How we live is how we die

A month ago, our family stepped into a hard reality.

A close family member went in for heart surgery, and the surgery did not go well. For a month, they have mostly been held in place by machines — sedated beyond recognition, more tubes running through them than in all of London, a dedicated nurse at their side every hour, and a chorus of beeping that speaks a language my creative brain cannot translate. What I do understand is this: we are waiting. And waiting, it turns out, is one of the hardest things a human being can do.

My partner and I haven’t experienced a tragedy like this so closely before. We are navigating this the only way we know how — imperfectly, tenderly, with our whole hearts. There have been moments of breathtaking closeness and moments of distance neither of us could explain. There has been beauty inside the grief, and grief inside the beauty. When life narrows to a single binary — they might live, they might not — you begin to see everything else in stark contrast to. The world becomes a pendulum, swinging between what is and what could be.

Every morning, I pray for grace. Because grace, I have come to believe, is what we all deserve.

It is in these fragile, watchful hours that life turns inward. The questions that surface are not small ones. How do I want to live? How do I want to die? What will be said about the space I took up in this world?

And here is what I have been quietly witnessing: how we live is how we die.

I watched my grandfather take his last breath with such ease, such love, such extraordinary grace that it stays with me every single day. He had contracted scarlet fever at ten years old and was told his heart was too big — a diagnosis that turned out to be one of the most beautiful prophecies ever spoken. At sixty, he underwent quintuple bypass surgery. His heart was so strong, so outrageously full of life, that the surgery only made it stronger. He went on for thirty-four more years.

I think of him with deep and profound admiration. Shouldn't we all be so lucky as to have too big a heart?

Eventually, his heart simply could no longer be contained within a human body. And when the moment came, his dying was nothing more than a small, graceful echo of his living — a full heart, releasing.

This past summer, the poet Andrea Gibson died.

If you've followed my writing for any length of time, you know how much their words have shaped me. I didn't know them personally, but I got to witness them perform at $2 open mic nights in Boulder and Denver in my twenties, and their words have made an inner library in my heart. The night of the surgery, my husband was traveling for work and couldn't get home until the next day. So I did the only thing that felt right to both of us: I read Andrea's poetry to him over the phone until he fell asleep.

If you've seen the Oscar-nominated documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, you already know what I mean when I say Andrea made their death a gift. They showed us how to dance through a diagnosis. They taught us that happiness is easier to find once we don't have forever to find it. When they died, they were surrounded by dozens of people who loved them. Their last words were: I fucking loved my life.

Even their final sentence was a poem.

They died exactly as they lived — with being of service, tender, a heart shattered into a thousand pieces, and bottomless joy.

And now I am here, in this ICU waiting room, watching a family member move through the most critical hours of their life. And I am seeing the same pattern emerge, though it breaks my own heart to bear witness.

They had lived a life saturated in pain. Not because they are weak — but because they are human, and unhealed, and the wounds of their childhood never found a way out. They moved instead through their body, settling into every crevice, every joint, every nerve. Their life became a constant cry for help. And because the help they needed could only have come from within, it never fully arrived. I watch that story playing out now on the grandest, most vulnerable stage of all, and my heart aches alongside theirs. Maybe repairing their heart is Western medicine’s answer to mending the broken-hearted. They will most likely survive this but life will never be the same as it was before surgery.

I have dozens of stories like these three. And in every one, the pattern holds.

So what do we do with this, we ordinary, magnificent, mere mortal people?

My invitation to you is this: start living the way you want to die.

If you want ease at the end, practice ease now. If you want peace, begin the work of finding peace today. If you want your final breath to feel like wonder, go experience wonder while your legs still carry you. If you want a death free from pain, find the courage to feel your pain now — move through it, sit with it, release it — so it does not have to live in your body forever.

There is no scientific study behind my hypothesis. What I do have is a lifetime of watching people, and a truth I have spoken to every client I've ever worked with: how we do one thing is how we do everything.

If that is true — and I know in my bones that it is — then how we live is how we will die. And if that is true, then there is only one question worth asking yourself today:

What is one thing I can do right now that points me in the direction of how I want to go?

Start there. The rest will follow.