactly where advance directives go to die (pun intended), but also where I hope to help you.

So let’s talk about what they actually are, why the current system needs updating, and what you can do about it.

What is an advance directive?

An advance directive is a legal document that outlines your healthcare wishes in case you can’t speak for yourself. It has two parts:

• A living will spells out the specific treatments you do or don’t want: resuscitation, ventilators, feeding tubes, and so on. It’s the document that answers the question: What do you want?

• A medical power of attorney (also called a healthcare proxy or agent) names a specific person to make decisions on your behalf if you’re incapacitated. It answers the question: Who speaks for you?

Together, these documents are the difference between your wishes being honored and your family standing in a hospital hallway, grief-stricken, fighting over what you “would have wanted” or what they ultimately want for you.

You may also hear the term POLST (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) when discussing advance care planning. Though depending on your state, it might be called MOLST, COLST, POST, or MOST—different names, same idea. A POLST is technically a type of advance directive, but it’s not the same as a living will. It’s a binding medical order, signed by you and your doctor, specifically designed for people who are already seriously ill, have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, or are medically frail. It tells emergency responders and care teams exactly what to do, or not do, in a crisis, and they are legally required to follow it. If you’re generally healthy, you don’t need one. But if you or someone you love is living with a serious or life-limiting illness, it’s one of the most important documents you can have. Talk to your doctor about whether it’s right for your situation.

Why you should have an advance directive

If you watched The Pitt, the HBO medical drama that won five Emmy awards for its first season, then you’ve seen them highlight the importance of advance directives in guiding end-of-life care, while emphasizing the ethical complexities when family members attempt to override them. The show portrays advance directives as they function in emergency medicine: sometimes honored, overridden, or contested. Even with an advance directive in place, there can be conflict between the patient’s documented wishes and their family’s emotional decision-making. Additionally, doctors still play a role in calling the shots, and will often default to “do everything to save” a patient. The point isn’t that advance directives are foolproof—they’re not. But without one, you have no say at all. With one, you at least have a chance that the people making decisions will know what you want.

Specifically, in Season 1, Episode 2: “8:00 A.M.”, doctors navigate a difficult ethical dilemma regarding a patient who has an advance directive refusing intubation and CPR, but his adult children, both holding medical power of attorney, disagree and override his wishes, forcing him to be intubated.

In a recent Hello, Mortal post: 3 types of wills you should know about before you die, we mentioned the Terri Schiavo case as one of the most well-known versions of this story. A woman was in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, while her husband and parents were locked in a legal battle over whether to remove her feeding tube. It went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court because her wishes were never clearly documented, and the people who loved her spent years in court instead of being able to grieve in peace.

While that case is extreme, the dynamic behind it, the people who love the person, unable to agree on what that person would have wanted, happens in less publicized ways every single day.

The system is broken

Dr. Ira Byock, one of the leading voices in palliative care and a major source of inspiration for the work we do, said he realized years ago that the way Americans approach advance care planning is flawed.

“It is based in protecting us from things we fear,” he said, noting that most advance directive forms are designed by attorneys and contractual in nature—listing treatments and circumstances we think we would want or want to avoid.

In my experience—helping clients and creating my own advance directive—I’ve found existing templates to be cold, overly clinical, and overwhelming. They typically ask you to think through endless hypothetical scenarios in complex legal and medical language, at a moment when most people are already anxious just thinking about mortality. So people never start, or they start, get overwhelmed, and stop. Or they complete them once and never look at them again—filing them somewhere no one will find them.

Dr. Byock taught me that it all boils down to trust: “most people want future decisions about their care to be made by people they trust and rooted in love. That is covenantal.”

At the end of the day, you must trust the person you name as your medical power of attorney to make a decision that aligns with your values and honors your wishes. Even when you have an advance directive, and it’s accessible, it doesn’t always get followed. In a crisis, a medical professional may never be made aware of your wishes. The rules also vary by state—what’s legally binding in California may not be in Texas, which adds another layer of confusion for families who live in different places than their loved ones.

Who speaks for you—and can they handle it?

Your medical power of attorney (MPA) is the person who will make decisions on your behalf if you can't. Choosing your MPA is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Most people default to the obvious answer: spouse, oldest child, closest family member, but that’s not always the best decision.

Being someone’s medical power of attorney is one of the hardest things a human being can be asked to do—if the time comes. We joke about “pulling the plug”—it’s become cultural shorthand for something unbearable. But ask anyone who has actually been in that room, holding that responsibility, and they’ll tell you the weight of it doesn’t leave you. The stress comes from not knowing whether you made the right choice or feeling like your decision is why that person is dead. Documenting your wishes is an act of mercy for the person you’re asking to carry that weight.

When the stakes are high and the pressure is overwhelming, sometimes the person who loves you most is not who can make a clear-headed decision on your behalf. Whoever you choose, the most important thing is that you’ve had a real conversation with them (not just handed them a document)—and yourself—about your values and your fears, starting with contemplating what a good death means to you.

And here’s something most people don’t know: if you haven’t named anyone, the state decides for you. Most states have default surrogate laws that kick in when no advance directive exists—a legal hierarchy that determines who speaks for you. The exact order depends on your state, but it typically goes something like this: your spouse first, then your adult children, then a parent, then a sibling. That might sound fine, but consider what it actually means: If you’re estranged from your spouse but never divorced, they’re first in line. If you have three adult children who don’t agree, they may all be required to decide together and they may not be able to reach a consensus. The person who actually knows what you’d want—your best friend, your partner of ten years you never married, the sibling you’re closest to—may have no legal standing at all.

How to create an advance directive

You don’t need a lawyer (though it never hurts to consult one if you can), and you don’t need to spend much money to get this done. First, talk to your doctor. Second, research services to help you create an advance directive.

Inspired by Dr. Byock’s advance care planning work for the Institute for Human Caring and the book Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper by Barry Baines, we created our own guided form at Hello, Mortal. It walks you through your wishes in plain language, with no overwhelming hypotheticals, and it provides a place to capture not just your medical wishes but what actually matters to you at the end of life. Our digital platform makes it easier to store, share, and update it as your life changes, because your wishes at 35 may not be the same at 65 or 90, and your document should reflect who you actually are right now.

We’re launching our beta soon. If creating an advance directive is something you’ve been meaning to do, or you need to update your existing one, joining the waitlist is your next step and a great one to take today.

If you need something immediately, there are other options available, including: Caring Info, Five Wishes, MyDirectives, and PREPARE for Your Care.

One more thing nobody mentions: once you’ve completed your advance directive, don’t file it in a drawer and forget about it. Give a copy to your doctor, your MPA, and anyone else who might need it. If you’re admitted to a hospital, bring it with you—medical staff won’t always ask, so you or someone you trust may need to advocate for it.

And a few more resources if you’re interested…

• Watch: The Pitt for how it portrays advance directives and other situations in emergency medicine (including the role of a death doula!).

• Read: Dr. Ira Byock’s Because I’m a Dad; the why behind completing his advance directive

• Listen: To this podcast by JAMA Clinical Reviews on advance directives. One of the podcasters, a doctor, described filling hers out before having a baby and making the case that anyone entering an operating room should be required to do the same—it’s a compelling idea.

The world is chaotic—life continues anyway

It’s an incredibly weird time to be alive.

In between news about mysterious meteors, missing persons, and impending nuclear war, the dishwasher needs to be unloaded, taxes are due, kids need to be fed, and dogs need to be walked. Still, people are falling in love, getting married, having babies, and celebrating birthdays. The mundane and the meaningful continue side by side, regardless of whatever new disaster or discovery unfolds next.

And you—and everyone you know—will die one day. That’s not a reason for dread, but rather a reason to live your life intentionally, using your time, energy, resources, and finances in ways that align with your values.

The fact that we will all die may seem morbid to some, but I’m a firm believer that it is the most clarifying truth available to us right now. Because, while we can’t control a lot of what’s happening in the world, we can control whether the people we love are left scrambling in chaos when we die, or whether we provide a little something to guide them and hold onto.

Paying your taxes is not an act of love, but documenting your advance directive is one of the most loving things you can do for the people who might have to make incredibly difficult decisions on your behalf.

Have you filled out an advance directive or tried to and abandoned it halfway through a confusing form? Maybe you were the person left to make decisions without an advance directive…

No matter the circumstance, I want to hear about it. Your experience might be exactly what someone else needs to read.

— Maura

SAVE YOUR SPOT

Whether you mark today by spending time in church, hiding Easter eggs with family, or treating it like any other Sunday, this time of year is a season for rebirth. And what marks it for many people around the world is the celebration of Easter Sunday.

At its core, Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The story goes like this: In the days before his death, Jesus shared a final meal with his closest followers—now referred to as the Last Supper. Shortly after, he was arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to die. He was crucified on a Friday, now known as Good Friday, and buried in a tomb. Three days later, on what is now Easter Sunday, it is said that Mary Magdalene went to his tomb and found it empty. He had risen, his followers proclaimed. His death had not held.

I don’t consider myself religious, but I “celebrate” Easter, meaning I value the holiday and its rituals as a time to get together with family and enjoy all the fun. Especially the consumerist aspects surrounding it: baskets full of candy, decorating eggs, and, in my family, a 50-person treasure hunt. Growing up Quaker, I was instilled at a young age with the importance of practicing SPICES. Over time, as I’ve learned more about different religions, I’ve grown to appreciate the ritualistic and community aspects they offer, regardless of whether I agree with or believe in their teachings. We all desperately need ritual and community to process change and loss.

Easter Sunday is the foundation of the world’s largest religion—a story of hope, renewal, and the triumph over death. But Easter didn’t invent these themes. For centuries after the resurrection, the holiday wasn’t even called Easter—it was called Pascha, derived from Passover, the Jewish holiday during which the crucifixion took place. Passover, which often overlaps with Easter (and is deeply intertwined with its origins), tells its own story of death and liberation. The Seder, a meal eaten annually around this time, is a ritual retelling of suffering, sacrifice, and freedom.

