I make a living talking about death.
I sit with families when the words "there isn’t more we can do" become the beginning of a different kind of care. I talk about hospice and grief, and I begin conversations most of us spend our lives avoiding.
And the most important thing I’ve learned is this: Working around death has made me want to live much more boldly.
I didn’t choose this education. It chose me.
The futures we grieve
In 2012, my daughter Vivian died. Some deaths divide life into a before and an after. Vivian’s death was the first. It reshaped everything I thought I knew about love, being a mom, life and dreaming about my future.
Years later, another kind of death divided my life: the death of my marriage.
In many ways, that grief was more disorienting. I wasn’t
only grieving a person. I was grieving the life I thought I would live.
In both of these endings, there was a particular ache in losing a future that never fully arrived. You can’t bury it. You can’t hold it. There is no ritual for the life you thought you were promised. You simply wake up one day and realize the storyline you were writing no longer exists.
I’ve learned that grief was never meant to keep us weighed down. When we stop resisting it, grief changes us. It refuses to leave us where it found us.
What the dying wish they had done
Years after Vivian’s death, and after the end of my marriage, I found myself sitting beside other people’s losses through hospice and end-of-life work. Something unexpected happened: all those unique griefs I witnessed began to speak into each other.
I heard families say the things they wished they had said sooner. I watched people wait for a crisis to have conversations they had avoided for years. I watched dying people care less about what they had accumulated and more about who they had loved, what they had forgiven, and whether they had truly lived.
At the end of life, people don’t wish for more things. They wish for more time. More courage. More forgiveness. More of the ordinary days they once rushed through.
And slowly, I realized those aren’t lessons reserved for the dying. They are lessons for the living.
Living means waking up to the fragility of time. It means noticing the beauty of an ordinary Tuesday, making the phone call we keep postponing, saying the apology, risking love, permitting ourselves to begin again and accepting the truth that none of us gets to stay here forever.
Grief and joy can live together
I am approaching 40 this fall, and I find myself taking inventory − not just of what has passed, but of what is still possible. I have been shaped by everything that didn’t go right: the losses, wrong turns and heartbreaks. But perhaps becoming who we are was never about avoiding those things.
We don’t get to choose what happens to us. But we do get to choose what we do with it. I don’t want to live a life untouched by grief. I want to live a life transformed by it.
Choosing joy does not erase what we’ve lost. Joy and grief are not opposites. They are often neighbors. So are heartbreak and hope. So is missing someone and still being fully alive.
I choose to live wide awake
Vivian’s life remains in the legacy of love I share with the patients and families I sit beside. I honor the end of my marriage by refusing to believe that one ending defines the rest of my story.
Becoming isn’t about avoiding what can break us. It is about leaning into the breaking and allowing ourselves to be recreated − to become someone new, someone perhaps more beautiful because of what we have endured.
Grief is the witness to the depth of our love. Death has taught me that life is not something we are promised. It is something we are given.
I intend to spend the rest of mine wide awake.
Maria Lees-Dunlap lives in White Oak and is a mom of seven, End-of-Life Doula, Certified Grief Specialist, and Community Liaison for Grace Hospice, where her work with death and grief has taught her-and others-how to live more boldly.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Working around death has taught me how to live | Opinion
