When Amy Pickard’s mom died all of the sudden in 2012, she was understandably grief-stricken. However she additionally felt annoyed and overwhelmed, since her mom didn’t plan forward for her dying.
“I might have given something to speak to my mother only one extra time, nevertheless it wasn’t to listen to her inform me she cherished 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 mentioned, can you set her [body] on ice? As a result of I do not know what’s going on,” Pickard remembers. In an effort to normalize dying and create a death-positive motion, Pickard teaches individuals tips on how to throw a dying occasion and add some humor to the inevitable and infrequently daunting end-of-life duties.
Coping with uncomfortable dying duties
Pickard refers to all the completely different choices that must be made and duties that must be accomplished after somebody dies as “dying duties.” She says these duties are “the hellscape of particulars compelled upon a grieving cherished one after their particular person dies.” This consists of obligations 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 mates,” she says. Stunned at how her mates took to the teachings, Pickard thought, “I’ve a message right here. And it’s touchdown.”
In 2014, she created an extended checklist of questions associated to when somebody dies. The checklist was a booklet known as Departure File, which she nonetheless sells at the moment. She included, “all of the minute, on a regular basis issues that got here up that I had no reply to, like ‘Do you will have a space for storing?’”
“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 need to reply the questions within the Departure File, so she determined to create a celebration the place everybody crammed out the solutions.
“I believed, ‘I’m communicator, I’m an extrovert and I’ve a humorousness, so why not have a celebration?’” she says.
Throughout 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 deliver a potluck dish based mostly on the recipe of a cherished one.
She didn’t have a marketing strategy when she began; as a substitute, she discovered as she went alongside and as her enterprise developed. Her events are actually 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 “had been blown away by it—all of us felt a gorgeous sort of electrical energy within the room,” Pickard remembers, noting that nobody else was internet hosting these kinds of occasions. “It’s unbelievable how vital that is, and the way in denial our complete society is over the one absolute constructive 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 communicate overtly about dying, dying and corpses.
The fashionable-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 anxiousness and terror of contemporary tradition are usually not,” 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 crammed out the Departure File and talked overtly 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 the 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 mentioned to him, “ that all the things 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 really 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 might have confronted making choices about duties associated to his dying.
Planning for dying is planning your life
Regardless that “Good To Go!” events are humorous and lighthearted, there are nonetheless instances, understandably, when individuals are grieving. Pickard handles these conditions by providing a tissue and attempting to assist them perceive that, “whenever you plan to your dying, it’s really 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 enthusiastic about what we need to occur once we die,” she says. Superior planning is a approach of letting individuals understand how you need to be remembered, she provides.
Pickard just lately expanded her enterprise to assist individuals declutter their houses whereas concurrently creating superior planning concerning their materials issues. She refers to this job as legacy organizing.
“I’m serving to individuals set up their houses 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 approach, you make new recollections. It’s really 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 desires to assist different individuals get by it too.”
Photograph by Bobby Tewksbury
