When Amy Pickard’s mom died all of a sudden in 2012, she was understandably grief-stricken. However she additionally felt pissed off and overwhelmed, since her mom didn’t plan forward for her dying. 

“I’d have given something to speak to my mother only one extra time, nevertheless it wasn’t to listen to her inform me she beloved me; I wanted her to inform me the friggin’ Wi-Fi password!” Pickard says.

Since her mom lived distant, Pickard didn’t know what payments wanted to be paid or what to do together with her mom’s now-deceased physique. 

“I simply stated, can you set her [body] on ice? As a result of I don’t know what’s going on,” Pickard recollects. In an effort to normalize dying and create a death-positive motion, Pickard teaches individuals learn how to throw a dying celebration and add some humor to the inevitable and infrequently daunting end-of-life duties. 

Coping with uncomfortable dying duties

Pickard refers to the entire completely different choices that have to be made and duties that have to be accomplished after somebody dies as “dying duties.” She says these duties are “the hellscape of particulars compelled upon a grieving beloved one after their individual dies.” This consists of tasks resembling cleansing their home and sorting their belongings, making funeral preparations, settling their funds and closing their property. 

After her horrible expertise together with her mom’s dying duties, Pickard wished to assist others keep away from the identical points. “I used to be preaching the gospel of superior planning to my buddies,” she says. Stunned at how her buddies took to the teachings, Pickard thought, “I’ve a message right here. And it’s touchdown.” 

In 2014, she created a protracted listing of questions associated to when somebody dies. The listing was a booklet known as Departure File, which she nonetheless sells at present. She included, “all of the minute, on a regular basis issues that got here up that I had no reply to, like ‘Do you could have a cupboard space?’”

“Good To Go!” dying events are altering the narrative

Pickard realized most individuals consider dying and dying as morbid and creepy, so that they don’t like to speak about it. She additionally knew most individuals would most likely not wish to reply the questions within the Departure File, so she determined to create a celebration the place everybody stuffed out the solutions. 

“I assumed, ‘I’m a superb communicator, I’m an extrovert and I’ve a humorousness, so why not have a celebration?’” she says.

Through the events, Pickard tapped into her humorousness by creating death-themed soundtracks with songs like “One other One Bites the Mud” and “Stairway to Heaven.” She additionally had everybody convey a potluck dish based mostly on the recipe of a beloved one. 

She didn’t have a marketing strategy when she began; as an alternative, she discovered as she went alongside and as her enterprise developed. Her events at the moment are known as “Good To Go!” events, although company have additionally described them as “Loss of life Tupperware Events” or “Fete du Mort” shindigs.

Individuals who attended the preliminary events “have been blown away by it—all of us felt an exquisite form of electrical energy within the room,” Pickard recollects, noting that nobody else was internet hosting a lot of these occasions. “It’s unbelievable how vital that is, and the way in denial our whole society is over the one absolute optimistic factor that we all know with 100% certainty goes to occur,” she says. 

Normalizing the death-positive motion

In a bid to overturn this cultural considering, Pickard considers herself to be a part of the death-positive motion—a mind-set that encourages individuals to have end-of-life celebrations and converse brazenly about dying, dying and corpses. 

The trendy-day idea of the death-positive motion dates again to the Nineteen Seventies, however the death-positive motion was additional popularized in 2011 by Caitlin Doughty, a mortician who believes individuals ought to change their perceptions about dying. On her web site, The Order of the Good Loss of life, Doughty says dying must be part of your life. “Accepting that dying itself is pure, however the dying nervousness and terror of recent tradition aren’t,” Doughty states on her web site.

When Pickard’s father died, the expertise was reverse that of her mom’s dying. Pickard attributes that to the truth that he stuffed out the Departure File and talked brazenly together with her about superior planning. When she first created the Departure File, she wished to assist others and didn’t think about the way it might in the future assist her. Like her mom, her father died all of a sudden. When he was intubated within the hospital, she gave a duplicate of his Departure File that included his superior care directive to the workers. Their response was, “Nobody ever does this. That is wonderful.”

Earlier than Pickard’s father handed away, she stated to him, “ that every little thing is taken care of.” She says the look of peace on his face in response introduced her consolation. It was at that second she understood that superior planning additionally brings peace to an individual earlier than they die. 

“It was such a bizarre, ironic second that the corporate that I created for others truly helped me and helped my grief,” she says. “With [my dad’s] instruction, I felt empowered. I felt I used to be honoring him.” The instructions he supplied additionally eradicated any uncertainty she could have confronted making choices about duties associated to his dying.

Planning for dying is planning your life

Despite the fact that “Good To Go!” events are humorous and lighthearted, there are nonetheless occasions, understandably, when persons are grieving. Pickard handles these conditions by providing a tissue and attempting to assist them perceive that, “once you plan in your dying, it’s truly planning your life.”

She explains that individuals put together for pure disasters by stocking up on candles and getting a generator, however they don’t plan for his or her dying. “We spend extra time constructing a burrito than we do serious about what we wish to occur after we die,” she says.  Superior planning is a manner of letting individuals understand how you wish to be remembered, she provides.

Pickard just lately expanded her enterprise to assist individuals declutter their properties whereas concurrently creating superior planning concerning their materials issues. She refers to this process as legacy organizing.  

“I’m serving to individuals set up their properties for his or her dying,” she says. She explains that her providers are just like that of a “dying concierge.” She says, “I encourage individuals to wash out their locations with their households. And that manner, you make new reminiscences. It’s truly enjoyable.”

This lighthearted strategy to dying and superior planning underscores Pickard’s mission with “Good To Go!” events. “I’m not a health care provider; I’m not a lawyer. I’m simply actually a woman that’s lived by grief and needs to assist different individuals get by it too.”

Picture by Bobby Tewksbury