And both traditions—Easter and Passover—reach back to something even older. Long before Christianity or Judaism, many ancient cultures celebrated spring festivals that honored renewal, fertility, and the return of life after winter.

The Stoics saw death and renewal as the fundamental rhythm of nature—nothing is lost, only transformed. In the Japanese concept of mono no aware, beauty is inseparable from impermanence (an example in this teaching is that the cherry blossom is precious because it falls). The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi wrote of death, not as an ending but as a homecoming, a return to something larger than the self. And, in Zen tradition, practitioners are invited to “die before you die,” to let go so completely that when death comes, it has already been met.

Spring itself is the oldest resurrection story. As we move deeper into April, the evidence is everywhere—the trees that looked dead a few weeks ago are budding, the ground that was frozen is thawing, and the days are lasting longer. Before any renewal, there was decay. Before the buds, the bare branches. Before Jesus had risen, there was death.

All of these transitions share a universal understanding: that something has to die before something new can be born. And that transformation isn’t about avoiding loss, but rather about sitting with it.

But in our modern western culture (especially for those of us without religion or its built-in rituals and traditions), we tend to rush past that part—the dying, the waiting, the not-knowing-yet. We want transformation without the decay, renewal without the loss, success without sacrifice. We want a new beginning and a better outcome without spending time processing the end that got us there.

The invitation of this season, in whatever tradition or religion you carry or none at all, is to sit with the full arc. So wherever you are this weekend—in a church pew, enjoying a meal with family, hiding Easter eggs for the kids, or on a walk by yourself—here is your contemplation:

If you could “resurrect” your life—not by going back, but by moving forward—what would it look like? What part of you needs to die in order for something new to be born?

I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to share your contemplation. Also, this piece touches on traditions and religions I don’t practice, so if something landed wrong or you have something to add, please share your thoughts.

— Maura

RESERVE YOUR SPOT

We tend to associate grief with the death of a physical being—and it is—but grief can belong to any kind of loss. Like the loss of a past version of ourselves we outgrew. We each have our own stories: the marriage that ended, the career we never pursued, the body that changed.

We’ve written about this kind of loss before: What happens when the person you’re grieving is you. And it’s not talked about enough.

In Western culture, we’re great at celebrating beginnings. We go all out for births, birthdays, weddings, and graduations. But when it comes to endings—retirement, divorce, illness, death—we usually try to avoid thinking about or feeling them.

Of course, what counts as a beginning and an ending depends entirely on your perspective. Beginnings and endings belong to each other—every beginning is built from an ending and every ending from a beginning. The caterpillar disappears into the chrysalis to later emerge as a butterfly. The fruit falls from the tree so the seed can open. The sun sets so another day can arrive. Life keeps teaching the same lesson: every threshold asks us to let something go to make room for something new.

Nature does not treat endings as a failure, so why should our endings in life be any different?

There may be no traditional funeral or socially sanctioned mourning period when we say goodbye to one version of ourselves and move on to another, but I think there should be. Because if we don’t mark or acknowledge that ending, it can be hard to fully step into what comes next. Endings do not process themselves—we need rituals to help us metabolize reality. Rituals provide us with space and meaning that give shape to loss, mark a threshold, and make room for the future.

Crisis as growth in disguise

Moving through change can be hard, but it’s universal and guaranteed (just like death). That’s why I’m introducing you to Erin Willett—an artist and change strategist whose work lives at the intersection of grief, identity, creativity, and becoming. Erin had already built a practice around helping people move through change when her own experiences of divorce and a miscarriage brought her into a more intimate relationship with the very questions her clients were carrying. Going through those losses deepened her understanding of the terrain she had long been guiding others through, of what it actually means to grieve a life, a future, or a former self while life keeps going.

“They completely changed the way I was looking at my work,” Erin told me recently about going through a divorce and miscarriage (scroll down to see more of our conversation). “Because, prior to the divorce, I was guiding people through periods of change, but I wasn’t talking about change, I was talking mostly about team building, leadership development, and culture. And then when I went through my divorce, I realized every single one of us is facing some significant chapter of change.”

Now Erin creates spaces where people can bring their full experience into the room, especially in times of transition. Her work asks a beautiful and brutal question: Who are you when the old self no longer fits, and the new self hasn’t fully arrived?

I’m excited to share that Erin will be hosting an upcoming workshop, Goodbye to the People I Used to Be, exclusively for the Hello, Mortal community, on Sunday April 26th from 1 to 3:30 PM EST. It’s an immersive creative experience that combines visualization, deep personal reflection, mirror work, and guided self-portraiture in a connected, virtual setting. She has led versions of this workshop before through her artistic practice, Rage Flowers, and now, she’s bringing that work to our corner of the internet.

This workshop is for anyone actively leaning into change, loss, reinvention, or the disorienting middle space between one chapter and the next. This is your space to feel, reflect, and honor the selves you’ve been. And if you loved our invitation to create something impermanent last week, or missed the chance to do so, consider this your second chance. But sign up soon! The workshop is limited to 30 participants.

Note: Paid Hello, Mortal members will receive a special discounted rate. Please watch out for a separate email in your inbox with the discount code. Also, since Erin is based in Canada, the price is listed as $65 CAD, which is $46 USD.

RESERVE YOUR SPOT

A brief Q&A with Erin

I sat down with Erin to learn more about her story and her thoughts on how to live well in the face of impermanence. Here’s some of the conversation.

M: Can you explain the meaning behind Rage Flowers and how it became the name of your practice?

E: [I had] a miscarriage in 2021. That experience is multi-layered, because at first my feeling was not one of immediate grief, it was a lot of confusion and disconnect. I found myself living entirely in my intellect and my head for many months. I was really confused and went searching for a sense of reconnection with my body. I saw a somatic sex educator at the time, and what came through (even though I was searching for a sense of pleasure) was a tremendous amount of pent-up anger. That opened up months of rage about everything, and I had to channel it because it was showing up in my relationships. I started drawing, and what came out of that was Rage Flowers, my art practice. I was drawing flowers because I was trying to draw things that weren’t angry, and then the flowers ended up becoming angry as well. So the experience of the miscarriage led to an opening of my artistic channel, a significant chapter exploring my connection to my body, with pleasure, and womanhood.

Within my own lived experiences, I was taught niceness and to suppress my anger, to keep my needs to myself as a child, not because my parents weren’t loving or emotionally deep people, just societally speaking, our anger is seen as something “unsightly.”

M: If someone is on the fence about signing up for the workshop, what would you say to them?

E: You can have your own individual moment with yourself and creative source. There will be no pressure to share, dialogue, or move through any of what you’re bringing up with the people in the workshop. The people who feel called to this workshop are moving through something significant. They know that something is ending in their life. They know they are saying goodbye to a part of themselves. They’re curious, nervous, eager, and anxious to see where things go next. And they’re coming to this workshop not just to do art exercises, but are more curious about where their life is going and want to usher in that next moment—their next feeling of being connected to their future self.

People enter the workshop nervous because they are unsure what the creative process is going to be like, but without fail, there is a palpable energetic shift in people as they create art. What it does to your nervous system to make marks on a page and to freely create for an extended period of time, not just giving yourself 30 minutes, but really to give yourself a solid two hours of creating, people’s entire body language changes. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. A lot of people leave the workshop feeling like it stirred up a significant amount of emotional depth and residue, so it takes time to process and move through what’s come up, but that’s why we’re doing it. That’s the work.

People surprise themselves. Making self-portraits is an intimate act. You’re not just looking at yourself, you’re witnessing, you’re really seeing yourself through this exercise. For a lot of people, it’s very empowering.

M: What would you say to someone who doesn’t consider themselves an artist?

E: Everybody says “I’m not an artist,”but for most people who have an artistic background, they have a harder time moving through this workshop without restricting themselves because they have expectations of what the art should look like. We’re moving through multiple different prompts to draw yourself, but more than that, you’re there to witness yourself. So sometimes a self-portraiture will just be a few marks, a blob, or shapes, and the point is not to make perfect art. The point is to experience the process of creating something.

M: What do you believe happens after we die?

E: I am of the mind that we reincarnate—that our souls are on learning journeys that are much greater than we can understand.

M: What final body disposition method do you want for yourself, and why?

E: I am claustrophobic, so the idea of decomposing underground is a very big no for me (laughs about projecting my claustrophobia onto my skeletal form). I am an open-air, high mountain, nature sort of person, so definitely cremated and scattered. Probably in the Gaspésie region of Canada, where my father’s family is from and where there are strong ancestral roots. But I would also like to be divided up, and whoever is scattering the ashes has some adventures and takes a part of me to Scotland, which is where my mother’s side is from. Maybe to Ireland, probably a little bit also to this one hill in the Subarctic where I grew up, which looks out over the tundra and lets you see the vast sparseness of the tundra front.

M: What’s your advice for how to live well in the face of impermanence?

E: My advice is to care deeply. Care about yourself and where you’re headed, care about others, care about the state of the world, care about the insects and the pigs and cows, care about the people you see experiencing pain and suffering on Instagram, care about the trees. The future needs us to care deeply about where we’re heading and how we’re heading there. We need to feel, respond, engage and act to make anything meaningful happen in our lives. We need to be doing those things from a deep well of care, not greed, not a desire for power. During the times of deep uncertainty, what will sustain us is the relationships we have with the people and ecosystems we care for.

For something to begin, something else has to end.

Endings are not only something that happens at the very end of life. They’re happening all the time—through the death of identities, certainties, relationships, and the comfort zones we build around ourselves. And if we don’t know how to process those endings, we can get stuck—clinging to who we were, long after life has asked us to become someone else.

If you’re standing in the rubble of an old identity or just sensing that one version of you is ending and another is trying to emerge, this workshop is for you.

RESERVE YOUR SPOT

I hope to see you there! And, if you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this email.

— Maura

There are only two moments each year when the Sun rises due east and sets due west for everyone on Earth—and one of them just occurred. Friday, March 20th was the spring equinox for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and the autumn equinox for those in the southern hemisphere.

