Holding Their Hands

On being present at the end of three lives — and why it changed everything I make.

I have held the hand of someone I love as they took their last breath.

Three times.

Three grandparents. Three different rooms. Three completely different kinds of leaving.

The first time I was not prepared. I don't think you can be, really, no matter how much you expect it. There is a quality to the silence in a room where someone is dying that I cannot describe to someone who hasn't been in one. It has weight. It has a particular kind of stillness that is different from ordinary stillness. The room knows before you do.

I held their hand and I didn't know what to say and I said some things and I don't remember what they were, and then they were gone, and then there were logistics. So many logistics. Papers to find. People to call. Decisions to make about things that hadn't been decided. And all of this while also trying to grieve, in real time, in a body that was still in shock.

The second time was different in the specific ways that each relationship is different. But the logistics were the same. The scramble was the same. The reaching for documents that may or may not exist, the trying to reconstruct what someone would have wanted based on things they said or implied or never said at all — that was the same.

The third time I knew what was coming. Not just the death — I knew the logistics were coming too. I knew what it was going to cost the people in that room to figure out what came next while also trying to feel what they were feeling. And I thought: it doesn't have to be this way.

The greatest gift you can give the people who love you is clarity. Not certainty — you cannot give them certainty. But clarity. Clear wishes about what happens to your body, your belongings, your digital life. Letters that say the things you should have said. A document that holds the answers so the people you love can spend their energy on missing you instead of scrambling to figure out what you would have wanted.

That is why I made When I Am Gone.

Not from theory. Not from reading about end of life planning or attending a workshop on estate preparation. From standing in three rooms with three people I loved and knowing, in my body, that there had to be a better way to leave.

I am also, now, a person who has received a cancer diagnosis. And sitting with that — with the particular clarity that a diagnosis brings, the way it sharpens your sense of what matters and what doesn't — I filled out the journal myself. I wrote the letters. I listed the accounts and the passwords and the documents and the things I would want someone to know.

It is one of the most loving things I have ever done for my children. Not morbid. Not dark. Loving.

Start the conversation. Write it down. Give the people who love you the gift of knowing.

They will be grateful you did. ❤️