My father passed on February 20, 2025

I’d experienced death in my family before, but nothing could have prepared me for this. Nothing. It was as if the light had gone out, and I was left to fumble through a dark room, arms extended, trying to feel my way through the world in hopes of avoiding the furniture I would inevitably run into. Life is just dimmer than it used to be for me, and, honestly, I don’t know if it will ever be as bright again.

But something dawned on me that gave me hope: what if death could teach us how to live?

In Western civilization, death is often seen as a taboo subject, a cultural faux pas, so we often avoid it in conversations on account of its morbidity and norm violation. What’s worse, we often pretend as if it’s not going to happen. Yet, death is a universal experience we will all someday share. It’s undefeated. So, why wouldn’t we want to be better at dying?

Stop for a moment and think about how you felt reading that last sentence. Not so great, huh? Me neither. But that’s my point exactly. Our fear of death is so salient that it just might be robbing us of our love for life.

Maura McInerney-Rowley is a death doula who posits that thinking about death might be the key to unlocking the things we really want in life. This conviction led her to create a platform called Hello, Mortal to help people contemplate their mortality as the missing link to a richer, fuller, more meaningful, and creative life. It’s a novel perspective that I hadn’t quite considered, despite the fact that I’ve spent so much of my career teaching people about the power of perspective. How ironic. But it makes a ton of sense, even in my state of seemingly bottomless grief. Living a better life could actually help us better embrace death.

You know, it’s been said that the graveyard is the richest place on earth due to the unfulfilled potential of the lives we lead—or choose not to. The evangelist Myles Munroe put it this way, “The wealthiest place in the world is not the gold mines of South America or the oil fields of Iraq or Iran. It is the cemetery. There lie buried companies that were never started, inventions that were never made, bestselling books that were never written, and masterpieces that were never painted."

The way I see it, if we want to get better at dying, perhaps we ought to get better at living.

Miss you, dad.