Equinoxes mark a turning point—when seasons shift from winter to spring and from summer to fall—thresholds that have long been celebrated by civilizations across time, from Chichén Itzá to Cahokia. These moments capture the interconnected and cyclical nature of existence—reminding us that endings (death, decay, letting go) are essential to new beginnings (life, growth, transformation), and that each gives meaning to the other, creating a continuous flow. And that life doesn’t move in straight lines, but rather in circles, cycles, and spirals.

Around this time each year, I find myself thinking about the snow and ice art (as pictured above) created by sculptor and photographer Andy Goldsworthy. His transient artworks consist of concentric circles etched into snow or carved into ice. They’re often already melting as he makes them, an embodiment of impermanence.

When I look at the one pictured above, something in my nervous system settles. It’s like I can almost hear the snow melting and flowing into rivers. I feel the sun warming my skin. To me, the photo evokes a familiar sacredness and childhood nostalgia of a snow day—the kind of natural aliveness we used to know, before modern life and technology made everything so fast, loud, and distracting.

This year, that image feels especially resonant. After the strange, heavy snowstorms that swept through so much of the country, many of us felt winter refuse to let go. Snow in spring is a reminder: the seasons don’t normally flip like a switch, rather they let go gradually, slowly, and on their own timeline.

The sculpture also reminds me that art doesn’t need to last to matter—that nothing does, really. We’ve talked about the concept of symbolic immortality before, and how humans are wired to create things that will outlive us. Goldsworthy’s work is a quiet refusal of that impulse. And, in that refusal, something reveals itself: when we stop making things to last, we start making things to feel.

If you’ve ever seen Goldsworthy’s work, you know everything he makes is already in the process of disappearing. Whether it’s a ring of leaves, a line of stones, or a spiral in the snow, each piece is shaped by hand from the materials he has at hand. Then the artwork is left to the elements to weather, melt, and decay. His art doesn’t try to escape impermanence—it collaborates with it.

“Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding,” Goldsworthy once said. “I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season, and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.”

Most equinox reflections will tell you to set intentions, to plant seeds, to step boldly into the light, and that’s all valuable. But I want to offer another perspective—an invitation to pause at the threshold before rushing forward and springing into action.

Go outside and make something impermanent. Use whatever the season offers you: melting snow, mud, rocks, sticks, dead flowers, or whatever’s near—no need to overthink it. Let the act of making be your meditation. And if the outdoors feels far away or too cold, the same spirit applies at your kitchen table. Impermanent art doesn’t have to be solemn or grand. I recently came across this creative piece of art on Substack, in which someone made a portrait from purple cabbage. Here is the before and after. Same invitation, different materials.

In addition to other practices you might have, such as meditation or exercise, creating temporary art is another way we can practice living well with impermanence.

If you partake in this invitation to create and feel like sharing, I’d love to see what you create.

— Maura

Hello, mortals. Is everyone doing OK out there?

I don’t know about you, but it seems like everyone I know is grieving something right now. The cold, brutal winter we’ve had on the East Coast seemed to be mirroring what was going on in so many people’s lives in early 2026: deaths of loved ones, illnesses and health crises, job losses and economic fears, and nervous system overload at the increasingly dystopian state of the world.

And a lot of anxiety around AI and work. Every day seems to bring a new viral essay every day about the “end of work,” the white-collar jobs apocalypse and rising unemployment. As Ezra Klein declared in the New York Times last week, “The future we feared is already here”—and we are not prepared for it. Questions around AI, he notes, have shifted from What if? to What now?

So many of us are staring into a future where our skills and expertise no longer carry the economic or social value they once did. And for some, the losses have already begun: An unsettling jobs report last week showed that U.S. employers cut 92,000 jobs in February, spiking unemployment to 4.4 percent—a troubling sign that the opportunities and roles that so many of us have trained and worked hard for are disappearing.

Something big is indeed happening. If you’re job-hunting right now and sending hundreds of applications into the void; if you’re a consultant, marketer, graphic designer or lawyer whose job is no longer “safe”; if you’re an engineer training AI to replace you; or if you’re a Gen Z who did everything right but can’t seem to break into the job market and start your career; you know this from personal experience. The ground beneath our feet, the foundation of our working lives, is shifting.

While nobody really knows whether AI will actually cause a “white-collar jobs apocalypse,” there’s no question that the nature of work is fundamentally changing. As Michael Steinberger writes in the NYT, “It looks all but certain that A.I. will transform knowledge work; the question is to what extent.”

As a writer, I’ve found it difficult to shake the ambient existential dread surrounding my profession. AI-generated content is everywhere. I’m constantly unsubscribing from newsletters and unfollowing accounts when I realize I’ve been reading something written by ChatGPT. Recently, I’ve had to start including an AI policy in my client contracts so I’m not spending my editing hours trying to reconstruct meaning from book chapters “written” with AI.

Meanwhile, I can’t open LinkedIn without getting a cortisol spike from the stream of desperate posts from out-of-work editors and copywriters. While the work that makes up most of my livelihood (book coaching and editing) has yet to be swallowed up by automation, other streams of work I once relied on, like brand copywriting, have dried up almost entirely. And I’m very aware that the work that remains may soon become scarce.

This feeling isn’t entirely new, but it’s more intense than ever before. Like other journalists, I’ve watched my profession absorb a succession of death blows over the past decade. Now legacy media is in free fall, undermined by a fragmented information ecosystem, the rise of social media and the creator economy, and AI. I can’t help but worry that the recent bloodbath at the Washington Post, which laid off 30% of its staff and left only a skeleton of the institution it once was, is one of the last nails in the coffin.

Most journalists I know have already left the profession to seek other work, and those who have remained are increasingly forced to operate like influencers, working for the algorithm to stay afloat.

It’s sad to watch the industry I’ve worked in for 15 years being dismantled, and to see so many smart, hard-working people out of work and unable to support their families. It’s sad to see people so readily giving their voices (their power) away. And it’s deeply sad to witness the devaluing of human thought and creativity, and its replacement with AI tools that do the job worse—at a massive social and environmental cost. There’s real grief in knowing that thousands more people will lose their careers, livelihood and future prospects as the wealth and opportunities are concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller pool of companies and individuals.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but I think it’s clear that we’re not prepared for the epidemic of grief that’s coming. How do we cope with the loss of not only jobs but the identities and lives we’ve built around them? What happens now? What do we do when the careers we’ve been told would lead to security, success and happiness disappear in front of our eyes?

The End of the Promised Path

I moved to New York City in 2011 chasing a cliché: the dream of becoming a writer.

After graduating from college, I landed an internship at Vanity Fair, where I didn’t actually write anything, but I did spend my days fetching editors Advil from the newsstand downstairs and coffee with a splash of half-and-half (instructions: “the color of a paper bag”). In the evenings, I worked as a hostess at a tapas restaurant in Grand Central to pay the rent on my railroad apartment in east Bushwick. I was tired and broke, but happy.

Coming off the heels of the Great Recession, jobs were scarce but digital media was booming. At 21, I was hired as an assistant editor at the Huffington Post with a starting salary of $20,000 (even 15 years ago, this was offensive). After I turned down the initial offer, reasoning I’d be better off waitressing while I waited for something better, they bumped it up to $30k, and I accepted. For over five years, I churned out stories, managed editorial calendars, obsessed over traffic stats, attended events around the city, and worked with Arianna Huffington on her books and wellness initiatives. Those early years in the newsroom set me up for the rest of my career in digital media, and later, book publishing.

That world no longer exists.

Looking back at my early days in New York, I feel a certain wistfulness for what now seems a bygone era. When I heard about the new Devil Wears Prada sequel, it struck me as not just a nostalgia marketing opportunity but an expression of real longing for a lost dream: the cultural archetype of the “New York City writer” and the promise of the high-powered creative career as the path to a meaningful life.

If you’re an American Millennial, Gen X or older Gen Z, that promise—successful career equals happy life and purposeful existence—was in the air you breathed and the assumptions you were raised by. We were raised to believe that building a successful career was the central project of adulthood. Work was supposed to provide identity, status, and purpose. Americans have long lived by the religion of “workism,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls it: the belief that work should sit at the center of our lives, serving as the organizing principle for not just how we spend our time but who we are.

Now, for many of us, that promised path is dissolving. As whole industries shrink and algorithms begin to absorb the work we once trained years to do, we face the loss of the illusion that our jobs would provide the meaning and security they had always promised. After all, work isn’t just about what we do Monday through Friday but how we find our place in the world. Carmen van Kerckhove writes in a viral Substack post, “You are not your job and soon you won’t have one”: “I see millions of people about to lose not just jobs, but the entire scaffolding of how they understand themselves.”

For better and for worse, work is the primary structure through which we’ve been taught to find meaning. Without work as a source of meaning, without a place to go and something useful to do every day, many people will feel existentially adrift.

The only way through is to face it head on, and to grieve what we’re losing.

Grief and adaptation

If we’re going to adapt to these massive changes, and find new ways of working and being, we will have to grieve first. The loss of a job (or an entire career path) is not just one loss. It’s a constellation of many losses, including the loss of identity, belonging, status, purpose, security, and in some cases, even losing our home or health. Many people’s lives will become unrecognizable as a result of the changes that are coming.

We need to give ourselves permission to grieve this. Too often, we dismiss and invalidate the true pain of these experiences because we’re only taught to grieve the death of a person. But as we’ve explored before in this newsletter, this type of grief is known as “disenfranchised grief” or “hidden grief.” What we wrote in a previous essay, “What happens when the person you’re grieving is you,” applies here, too:

During times of career transition, we might lose a professional identity or a more successful version of ourselves. Becoming a parent, we lose our more free and independent self. In times of sickness or injury, our formerly healthy and vibrant self is gone…

There may not be a funeral or even a word of acknowledgment from anyone else about what we’re going through, but the grief is real. And it’s time to name it, and start talking about it, so that we can more smoothly move through the “deaths” of our former selves to fully rebirth into who we’re becoming.

Grieving isn’t optional; it’s necessary. It’s an evolutionary mechanism that leads us from loss to new possibilities. When something important is taken from us—a person, a home, an identity or an imagined future—grief is the process through which we absorb the loss and slowly adapt to our new reality. Mourning our losses prepares us to survive without them.

