about me
After my mom died in 2020, I realized how crucial it is to have a death plan. Not only for her, the one who died, but also for us, the ones who lost her. In the years since she’s died, I’ve come to realize how little we talk about death and how we want to die. We often don’t know what our parents want, what our siblings want, what our spouse or partners want.
But death happens to all of us, so why don’t we talk about it more? We plan who we want at our wedding, our child’s birth, at our 30th birthday, at our retirement party. But who do we want at our funeral? We talk about what outfits we will wear for those big life events, but what do you want to wear as your final outfit? How do you want your final event to be celebrated or remembered?
I hope to help bring awareness to the necessity of planning and talking about your death, and the death of those whom you love. I hope to make it a little easier for you and those around you and I hope to bring a little bit of lightness and humor instead of only sadness and doom.
I spent 7 years in the User Experience field talking and observing customers on what problems they had and then tried to create a solution to solve those problems. I was an integral part of the planning and executing of my moms death (no I’m not a murderer). I love planning and organizing, I love having deep, meaningful, and difficult conversations about the things that matter in life to people, and I want to give back. I want my work to be meaningful in some way. So, I took my skills and my interests and my experiences and I’ve landed here, in what I call Death Consulting, a place where I hope to help you plan for The Big Sleep in a way that makes you feel understood, comfortable and safe.
The short version
In 2019 it became pretty clear that my mom would die from her metastasized breast cancer. We didn’t know exactly when, and of course we were all holding out hope that she would survive, but either way we decided it felt right to make a plan, with her, for if she did die.
I’m not sure if my mom had come to terms that she would die and had accepted it then or if she was in complete denial, but either way my mom, dad and I sat down and started planning her death as if we were planning something normal, like a wedding. We had a spreadsheet with names and phone numbers that eerily resembled my wedding guest list. We talked about what dress she would wear, which reminded me of going wedding dress shopping with her a couple years before this. We talked about how she would want her hair, her makeup, and what color nail polish she wanted.
We talked about how she wanted to die, where she wanted to die, what she wanted to happen to her body. We went and looked at gravesites as a family and walked around wondering if this felt like the right place for her to be buried one day and for us to come visit her grave. Again, eerily similar to when I was touring wedding venues only a few years before. We talked about what kind of casket she wanted to be buried in, what kind of ceremonies and celebrations she wanted, as well as what my dad, brother and I wanted. We hired a death doula who had a lot of expertise in alternative ways of dying because that’s what my mom wanted. We had more planning sessions with her. My parents talked with hospice and the palliative care doctors to make sure no matter where she died, we were able to honor her desires as much as possible.
I learned you can bring pets into the hospital in the palliative care wing so I always brought my dog when my mom was there. We learned that insurance doesn't cover hospice forever, so we had to plan around when and how we wanted to leverage the extra help from them.
We had a lot of difficult but necessary conversations until we had a plan in place. My dad was in charge of contacting the first group of people with health updates on my mom. My aunt was in charge of contacting the second and third groups of people. My brother was in charge of food and drinks whenever the time came. I was in charge of her outfit, her makeup, and the little details. Our death doula educated and guided us through the process of dying as my mom decreased in health, and eventually passed away.
She wanted her body kept in the house for three days so family and friends could come say their goodbyes. She wanted to be buried in a wicker basket instead of a traditional casket. She didn’t want to be sent to a funeral home. We knew all of her wishes because we talked about it, we planned for it, we did research and hired necessary people to make sure her wishes were carried out. None of that would have happened if we didn’t plan or talk about death.
None of this planning was fun. It was uncomfortable and I hated doing it. But after going through the experience of her death, it became so obvious to me why talking about and planning for your death is so important. And how nice to have already planned it? It’s nice for you, the person dying, but it’s also helpful for the people around you. They aren’t left to make these important decisions about what you might have wanted while they're grieving.
Death is going to happen to all of us. That’s a fact.
We also don’t talk about it. For whatever the reasons are, we don’t like to talk about it, we don’t think it will happen to us, we think we have time. Hopefully that’s true, but eventually it will happen.
So, here I am, trying to take what I learned from my mother’s death, as well as my professional experience in interviewing and understanding people from my 7 years in User Experience, and also my knack for organization and planning and turning that into something that can hopefully help some people prepare for The Big Sleep.
And at the very least, I hope I can at least make the topic of death a little more digestible for people to think and talk about.
