Most people do believe that death is something that happens to them. It is a medical event or biological conclusion? Something which lies just outside their reach.
But that is not the full scope of the truth.
While you may not be able to control the timing or the outcome of death, you absolutely can shape the experience of it. You can design the conditions. You can choose the lens through which to blast your imagination into overdrive. You can participate in one of the most significant thresholds of your life… or you can let it happen by default.
This is personal and what I encourage when I say ‘death is by your design’.
What Death Authorship Actually Looks Like
Death authorship does not mean you are about to control the death itself. It means making intentional choices and clarifying how you want to be cared for, what environment feels right, who you want present, and what kind of atmosphere you are moving toward.
It looks like asking yourself a few mighty questions:
● What do I want the room to feel like?
● Do I want intervention or comfort prioritized?
● What sensory details matter to me—lighting, sound, temperature?
● Who do I trust to hold space with me?
● What do I want said, or not said?
These are not abstract or unattainable questions. They are design questions. And the answers shape your experience of…every thing.
I have watched someone relax the moment we sat outside daily in the air. I have read poetry, weaved with wool, told stories for hours, and decorated environments away from the noise of outside. The span of comfort or preferences such as dimmed lights and lamps from home. I have been with families that respond with softness when we turned off the relentless beeping of monitors. I have witnessed the shift in a room when someone's favorite music or instruments replaced a sterile, clinical silence.
These simple and free choices matter. They are by no means frivolous. They are part of how your body experiences the transitional threshold and also the beginning questions to the agency of your design.
Why Most People Avoid This Work
The cultural narrative around death is passive. So many of us are taught by example that death is something to endure, not design. Something that happens in these supposed, cubicle rooms with protocols and rules and regulations that we do not fully understand. These decisions have been made by people in white coats, usually male bodies, and black coats behind desks.
But that really is only one version of death.
I am here to embolden the changes taking place.
These decisions are not the only ones available to you.
The reason most people avoid thinking about their death is not that they are afraid of dying. It is that they are afraid of arriving there unprepared, disoriented, without language, without ground.
Preparation will remove that fear. Not by making death controllable, at the whims of others, nor by shrugging shoulders. Let us make it participatory.
Imagination as a Practical Tool
One of the most powerful tools in death preparation is imagination.
Before you can make practical decisions, you need to be able to visualize the threshold. To imagine what good will feel like for you. Imagine a nervous system that recognizes itself. This can be met gently and with your entire being.
Where visualization and values statements intersect, fear takes a backseat. This is a step that turns the abstract into something concrete. It gives your body a reference point that you recognize.
A quick and tender check-in is to close the eyes and float, then imagine:
What does the room look like? Who is there with you? What does the air feel like? What sounds are present? How does your body feel held? What do you not want to be there?
You are not committing to anything here, just wandering. You are building an orientation. The awareness of yourself in ideal terms, and the orientation is where all the good trouble of preparation begins.
The Freedom in Authorship
Here is what I have paid attention to and learned after only a few years of this work: the people who prepare for death are not more afraid. They become less afraid. They have done the thing so many do avoid. They look directly at their own mortality to clarify what matters and design the choices.
And now they are free because of their courage and bravery.
Free to live without that background hum of dread. Free to talk about death without flinching. Free to know that when the threshold comes to meet them, they will not be walking completely blind.
That is not a morbid space; it is a creative agency.
Death will come. It shows up to meet with you.
And perfectly enough, you do get to choose how you meet it. That choice, that unique and personal authorship, does change every thing.