From a biological perspective, grief serves several adaptive purposes. It leads to a state of hyper-vigilance and heightens our awareness of vulnerability after a loss, helping us navigate dangerous periods when social protection may be weakened. The pain of loss also motivates us to protect what remains, strengthening bonds with surviving community members and encouraging behaviors that prevent future losses. At the same time, grief helps the mind update its map of the world—loosening our attachment to what’s gone so we can begin imagining life again under new conditions and prepare to form new attachments.

Paradoxically, rushing to move on without properly allowing space and time for grieving can keep us stuck in the past. That’s why honoring endings is so essential to our ability to move forward, although certainly not easy when survival fears are kicking in and you need to find a new way to pay the bills. But it’s only in the uncomfortable space between death and new life (aka the “bardo”), in the discomfort and uncertainty, that a new path takes form. And this is where many of us seem to be right now.

The Road Ahead

For me personally and so many other people I know, there’s an “end of an era” feeling to this moment. It’s sad and disorienting, but in moments, strangely energizing. As I’m preparing to leave New York after 15 years and start a new chapter in Maine, I’m allowing myself to imagine the possibility that it may be time for my work to evolve along with my life, and perhaps to become something more offline, embodied and relational.

My hope is that this crisis might offer the possibility of a return to something more meaningful and real. After all, making work the center of our lives and identities was never all that satisfying to begin with. Many corporate jobs were always devoid of meaning and true value. Few people find purpose in increasing shareholder value and optimizing engagement. Working 40 hours a week while trying to care for children and aging parents was never a sane way to live.

I have always stubbornly believed in the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, and the possibility of making a living doing work I care about that aligns with my values and does good in the world. That kind of work still exists. It may just look different than the careers many of us were trained to pursue.

Right livelihood, like many other aspects of Buddhist philosophy, directly challenges the extractive logic of our capitalist system. It’s an ideal to strive for, and one that admittedly is not always possible in today’s world. The very structure of the job market can make it impossible for to avoid “wrong livelihood”: work that either directly or indirectly causes harm. By design, those with fewer resources have far less freedom to choose how they work than those with more.

But as the foundations of that system begin to crack, there is the hope of something new and more life-affirming emerging. To the extent that we’re able to do so, the task may be to orient ourselves toward the kinds of work, and the kinds of lives, we hope this next era might make possible.

Can we work in a way that isn’t soul-crushing? Most people I know who spend their days staring at screens quietly long for the same thing: to get offline, to live more embodied and relational lives, to build communities, to spend time with their children and neighbors, to make things that feel real.

Here’s what I do know: there is so much work that needs to be done. As countless jobs disappear, this strikes me as something important to remember. Work to help each other and build more sustainable systems. Perhaps the loss of corporate, technology-based work will be the rise of more human work: caregiving; feeding and farming; community building and local services.

Maybe it sounds like a pipe dream right now, but if we don’t dream of something better—and embody that in whatever way we can—then we’re accepting the current trajectory as inevitable. It’s not.

As artificial intelligence transforms our economy, we will have to decide—individually, but especially as a society—what kinds of work we actually value.

The coming years may bring a massive revaluation of labor. And if we’re thoughtful about it, we might discover that much of the most important work humans can do was never the work we built our economy around in the first place.

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Have you experienced job loss? Has AI impacted your profession, or are you worried about how it might alter your professional trajectory? We want to hear about it. Respond to this email or let us know in the comments. x

Long before hospitals and funeral homes, women were the ones closest to the human body’s most intimate transformations.

Just as women have historically been closest to birth—as the ones who give birth, and as the midwives and caregivers who once guided that process in the home before it was medicalized—they were also often the ones closest to death. They tended to the dying, cared for the body, and helped others throughout the end-of-life journey. Today, we call a person who does that an end-of-life doula or a death doula.

Men have long been involved in deathcare too, but mostly as the muscle. Taking on roles such as digging graves or being undertakers—people who “undertook” the practical arrangements around a funeral, like a tradesman (woodworker, carpenter, or cabinetmaker) who could make a coffin and also handle transport and supplies.

That balance began to shift in the mid-19th century when Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body was transported across the country for public viewing after his assassination. The visibility of the preserved body helped normalize embalming during and after the Civil War as a means of transporting deceased soldiers home to their families. It also ushered in a new way of thinking about the dead—one that transitioned care out of the home, away from the hands of women, and helped give rise to the modern funeral industry. The term “undertaker” evolved into “funeral director,” and caring for the dead became a professional, mainly male-dominated industry. Bodies were sanitized, packaged, and sold back to families as something that should be hidden from view—either in sealed caskets or urns.

But, after nearly 150 years of a male-dominated industry, women and grassroots community efforts are starting to reclaim deathwork again.

The resurgence of green burial and the innovative method of human composting, also known as natural organic reduction (NOR), or terramation, is one example that signals a return to treating death as part of the body’s natural relationship with the earth. And many of the people leading the way are women. So it feels fitting on International Women’s Day to highlight two people leading that return: Katrina Spade and Caitlin Doughty.

Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, the world’s first human composting facility that offers an eco-friendly alternative to fire cremation or conventional burial. Caitlin Doughty is a well-known mortician, an advocate for funeral industry reform, an author, and the host of the popular YouTube channel Ask a Mortician. She is also the founder of the Order of the Good Death—a nonprofit she started in 2011, which is largely credited with helping pave the way for the death-positive movement and working to legalize human composting and water cremation in all fifty states. (Caitlin, if you ever see this, I’d love to interview you, too!)

Note: I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that there are thousands of other women (and men) working tirelessly and contributing to the work of the death-positive movement—from death doulas and social workers, to hospice nurses and doctors, to chaplains, morticians, advocates, and more.

Decomposition as bodily sovereignty

I came across the clearest articulation of this reclamation of deathwork and women’s bodies in Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, a book about death practices around the world.

Normally, I do not write book reviews (and this isn’t one), but I found myself so completely fascinated by and immersed in Doughty’s writing style. Her boundless curiosity and dark humor (my love languages) were the perfect recipe for writing about what most would consider morbidly focused travels around the world. Imagine Anthony Bourdain, but instead of food as the central theme, it’s dead bodies and funeral customs. After reading the book, I thought to myself, I would love to see this turned into a documentary series.

While reading, I highlighted entire pages, including one passage that I’m going to share with you today, because it opened my mind to something I had never thought about before: decomposition as a form of freedom and bodily sovereignty—especially for women’s bodies.

For context in this reading, the “recomposition project” mentioned is referring to human composting. And at the time this book was written, Doughty was visiting Katrina, who was working with Dr. Cheryl Johnston and her students at the Forensic Osteology Research Station at Western Carolina University to perfect her human composting method.

The following passage is written by Doughty and taken from the “North Carolina: Cullowhee” chapter of her book:

It’s worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, and architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, “I love and accept myself.” ...

I agree with Katrina here, Women’s bodies are so often under the view of men, whether it’s our reproductive organs, our sexuality, our weight, our manner of dress. There is freedom found in decomposition, a body rendered messy, chaotic, and wild. I relish this image when visualizing what will become of my future corpse ...

When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from a visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “professional,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men. The corpse, with all its physical and emotional messiness, was taken from women. It was made neat and clean, and placed in its casket on a pedestal, always just out of our grasp…

Maybe a process like recomposition is our attempt to reclaim our corpses. Maybe we wish to become soil for a willow tree, a roebush, a pine—destined in death to both rot and nourish on our own terms.

When I first read this passage, it resonated so deeply with something inside my body. I’ve felt the pressures that both Katrina and Doughty describe of being a woman.

This passage also articulated an opinion from Doughty that I agree with: we essentially owe our lives to the earth. After all, the plants and animals we consume during our lifetime are grown and nourished by the soil. Furthermore, it touches on a similar thread we’ve pulled at before in the article, “What the dying regret most isn’t what you’d think.” This post speaks to the regret some people feel at the end of their life regarding all the ways they’ve withheld themselves from their bodies—how long they spent hating them, ignoring them, refusing pleasure, refusing movement.

A woman’s many endings

Women are experts at endings. Our lives are marked by many small deaths and transformations: leaving girlhood behind with menstruation, becoming partners and wives and sometimes mothers who give our bodies over to pregnancy, shifting our identities. Some of us leave work to raise children. Some endure divorce and other losses. And, eventually, we leave our fertile years behind with menopause.

And many women spend a lifetime being managed by beauty standards, reproductive politics, medical systems, and the male gaze, to name a few of the pressures we face. Our bodies are monitored, picked at, sexualized, legislated, and marketed for our entire lives. Decomposition is a radical act for women’s bodies—a chance to express ourselves and our values. It’s a kind of final bodily sovereignty that is the ultimate refusal to perform or fit in.

Today, no matter how you identify, notice the moments you try to manage your body into being more acceptable—smaller, smoother, younger, quieter.

And if decomposition is the ultimate final freedom, think about what “bodily sovereignty” looks like for you in death. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

— Maura

P.S. If you’ve asked me to review your book and I declined or haven’t responded to you, please know it’s not personal. I just may not have the bandwidth for it at that moment. But I’m always happy to hear about what you’re working on and add your book to my reading list!

Would you accept an invitation to dinner with death?

You’d be promised beautiful, chef-prepared food, wonderful company and deep conversation—but only if you were willing to be vulnerable, and to brave discussing the one thing most people are afraid to talk about: death.

This past December, we hosted two such dinners at Sparrow, a contemporary funeral home in Brooklyn. In a room that had held hundreds of funerals, where thousands of people had said their final goodbyes, a group of curious souls joined together over a candlelit meal to talk openly about a wide range of mortality-related topics, including grief, AI and the digital afterlife, spirituality, medical assistance in dying, and of course, love.

The dinners were inspired by the global Death Over Dinner movement, but with our own Hello, Mortal twist using Death Archetypes, a contemplative personality test designed to shed light on your own attitudes and views on mortality and impermanence. We shared our archetypes (including the mystic, the ancestor, the phoenix, and the lover)as a way to get “in the mood” and spark conversation and reflection.

