You’ve long since heard the public service announcement: You’re going to die and so am I. And if you’re like most people, you’d rather put it off and not think about it, as in, at all, ever. I get it…it’s a buzzkill.

And yet when we’re confronted with OPD (other people’s death), it can often feel like we’re being reawakened to the couer de vivre, the essence and heart of life itself. Ordinary time falls away and suddenly, we become acutely aware of the simplest of gestures. We are reminded of who our people are by the ways in which they show up and help us navigate through the precarious days when Death comes calling.

We feel things more intensely. Or conversely, we become numb to it all. My point is, we slip into a kind of altered or what I call altared state where there is a sense of something numinous and incredibly special at work. The little things that seemed so important the day prior have now been rendered meaningless. What becomes illuminated for us when Death comes are the things like love, kindness, and the well-meaning thoughts and actions of our community of loved ones. And what we focus on ~ the salient things that matter as we pay tribute to our dearly departed ones, is the manner in which they lived and loved. We do the work of holding all the memorable moments in the palms of our hands and we reflect upon how it is that these intangible treasures become the things we will miss most.

In this way, Death is a verb. Not simply because it is an active albeit underground force at work in our bodies from day one, but because it is agential. It comes for our people, often when we least expect it, which is such a shady and flawed deal when you think about it. If we could only have come into this world with toe tags imprinted with our death date for all to see, just imagine how the quality of our relationships and our days might improve. No longer would we be shuffling our feet and sloughing off our audacious dreams, waiting for someone, anyone to hand us a permission slip card that says, Pass Go…Collect $200, and For Goodness Sake, Go Do That Darn Thing You’ve Been Putting Off Forever! 

We’d be busy doing that darn thing because we would already be calculating our days and fastidiously subtracting one from the calendar each new morning we wake up. We’d be hell-bent on carpe’ing our moments. Little wonder that seize is Death’s favorite verb, both in how it steals from us and how it ominously whispers to us Left Behinders to seize our days while we can.

It’s either get busy dying, or get busy living and the best way to live awakened is to have a consciousness that Death has already scribbled a date in invisible ink on our dance card. This is that agential part. Death is always there…waiting in the shadows at the edge of our dance floors.

And so borrowing a page from the late, great conscious dying master Stephen Levine (author of A Year to Live), we do well to make a date with death and to reconfigure its agential force in our lives from an unhealthy co-dependency to a more permissive partnership; treating it instead like a kind of subliminal coach who is “here” to teach us how live more purposefully. I’ve talked about aspects of this before here and here, and I’ll keep talking about it until my own dying day.

Seriously, we need to make space for Death as in pencil it on the calendar, not as a way of “attracting” it, but as a way to better understand it, be proactive about getting our financial, logistical and emotional mortality ducks in a row, get comfortable and less fearful about it, and ultimately, make peace with the inevitability of it all.

There are all kinds of ways you can go about this. For the techie-inclined, google “end-of-life apps” and you will find a plethora of digital companies happy to help you get more organized or contemplative…or agitated, in the case of the online death clocks that arbitrarily calculate your projected date of death, based on your age, weight, BMI, and other factors. 

Breaking life down into small conscious-living seasons is not a bad way to live. Consider author Patti Digh’s book, Life is a Verb, inspired by her stepfather having only 37 days to live from the date of his lung cancer diagnosis. Little surprise that she advocates for creating one’s own 37-day fiercer living project. This is the mathematical reality of Death – our days are numbered and while those days vary greatly for each of us, they are always and ever diminishing. 

For the socially-minded, consider attending a Death Café in your locale or hosting your own Death Over Dinner. For the intellectually-oriented, you’ll want to spend time acquainting yourself with the speakers and topics that Dr. Karen Wyatt has spent the last few years curating online at End-of-Life University.

Or if you live in Seattle and want to pencil in 6-8 dates on the calendar, drop me a line and I’ll add you to my Death Becomes Us fall workshop series list.

And for you writerly types, borrow inspiration from the poem below and craft your own “When I Die” poem to leave behind as a kind of instructional list of heartfelt imperatives for your loved ones.

Look for the verbs in the poem (let, be, notice, take, look, wear, eat, take, taste, read, put, move, feel and give) and using those as your template prompts, try your hand at imagining the locale and how you would like your loved ones to celebrate your life. Add your own verbs (such as some variation of share, confess, or admit that help reveal a funny story about you).

In contemporary death industry circles, this contemplative work is an important aspect of having a good death – that we have a say and aren’t afraid to speak up about our wishes for fear of sounding morbid or strange.

I wrote my own variation of this poem in the form of a poetic Heart Will last year for a pilot e-course launch that the good folks at Willow EOL were spearheading, and it was a powerful exercise in getting real and imaginal about my own death. It was also a great method for engaging in a bit of self-eulogizing. I was able to weave in lines that spoke to my inimitable essence and I got to be bossy from what will be the great beyond, by asking that they “sing me home as only a threshold choir of loved ones can: off-key and out of sync.”

The grim truth is that we all have an as-yet unwritten poem called When I Die. It’s not If I Die. It’s kind of a bigger deal than we make of it, insofar as all our life roads are going to lead there. Why then do we spend so little time talking about it?

Let’s start getting wise to those whys so we can get busy really verbing all the rest of our days with a little more zest mixed with a good balance of rest.

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WHEN I DIE } by Lucille Lang Day

Let the sky be blue as a Steller’s jay
and rippled with clouds, the trail
be rimmed with blossoms blowing
in wind soft as baby’s breath.
Notice the red maids, each with five
bright petals and hairy-edged sepals,
and sun cups—light-filled chalices
on stalks ringed with oval leaves.

Take a lance-like leaf from a bay tree,
break it and breathe deeply. Look
for the black cap and yellow breast
of a Wilson’s warbler if you hear
a series of musical chirps, dropping
slightly in pitch toward the end,
coming from the willow by the stream.

Wear vermillion, indigo or violet. Eat
wild mushroom risotto with fresh thyme
and Taleggio cheese. Take a bite
of curried chicken with eggplant relish.
Let your tongue caress fresh
strawberries, kiwi fruit and grapes.

Taste—no devour!—the chocolate-hazelnut
truffle tart. Open a bottle of chardonnay.
Read a poem that mentions luminous cells
or blue-pod lupine, its curved banner petals
waving on a cliff by the raucous sea.

Put on a CD that’s good for dancing,
maybe rock-n-roll from the fifties or sixties.
I always liked Little Richard and the Beatles.
Move as the music enters your body. Feel
your heart beat faster, then think of me.

I will be your partner, the air and light
that surround you. Give yourself
to the rhythm as arms and legs lead you.
I will be there, spinning with you.
Trust me. I won’t step on your feet.