I have way too much experience with ignoring the elephant in the room….specifically in my second marriage that went on for probably at least seven years longer than it should have. We ignored the elephant. We put a doily on it and called it a table. I dusted it occasionally, failing to see how it was truly crowding me out of the room. Ignoring the elephant doesn’t just occur during times of marital strife. It can happen when we are enabling a substance abuser. Or when we ignore cues from our bodies until it’s too late. But, probably one of the biggest, and most important elephants to talk about is death.

We don’t like to talk about death. It makes us decidedly uncomfortable. It’s too close to home. It’s too real. It’s too sad. Kimberly Paul shows us how to start the conversation. She strips the doilies and the dust bunnies away from the great big elephant of death and shows us how to take some control in an otherwise bleak and uncertain time of our lives and the lives of those we love.

Kimberly has a story. We all do. Hers has her sweet fiancé who discovered melanoma…too late. Hospice was a Godsend for them as they navigated a painful journey toward the end of her fiancé’s life. At some point in her grief process, she saw an ad in the paper for a Volunteer Coordinator for a local hospice. She thought she was going in to volunteer but quickly found they needed someone full time. Eventually, she was moved to marketing director for Lower Cape Fear Hospice. Her experience as a screenwriter for Saturday Night Live and Dawson’s Creek, among others, gave Kimberly skills in communication and helped her have difficult conversations with hundreds of Hospice patients. She gave a TED-X talk on the subject. And she felt a calling. She wanted to write a book. She wanted to start a conversation. She wanted more people to talk about the elephant and make dying the topic it deserves to be…an opportunity to live well in your last years. This isn’t necessarily Kavorkian. We design other parts of our lives…education, marriage, family, careers, retirement…why not death? The next logical step for this compassionate, forward-thinking woman was a podcast series and “Death by Design” was born.

I received a private message from Kimberly in November asking if she could interview me for the Death by Design podcast. I was intrigued. I was thinking this could just be a long series of depressing narratives about a subject no one wants to talk about. Then I got on the phone with her and I got hooked into her frank, upbeat, intelligent approach to embracing our end. After all, it’s unavoidable…why not live our final years “by design”? My segment will be aired in early March. I’ll share a link when we get there. In the meantime, since we talk about death a lot here, I wanted to turn you on to Kimberly’s page at http://www.deathbydesign.com/so you can explore it on your own. Yesterday, there was some discussion here on The Ranch about someone’s husband that has cancer and he hasn’t made a will. I’m hoping listening to Kimberly will help them have the difficult conversation…even if it means you’re “bugging him”. ❤️

“Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭85:10‬ ‭ESV‬‬