December—the year’s end, and a time of both darkness and celebration—felt like the right time to gather around death. And for both of us, the timing was charged with extra meaning. I (Maura) held both dinners during the week of both my parents’ birthdays and my own birthday, which felt like a meaningful way to celebrate and honor not only my parents (one dead, one alive), but also the experience of aging. (Not to mention a milestone birthday for me, the often-dreaded “halfway to 40” birthday that is turning 35.) And I (Carolyn) co-hosted the December 4 dinner the night before leaving for the Hoffman Process, a powerful weeklong retreat that took me into a deep contemplation of death and grief, and brought a level of healing and peaceI didn’t know was possible. In a perfect moment of synchronicity, the guy who sat down next to me on the shuttle from the airport to the retreat center in the Canadian Rockies turned out to be an estate lawyer from Dallas. We talked about our views on embracing mortality, and I learned that he hosts gatherings at a local brewery encouraging people to prepare for death, with a touch of humor and levity (and his signature “You’re Gonna DiePA” lager).

These intimate dinners made one thing unquestionably clear: we need to talk about death, and we need to have these conversations together, in person. Nothing can replace the alchemy of IRL conversation and its power to lower our defenses, remind us of what we share and how we’re all connected, and open our minds to new perspectives.

Something transformative happens when you put a bunch of strangers in a room, light candles, share food and drink, and talk openly about mortality. We’ve hosted similar events (Death Over Coffee) in a virtual setting, and while they’re certainly meaningful, it’s just not the same. In person, you can tangibly feel the energy shift—the way the room leans in when someone shares something vulnerable, like naming a fear or regret you resonate with. And being together in a funeral home made death even more literal—the space itself was a reminder that this isn’t hypothetical; it’s our future.

To get the ball rolling, we started the event with a moment of shared silence. Then we invited the guests to repeat after us, speaking aloud three fundamental truths:

From there, we were off and running for a couple hours of powerful and wide-ranging conversations. While the conversation touched on many different topics, a few themes came up both nights that brought death out of the shadows and into a vibrant, life-affirming conversation. We thought we’d share some highlights of the conversation with you.

Dying vs. Passing Away

One of the biggest conversational points of the night was language. In a culture that almost never names death directly, euphemisms like “passed away” or “lost” or “transitioned” can be a symptom of avoidance, cultural differences, and a coping tool.

One night, a guest bravely ventured to say that they hate the phrase “passed away,” sparking an impassioned debate among the entire group. This person said they didn’t want to be told someone “passed on”—they want (what they define as) the truth: this person died. For them, the euphemism feels almost insulting, as if the person delivering the news doesn’t think they’ll be able to handle the reality that is death.

In response, other people shared that they use “passed away” very intentionally to protect their own nervous system. The conversation sparked an important insight for me (Carolyn) about how I used different words to speak of different losses. I shared with the group that while I usually tell people “My dad died,” when I speak of my brother’s death, I usually say “My brother passed away.” It occurred to me that this was a way to protect myself from the other person’s reaction to hearing of the death of a sibling, and a young person—which is usually discomfort or even shock. It’s a way of controlling how much emotional shrapnel I have to absorb just to share my own experience.

Someone else offered a completely different take: to them, “passing” was literal. It described the movement from one state to another—passing through from Earth into whatever comes next. In that framing, it’s not a softening at all; it’s a spiritual and cultural honoring of death as a transition.

All of these perspectives, of course, are valid—and it was fascinating to see what completely different meanings and associations a single term could carry for different people. What do you say? What do you think? Is saying someone “passed away” a form of avoidance, protection, or simply a belief? The answer around the table was: It depends on who’s saying it, and why. The point isn’t to police vocabulary, but to notice what we’re trying to shield: ourselves, others, or the truth itself.

Should the dead be digitally resurrected?

You can’t go to dinner these days without talking about AI. It’s everywhere, it’s unavoidable, so it’s no surprise that we discussed the use of AI “grief bots”—digital avatars of the dead. We talked at length about the emerging possibility of recreating an AI version of you that can interact with the people you love after you die. Built from someone’s texts, emails, voice notes, photos, and videos, these bots attempt to mimic their voice and personality (and sometimes even their face) so you can ‘chat’ with them by text, call, or video as if they’re still here. Most folks at the table had a visceral negative reaction to the idea. Many, especially those who work in deathcare, expressed their observation that a crucial part of processing grief is accepting, slowly and painfully, that you can’t see or talk to that person face-to-face anymore.

Others, however, could imagine cases in which (with medical and regulatory oversight) an AI avatar might support the grieving process. Some guests shared real use cases and first-hand experience where users felt genuine solace with the help of an AI avatar. Others shared stories where the technology seemed to interfere with grief instead of supporting it.

Through the conversation, a central tension emerged: At what point does “staying connected” become “never letting them go”? When does a grief bot offer comfort, and when does it trap us in a simulation?

One guest, Danny Harris, Executive Director at Aspen Institute Socrates Program, posed a thoughtful question in response: “What does it mean to be human?” His question pulled us out of the “cool vs. creepy tech” debate and into something deeper.

Should we be able to choose our own death?

Circling around the notion of digital immortality (and even physical immortality), there was a brief detour into longevity culture before diving into one of the most controversial topics in end-of-life care: medical aid in dying (MAID).

MAID, is a legal option, in some places, typically for terminally ill individuals under strict criteria and physician oversight, to take medication that will allow them to die peacefully in their sleep. If you’re curious to learn more, read this piece I (Maura) wrote about MAID and what it means to choose your own death.

Many people at the table spoke strongly in favor of it: if you’re dying anyway, and your suffering is unbearable, shouldn’t you have the right to choose the timing and manner of your own death?

But one person pushed back—not against MAID itself, but in his words, “against a world that makes MAID feel so necessary.” He shared that he dreams of a world where MAID isn’t an option because it doesn’t need to be: a world where dying people are truly cared for, where they aren’t abandoned by systems or treated as burdens. In his view, choosing MAID was essentially a choice rooted in fear of the dying process.

At first, his perspective confused some people. I (Maura) thought I understood what he was trying to say. From my time at the MAID conference, I learned that many people pursue MAID for peace of mind, and never actually end up using the medication. Sometimes simply having the option is comforting enough.

Again, we didn’t land on a single “right or wrong” answer or position—MAID after all is a highly controversial topic and a matter of personal choice. What we did was harder: we sat together at one table, with our different experiences, beliefs, and perspectives, and stayed in the room to discuss our disagreements, remembering that behind every stance is the same longing: a peaceful death.

The practical side of dying

We also talked about the logistical and decision-making side of dying: What do you want done with your body after you die? What do you want (or not want) at your funeral? Who do you want to be your medical power of attorney? Do you have an advance directive? Do you have a will?

People shared a desire for a wide range of body disposition methods—from green burial to human composting to donating their body to science to open-air cremation at a Tibetan Buddhist center—and how their choices are influenced by their culture, religion, geography, finances, and climate altruism.

One attendee, Jordana Ibghy, Founder of Urth Ritual, shared how her belief in natural cycles and desire for her death to support new life informs her wish for a green burial with a mycelium coffin.

Another attendee, Darnell Lamont Walker (grab a copy of his new book here!), shared a delightfully humorous story about a conversation he had with his mom, who said she hadn’t yet purchased a cemetery plot near her deceased husband, but wasn’t worried about it. When Darnell asked how she’d feel about being buried elsewhere if that cemetery was full, she replied, “I don’t want to be surrounded by strangers!” (Ironic given that she doesn’t even believe in an afterlife). The story was charming, and gave us the exact dose of levity needed when talking about death at dinner.

We also got into advance directives—a legal document that typically consists of a living will and a medical power of attorney, which allows you to spell out your end-of-life care preferences and appoint a decision-maker if you become incapacitated. I (Maura) shared my take on how I think they’re broken and what I’m doing to fix them (more on that another time). Underneath it all was a simple, sobering reality: most people don’t have a death plan in place, yet intuitively most of us understand that pre-planning is one of the most profound gifts we can give the people we love who will survive us. The problem is, we think we have time, until we don’t.

We joked that we should have created and signed our advance directives right there at the table, since all you need in New York are two witnesses (notarization can help, but isn’t required. Maybe next time…

Even if you prepare… Death is still scary

Even at a table full of people open to the idea of discussing death (many of whom also work in the deathcare space), it was clear that nobody is immune to the fear of death. (It’s only human, after all!) Interestingly, it was much easier for the group to talk about AI than it was to talk about their own fears around dying. At one of the dinners, conversations around artificial intelligence and longevity lingered, while a question about interrogating our own deepest fears around dying and the end of life garnered only a couple brief responses before someone changed the subject.

It’s not entirely surprising, and there’s no judgment here; just an observation and an invitation to self-reflection. We’re all afraid of death in some way, and often unconsciously. One of the things we explore in Death Archetypes is the ways this universal fear of death can play out in different ways based on our personality types. For some, the root of the fear is existential in nature—we might be terrified by the idea of nothingness and annihilation. For others, it’s bodily deterioration and the prospect of losing one’s physical and mental faculties that strikes the deepest chord. And for others, losing the people we love is the core fear. In most cases, it’s a mix of all of the above.

This is also a humbling reminder that most of us (even those who spend a lot of time around death!) have some level of unconscious fear and denial of our mortality. As many great Buddhist teachers have noted, contemplating mortality is a lifelong practice. And, perhaps, our existential anxiety isn’t something to overcome but something to channel into the creation of art, beauty and lives of meaning.

We’re all gonna die. Let’s talk about it.

These dinners were a small attempt to transform the denial of death (an unfortunate, primarily Western cultural taboo) into a celebration of life, and to see what unfolds when we give death a seat at the table. Because avoiding hard conversations doesn’t make them disappear; it just guarantees they’ll ambush you later, louder, with higher stakes.

When was the last time someone asked you about mortality at the dinner table or over coffee?

That’s why we’re dreaming about hosting more in-person gatherings—in different cities, with different formats, and different communities.

If you’d like to see a Dinner with Death (or something like it) where you live: comment with your city! We’ll see if we can organize a local event.

And for those who asked about a template to host your own dinners, we’re working on something special for you! Consider this Part I.

We’re all going to die. Let’s keep finding ways to talk about it—while we’re still here.

— Maura & Carolyn

P.S. We’ve also transformed these dinners into professional workshops, which we’ve already shared at several universities. If you’re interested in bringing one to your community, organization, conference, or retreat, you can reach us directly by replying to this email.

Last week, two friends (one in their 40s and one in their 30s) reached out to me for advice on how to discuss and plan for end-of-life care with their aging parents. As a death doula, advising on this topic is part of my job. The brief information I shared with them, which they found helpful, inspired this piece.

So whether you are thinking about preparing for your own mortality, or that of someone you care about, understanding end-of-life planning, and the fact that there are different types of wills, can provide logistical, financial, and emotional wellness for you and your loved ones.

We rarely, and typically only when a crisis occurs, strike up a conversation about death or end-of-life planning. So it’s no surprise that when most people hear the term “will,” they think of a legal document meant for wealthy homeowners or elderly people needing to designate their assets to their loved ones.

While this document—called a financial, inheritance, or last will and testament—is critical for everyone, it’s only one piece of the end-of-life planning puzzle.

What many people don’t often realize is that there are several types of wills. The three we’re discussing today are essential: financial (inheritance), health (living), and love (ethical). Having all three is the best way to protect you—and the people you care about—from chaos and conflict.

One of the cruelest things about death is how often it takes more than one thing from you.

I’ve seen and heard it too many times: a person is dying, then their family is torn apart by fighting, and it’s like another death occurred. They disagree on health, financial, and logistical decisions. They argue about what Mom would’ve wanted, who did or didn’t do enough, who gets what, and who’s in charge. People get iced out, take sides, and stop speaking.

Just like death, everyone thinks they’re immune to this type of conflict and that it only happens to other people, other families, not yours—until it does.

And when it does, it’s heartbreaking to witness (and experience), but the good news is that with a little preparation, it can be prevented (so keep reading!). Because end-of-life planning isn’t just about protecting assets—it’s about coming to terms with your mortality and honoring the emotional wellness of the people who outlive you.

The three types of wills

Below is a brief overview of the three types of wills that you should have. Keep in mind that this is general information meant to help you start the conversation—not legal, medical, or financial advice. Laws vary by state, so consult a licensed professional for advice tailored to your situation.

1) The financial, inheritance, or “last” will
This is the classic will most people think of—the basic “here’s how I want my stuff handled” and the “my house goes to ___” document. A common misconception about this type of will is that we need specific assets or to be in a certain tax bracket to need one, but that’s not true. Anything you own (your clothes, books, furniture, etc.) counts as an asset and is reason enough to put your wishes in writing.

At its core, this document determines who inherits your belongings, who administers your estate, and who would serve as guardian for your children or pets. It may also include funeral or body disposition preferences.

You can create this document by hiring a lawyer (which can be costly) to draft a personalized version, or by using a reputable online service for simple situations for a fraction of the price. Nowadays, you can also find free templates online. But whatever you do, follow your state’s guidance in order for it to be legally binding and to ensure it will hold up in court.

2) The living or health will (a.k.a advance directives)
This is the will that matters when you can’t speak for yourself. It can help prevent a very specific kind of horror: your family fighting over medical decisions at your hospital bedside. Remember the Terri Schiavo case?

A living will is part of the broader category of advance directives, legal documents that outline your healthcare wishes in the event you cannot communicate for yourself. An advance directive usually includes two parts:

• A living will (what life-sustaining treatments you do or don’t want in certain scenarios)

• A medical power of attorney (the person you choose to make decisions if you can’t)

This is a critical document that most people never get around to filling out because they don’t know it exists, or they avoid it. And most advance directives ask you to think through a million “what if” scenarios, which can be very overwhelming. That’s why people often start this type of will but never finish it. But these are vital documents to have, because without clear directions, someone will be forced to guess what you want, and their decision might go against your wishes or start a fight between the people you care about. To prevent overwhelming yourself or your loved one, you should fill these out with your present-day preferences—not for some distant time in the future. Remember, you can always change the details, and it’s helpful to review annually.

By creating a living will, you are saying: this is what I want, and this is who I trust to speak for me. This simple action can spare your people the horrifying trauma of questioning: “Did we let them die?” or “Did we keep them alive too long?” or “Did we do the right thing?”

It’s important to note that even if you have these documents in order, they are not always followed, for various reasons. So, at the end of the day, this document comes down to trust. Ask yourself, who do you trust to make these big decisions for you? And have you talked to them about your wishes?

3) The ethical will
Ethical wills have been around for thousands of years. In Jewish tradition, they’re known as tzava’ot—a values-based counterpart to a “traditional” will or financial will. They are created so someone can pass down guidance, meaning, and moral instruction.

This document is not about money, but it might be the most valuable “will” of all because it’s the part of you that lives on, something that your friends and family can return to after you’re dead. And for many people who receive one (including myself), it’s priceless.

The contents of an ethical will are only limited by your imagination and can come in many forms—a letter, a book, a video, a song, etc. The aim is to reflect on your life experiences and pass on values, lessons learned the hard way, stories, favorite memories, beliefs, wisdom, and hopes, or a message to loved ones. It can serve as a mini memoir—a personal, spiritual, and emotional legacy that allows individuals to share their philosophy of life, express gratitude, or offer apologies to family and friends.

Here’s an example of some prompts within an ethical will:

• My biggest regret is…

• The recipe for a life well lived includes…

• After I die, I hope you remember…

• Here’s what I wish someone had told me sooner…

• This is my philosophy on love (or money, etc.)…

• How to have compassion for someone who has hurt you…
  
  

If you’d like to go deeper on this topic, check out Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper. (Bonus: it has a section on living wills).

Why you should have all three

Contrary to popular belief, if you do nothing for your end-of-life planning, it doesn’t just magically work out. When you die without a will, your state’s intestacy laws determine who inherits your assets, who has authority to act, how things get distributed, what paperwork is required, and what timelines you’re bound to. And if you become incapacitated without a living will, families can end up in conflict.

While the state’s default decisions sometimes match what you’d want, other times they don’t. And when they don’t, your friends and family aren’t just grieving, they’re navigating probate while raw, sleep-deprived, and emotionally wrecked. That’s when people say things they can’t unsay and do things they can’t undo.

We’re all gonna die—that’s 100% guaranteed. The least we can do is leave instructions, guidance, and support for the people we love—financial, medical, and ethical.

And this is the part I believe in the most: your health and your wisdom are your greatest assets. When my mom died, I cared less about the material things she left behind and more about the love she showed me and the wisdom she left me in the letters she wrote. That was her ethical will—that was the real inheritance.

More importantly—and this applies to all types of wills—make sure multiple people know the document exists so that when you die, they know where to find it and who to contact.

Now what?

Whether you are planning for yourself or helping someone else, it’s important that you take time to reflect on and talk about your mortality—together. One way to do this is to take the Death Archetypes test and discuss your results with parents or other loved ones. If you’re not familiar with it, this is a test I co-created to help start the conversation around death and encourage further contemplation of a topic that can be awkward and scary. It’s a versatile tool that has been used in academic, clinical, and casual settings.

You should also assess your current situation: Are you planning for yourself or someone else? What have you or they already done? What still needs to be done? For example, how many out of the three wills mentioned above have been completed? When were they last updated, and where are the documents? You can also use this article I wrote: 10 questions to answer before you die as a starting point. Even people who thought they “had everything done” have told me there were items on this list they had not thought to include.

This is when it can get overwhelming and where/why most people stop because they can’t get past all the decisions: Where do you start? How do you start? What tools should you use? How much should this cost?

But don’t worry, you don’t have to do everything at once, and there are lots of resources to help, depending on your needs, including the platform we’re building at Hello, Mortal, to help you and the people you love complete end-of-life planning. If you’re ready to take one small step today, join the waitlist to be first in line when we launch.

Don’t leave the people you love to fill in the blanks when you die. Creating an end-of-life plan is not only practical but also a means of demonstrating your love for those you care about—before and after you die—by letting them know what you want and making hard decisions for them.

I’d love to hear from you: of the three types of wills mentioned above, how many have you completed and which ones? If you haven’t done any yet, don’t worry, you’re in good company.

— Maura

And with that, here is your Sunday contemplation.

Aren’t we all always dying a little bit?

We lose little bits of ourselves as we journey through life. We outgrow an edge we once had. We hand pieces of ourselves to others in need. We shed our skin again and again. We evolve.

Astrologically, we leave the Year of the Snake tomorrow, on Feb 16th. In the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Snake is associated with renewal, intuition, and transformation— a year about shedding parts of ourselves we’ve outgrown and releasing what no longer serves us. And, as we leave the snake to enter the Year of the Fire Horse, much may feel unsteady. The future is always unknown.

How do we let go of who we were so we can become who we’re meant to be? Not just as individuals, but as a society?

In Learning from Trees, poet Grace Butcher offers a simple yet profound invitation: to practice dying the way we practice birthdays or vacations, as naturally as trees shed their leaves. There is no fighting the change of seasons, just acceptance of the certainty that they will change.

For trees, death is not a catastrophic rupture, but rather a part of the rhythm of being alive. Trees don’t mourn the fall—they prepare for it. They stand bare, open to being undone and to rest. They know something we’ve forgotten: that loss is part of the design.

How can we as humans accept the fact that we will all one day die? And how can we realize that the final transformation is just a larger version of the small adjustments we make every day, every year, throughout our lifetime?

When I first read Butcher’s poem, I loved it for the way it challenged me to reframe dying—not as an interruption, but as a practice. And I find myself returning to it in seasons of transition, endings, and new beginnings.

Learning from Trees

By Grace Butcher

If we could,
like the trees,
practice dying,
do it every year
just as something we do—
like going on vacation
or celebrating birthdays,
it would become
as easy a part of us
as our hair or clothing.

Someone would show us how
to lie down and fade away
as if in deepest meditation,
and we would learn
about the fine dark emptiness,
both knowing it and not knowing it,
and coming back would be irrelevant.

Whatever it is the trees know
when they stand undone,
surprisingly intricate,
we need to know also
so we can allow
that last thing
to happen to us
as if it were only
any ordinary thing,

leaves and lives
falling away,
the spirit, complex,
waiting in the fine darkness
to learn which way
it will go.

***

For this week’s contemplation, we invite you to sit by or look at a tree and meditate on this poem. Ask yourself: what have we (or do we need to) shed so that we can grow? And what outdated beliefs or ideals must we release—together—so something new can take root?

— Maura & Kate

P.S.

This poem was submitted by a hello, mortal member. If you have poems about mortality, impermanence, etc, that you would like to share/submit, we’d love to receive them!

I’ve been under the weather and haven’t had the energy to write a new post this week. So, today, in honor of the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, I’m sharing a piece from last year that I’ve lightly updated.

I hope you enjoy.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have gathered in arenas to witness spectacle, struggle, and the pursuit of glory. From the Colosseum in ancient Rome and the sacred ball courts of the Aztecs, to medieval tournaments and the early rise of organized sport, to the Super Bowl and even the trading floors of Wall Street, we’re naturally drawn to competition and the stories of those who strive for greatness—because these moments mirror life itself. Struggle is the most universal human experience, and to exist is to compete for survival.

Whether on the battlefield, in the workplace, or on the playing field, we sacrifice and struggle to rise to the top. In earlier civilizations, this was in pursuit of immortality—the belief that a hero or warrior could literally become a god. Today, it’s often in pursuit of legacy—the hope that our efforts will stand the test of time and outlive us.

Tonight, more than 100 million people will tune in for our modern Colosseum: The Super Bowl. And over the next few weeks, billions will tune into the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Across these different arenas—whether padded in turf or on ice and snow—something primal is unfolding. These athletes aren’t just playing a game, they are stepping into a tradition as old as civilization itself—a test of mindset, strength, skill, and endurance in pursuit of something greater.

History tells us that only the greatest will be remembered, but even they will eventually fade into obscurity. This is the paradox of ambition: we chase greatness, knowing that one day it might all be forgotten, but still we play.

Why we play

Forever, we’ve asked what truly drives human beings. Is it pleasure, power, purpose or something else entirely? The answers vary, but they all orbit the same central truth: we are creatures painfully aware of our own mortality, and we will always seek to make sense of why we’re here.

Anthropologist and author Ernest Becker called this drive symbolic immortality—the desire to create a legacy that will live beyond us. He theorized that symbolic immortality helps humans cope with existential anxiety—the innate fear that arises when we confront the reality of death, and question whether the lives we are living mean anything.

Sigmund Freud argued that the fundamental drive of human beings is pleasure. His contemporary, Alfred Adler, disagreed—he believed our core need is for significance and that we strive for superiority and validation to overcome feelings of inferiority and to prove our worth. Our accomplishments serve as armor against the fear that we are small, insignificant, and forgettable.

So we push our bodies and minds to their limits. We chase wealth, power, and recognition. We seek symbolic immortality by trying to etch our names into history—breaking records, achieving titles, winning awards, writing books, building companies, becoming “someone”—anything that tells us we mattered, that we were worthy, that someone somewhere will remember us when we’re gone.

Whether it’s professional sports, a business venture, or an art project, none of us are immune to this. The playing field is just a metaphor for life’s bigger arena. We convince ourselves that if we just work harder, sacrifice more, and win big enough, maybe—just maybe—we will be happier and create a legacy that matters.

But no matter how much we achieve, time remains our only undefeated opponent. And beneath it all, whether we realize it or not, we are fighting against the one thing we cannot defeat: death.

The modern colosseum

Football, like any high-stakes competition, is a microcosm of how symbolic immortality plays out. Penn State historian Garrett Fagan argues that football is a direct descendant of the Roman Colosseum games. Both are violent spectacles, turn athletes into heroes, and reward the strongest while discarding the broken.

However, most gladiators were forced to fight, whereas football players choose to walk on the field. But how much of a choice is it when many players come from lower-income backgrounds, where sports are their best, sometimes only, path to a better life? Much like the Roman gladiators (many of whom were prisoners, slaves, or desperate free men), athletes often risk their health, identity, and future for a shot at greatness. And in the end, the game moves on, while their bodies and minds often do not.

We may not fight with swords or shields anymore, but in our own ways, we all play this game, and the same instincts are occurring: we have a deep psychological need to prove ourselves so we chase what we think will bring us significance,hoping for the promise that “success” will finally make us enough.

What we trade for success

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that greatness demands suffering, and to “become who you are,” you must be willing to endure. Athletes, more than anyone, embody this idea—they sacrifice their bodies in the pursuit of an ideal. They push through broken bones, concussions, and surgeries because they accept that suffering is the price of greatness.

Take Tom Brady, for example, arguably the greatest quarterback to ever play Football, and whose relentless pursuit of self-mastery was legendary. His diet (the TB12 Method), training, and mindset were all built to conquer time itself.

“My goal is to play forever,” Brady once said.

And for a while, it seemed like he might. He won seven Super Bowls, outlasted generations of quarterbacks, and redefined what longevity in sports could look like. But even the greatest can’t outrun time. Brady left the New England Patriots after 20 seasons to continue his pursuit in Tampa Bay with the Buccaneers. He was still chasing something even after reaching the top, and it cost him his marriage. In the end, he learned what all greats eventually do: the game always moves on without you.

And Brady’s not alone. There are countless others. Take Alpine ski legend Lindsey Vonn, who came out of retirement and even chose to race today at the Olympics despite a ruptured ACL from a World Cup crash nine days ago, only to suffer a devastating fall early in her downhill run in Italy this morning (unrelated to her ACL injury) and had to be airlifted off the course. We’re wishing her a speedy recovery.

Everyone chasing greatness pays a price. The question is: what are you willing to pay?

This is the fundamental struggle of all high achievers: we want permanence in a world of impermanence. The pursuit of building something great always feels urgent—like the next milestone will finally make it all mean something. But no matter how high you climb, the moment passes, and a new goal takes its place.

This is what Becker called the denial of death: the idea that all human ambition is, at its core, a way to distract ourselves from the reality of our own impermanence. We work, we strive, we build, we compete, we push past our limits—not just to win, but to prove, if only for a moment, that we were here and we mattered.

The arrival fallacy

Rarely does winning give us more than momentary satisfaction. We forget that it’s the journey (not the destination) that gives life meaning. We tell ourselves that fulfillment lies in the next promotion, the next championship, the next great achievement. But the moment we “arrive,” we realize the arrival wasn’t what we were searching for after all.

As writer Rob Henderson put it: “The scariest thing about getting everything you want is realizing it doesn’t make you happy.”

This is what’s known as the “arrival fallacy”: the idea that happiness exists just beyond the next victory, only to disappear the moment we reach it.

This doesn’t just apply to athletes, of course. High achievers in every field—CEOs, artists, musicians, academics, politicians—burn themselves out chasing something they think will finally make them happy. But time and again, we see that reaching the top doesn’t lead to fulfillment.

What if we’re not meant to arrive? What if the struggle itself—the striving, the effort, the process—is the whole point?

We chase greatness as if it will last forever. Yet, everything we build—our careers, reputations, achievements, even our relationships—are fragile, and can slip away the moment the next season begins.

A different way to play

Every game and every pursuit, no matter how glorious, eventually reaches its final chapter. The CEO steps down, the artist finishes their last masterpiece, the teacher retires. This is true for all of us.

So instead of chasing some future version of success, what if we focused on showing up fully in the life we have now? Because, in the end, legacy isn’t about what we accomplish—it’s how we play the game.

Our jobs, achievements, and status won’t last, but how we live, treat others, and embody our values will. Success isn’t just what you achieve–it’s about what you refuse to sacrifice along the way.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

At the end of the day, maybe the point is simply to play—to step into the arena of life, give it everything you’ve got, and embrace the struggle, knowing that one day it will end.

– Maura

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been absorbing one traumatic, heartbreaking moment after another.

And as a result, you may be grieving… just not in the way you think.

When most of us hear the word grief, we tend to think of death—someone we love dying. But grief is more encompassing than that. Grief is what happens when love meets loss.

Grief can be the loss of a home, community, a sense of safety, or the feeling of freedom. You can even grieve the loss of how things (or you) used to be. Grief can also be a loss of trust—in institutions, in humanity, and in the future—or even the loss of any sense that you can change what’s happening.

But the world doesn’t stop just because something horrible happens—even in death, life continues all around us. We still have to go to work, feed our families, pay rent, and make plans.

If you’ve felt disoriented by the need to function while feeling like the world is falling apart, you may be experiencing collective grief.

Collective grief is a shared emotional experience that occurs when a community, a country, or a generation is absorbing loss at the same time. This can include loss of people, but also loss of environment, freedom, and safety, which can cause widespread feelings of helplessness, fear, and anger.

(And eerily, we wrote about something adjacent to this almost a year ago in a piece called How to love a dying world. I mention thisbecause it still rings true today.)

The weight of witnessing

Take a 60-second scroll on your preferred social media channel and—depending on your algorithm—in between videos about home decor tips or a viral 2016 vs 2026 photo trend, you might see:

• A video of someone being murdered in the street.

• Live images of war.

• Someone snatched from their job or home.

• More shootings. More grief.

All in under one minute.

We’ve grown accustomed to thinking this onslaught of information is normal. And worse: many of us can feel that it’s harming us. Our nervous system evolved to handle immediate threats like running from a predator, not to witness suffering through a constant feed designed to fragment our attention.

As a result, most people respond to collective grief in one of three ways:

1) Doomscrolling
We’ve all done it. You open a social media app and what started out as a harmless scroll suddenly turns into doom and gloom. You keep looking, liking, commenting, and sharing because it helps you momentarily regain a sense of control. And maybe you question what it says about you if you don’t repost or engage.

But constant exposure to distressing information doesn’t make the nervous system wiser—it often makes it overwhelmed. And a never-ending pattern emerges: people feel numb or they grow tired or fed up with the news, then they feel ashamed for those emotions. Sometimes, that leads them to scroll more to “prove” they still care. That spiral is its own kind of exhaustion.

2) Outrage

Anger is an emotion that sometimes accompanies grief. Especially when what’s being lost feels unnecessary, unjust, or preventable. Today, that anger often manifests in arguments in the comment section, but it can also motivate people to get off their phones and into real life: organizing meetings, showing up at town halls, sharing donation links, attending vigils, gathering with neighbors, and protesting in the freezing cold.

We typically associate anger as a negative emotion, but that’s not always the case. If you feel furious, that makes sense. Anger arises when something you care about is threatened. The question is whether you’ll let the anger eat you (and your relationships) alive, or turn it into something constructive.

3) Total shutdown
Some people go offline completely—which is a totally sane response to apps that are designed to be addictive. But shutdown can come with its own guilt: If I look away, am I abandoning people? If I rest, am I complicit?

If you’re feeling numb or shutting down completely, it probably means you’re overloaded, which is natural. That emotional detachment is a protective response of your body—known as “dorsal vagal shutdown”—meantto help you survive the amount of suffering you’re being asked to process at one time. This is not a failure or weakness, but rather a survival mechanism. We’re trying to metabolize collective loss when we were never meant to.

We’re trying to metabolize collective loss when we were never meant to.

In the 1960s, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted this exact outcome in what he called the “global village” theory. He said that electronic media (initially radio and TV, later the internet and social media) act as an “electronic nervous system” that shrinks the world, enabling instantaneous, worldwide sharing of information and culture, extending our nervous system globally. It enables a “tribal” existence in which individuals are interconnected, driving high-velocity social change and constant, real-time awareness of events in other locations.

Whatever you think of his predictions, the lived experience today is familiar: log on to social media and something will make you cry, laugh, and angry all in one minute of scrolling.

So what do we do instead?

I’m not a doctor or a therapist, but I do know from personal experience that living in extremes of “feel everything” or “feel nothing” is not ideal, if we can help it.

So, instead, I want to offer you this:

Name what you’re feeling as collective grief. Then give it an outlet, so it doesn’t turn into cynicism or despair.

Understand that the grief you are feeling for your country and your neighbors is actually love. Love for human life, dignity, and the idea that people should be safe in their own homes. Love is why this hurts. It’s why you might be outraged and angry.

“Open your heart to love. Everything that you are feeling right now, name it love. Whether it’s fear or sadness. Everything that you are feeling, name it love,” said the late Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson.

If you want to take it a step further, try limiting your time on social media. When something you see upsets you or makes you feel numb, try moving your body for at least a few minutes. Other things that may help include taking action in your local community, such as volunteering for an organization you care about or getting involved in a cause. And don’t forget to let yourself rest. Taking time to rest is not disengagement or apathy. It’s a way to help your nervous system recover so you can stay present without becoming overwhelmed.

Something that’s inspiring me recently is this: a group of monks has been walking 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in a “Walk for Peace.” They’re traveling through winter weather, sleeping in tents, relying on kindness, and continuing despite serious hardship—including a devastating accident along the way.

Their message isn’t “ignore reality.” It’s the opposite: meet reality together. They aim to raise awareness of peace, loving-kindness, and compassion worldwide.

Maybe there’s something to learn in their journey: grief is heavy, but it can feel a little lighter when we carry it together.

— Maura

My favorite thing to do in New York City on a Friday morning is throw on a bodysuit, hop on the L train, and spend 90 minutes dancing with a group of strangers of all ages and walks of life in an old church in the Bowery.

I love it not just because it is such a quintessentially New York experience, but because this particular dance class, 5Rhythms—a movement meditation practice created by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s that journeys through five distinct rhythms to free the body and unlock deeper awareness —fills me with a sense of aliveness that is almost transcendent.

Roth’s method, inspired by Gestalt Therapy as well as shamanic and indigenous traditions, is a healing practice as much as it is a dance class. It’s designed to liberate through movement. Even when it doesn’t happen in a church, the freedom that comes when you drop your self-consciousness and let your body move the way it wants to move, feels like something sacred.

As Roth put it: “When we dance, we wake up… We have fun and forget all the heavy shit we carry around. In the dance we get real, get free, get over ourselves.”

Going to “church” on Friday mornings is something I started doing as a direct result of contemplating death. After a season of grief and loss forced me to confront life’s fragility and impermanence, I realized that the time to do the things I really wanted to do, the things that mattered most to me, was right now. Rather unexpectedly, one of the main things that kept coming up was my desire to dance again. Growing up, I did ballet and rhythmic gymnastics (yes, the kind with ribbons and hoops), and I missed that ecstatic feeling of free and graceful movement. I wanted to enjoy my body.

As it turns out, this is not an unusual response to facing one’s mortality.

According to hospice chaplain Kerry Eagan, one of the most common end-of-life regrets is not having danced more—not having truly appreciated the joys and pleasures of being in a body. Eagan says she’s heard this from her patients “hundreds of times.” When faced with the prospect of losing this body, we begin to appreciate the experience of embodiment for the first time—and wish we had enjoyed our bodies more while we still had the chance.

In her beautiful book On Living, Eagan describes how her hospice patients speak of their regrets around their bodies:

Second in intensity to the regret of hating their bodies is the wish of the dying that they had appreciated their bodies more in the course of their lives.

Mind you, it isn’t just health that they wish they had appreciated. It is embodiment itself. It’s the very experience of being in a body, something you might take for granted until faced with the reality that you won’t have a body soon. No matter what you believe happens after death, whether it be an afterlife, reincarnation, or nothing at all, this remains: You will no longer be able to experience this world in this body, ever again. People who are dying face that reality every day.

So they talk about their favorite memories of their bodies… The feel of the water the first time they went skinny dipping. The smell of their babies’ heads. The breeze on their skin that time they made love outside. And dancing. So many stories about dancing. I can’t count the hundreds of times people—more men than women—have closed their eyes and said, when describing USO danced during World War 2, or shagging at South Carolina beach houses, or long, exuberant nights dancing at roadhouses and discos and barns and wherever else there were bodies and music, “If I had only known, I would have danced more.”

Dancing is an expression of freedom, and one we are most likely to take for granted. To whatever extent we are able-bodied, we carry a basic freedom with us: the freedom to move, to experience pleasure, to savor the sensory richness of being in a body. Most of us don’t truly recognize that freedom until we are about to lose it.

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Reading Eagan’s book was not the first time I’d heard this regret expressed.

When I first started writing about death, I interviewed death doula and children’s TV writer Darnell Lamont Walker (whose book, Never Can Say Goodbye, comes out in February!). I asked him what he would regret most if he were to die tomorrow, and I was taken aback by his answer: “I wish I had learned ballet.”

To me, this is such an important reminder of what contemplating mortality is really all about. It’s easy to assume that thinking about death will lead us to serious, major life changes: pursuing more purposeful careers, healing broken relationships, cementing our legacy. And sometimes it does. But just as often, it leads us back to the simplest pleasures. It reminds us that the small things are actually the big things, and that everything we love is fleeting.

Coming home to the body

Like most regrets of the dying, it’s the things we didn’t do (rather than the mistakes or failures) that haunt us. So why do we stop dancing? What keeps us from appreciating and enjoying our bodies while we still have the chance?

Part of the answer is simple and difficult at the same time: being in a body is often painful—sometimes exquisitely so. We carry not only our own pain and trauma, but that of the people who came before us. Our bodies endure loss, injury, stress, illness, violence. They hold more than we can see.

And yet, faced with death—with the reality of life in this body coming to an end—so many of us wish we had appreciated it more. We wish we had savored the embodied joys and pleasures of movement, touch, sensation and rhythm that were always available to us.

For many of us, it’s the weight of unprocessed trauma that keeps the joy of embodiment just out of reach. The FX series Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, explores this beautifully. (If you haven’t already seen it, go watch it right now—it is incredible.) The series follows a woman in her forties who pursues sexual pleasure and liberation after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. In her quest to finally experience her first orgasm, she must confront the childhood trauma that led to a lifetime of disembodiment and feeling unsafe in her body. Even as her body slowly deteriorates, she is able to come home to it for the first time.

Other times, it’s not trauma so much as the seriousness of adult life that disconnects us from our bodies. Caught up in the treadmill of to-dos, we live almost entirely in our heads. We might start to forget that we even have a body! We become consumed by struggle and obligation, by productivity and survival, and forget to actually enjoy being alive. Somewhere along the way, we lose the plot. We follow the script of unconscious cultural and generational stories that tell us life is supposed to be hard—and that pleasure, especially bodily pleasure, is suspect or sinful.

Alan Watts captures so perfectly: “We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end… But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

For me, it was both. As I got older, I spent less time dancing. Movement (when it happened at all) became goal-oriented and pragmatic: the structured sequences of an asana practice and the utilitarian rhythm of jogging. The busier and more “in my head” I was at any given period of my life, the less I danced, and the less free I felt in my body. When I was grieving, I stopped moving almost altogether. The trauma of sudden overlapping losses sent my nervous system into freeze (and then functional freeze), and I become increasingly disembodied—a state that it took years to begin finding my way out of (still working on it, tbh).

Dance became both a path to healing and an expression of it. This past year, with my new commitment to experiencing the joy of my body, I found myself dancing in all kinds of places: on wedding dance floors, at sunrise at Burning Man, in the living room with my toddler, in the old church on the Bowery on Friday mornings. Looking back, it feels like the best way I could have possibly spent my time.

There’s no quick fix to healing the deeper traumas we experience in this life: physical and emotional abuse, sexual trauma, tragic losses, systemic injustice and oppression. Healing our trauma, and becoming embodied, is a complex and often lifelong journey. But the fruit of our healing—the experience of embodiment—is also the medicine.

Dancing isn’t just something we can enjoy once we’ve healed ourselves. It is one of the most powerful paths to healing. (“If you just set people in motion, they'll heal themselves,” Roth said.) The body isn’t something to overcome; it’s something to come home to, while we still can.