Don’t.
But if you must, do it on a Tuesday preferably in the wet part of a Midwest spring where it’s moody and ominous, forcing funeralgoers under black umbrellas and sunglasses to hide their grief. Hold out until you have successfully shadowed a devastated executrix and have transferred your voice memos to actionable legal documents while simultaneously picking out your funeral showing program, obviously choosing the agnostic eagle flying over a mountain.
Make sure your expired yogurt has been disposed of and that you have included custody of your four cats in your will. Do it lying down in a supine position, free of a violent fall or traumatic brain injury so your death certificate reads senescence instead of preventable accident. Your Facebook friends want to know if this was a drug overdose so mention “died of old age” in the obit.
Cancel your AOL account because you have not shared your password with any living humans in 30 years. Take care to evict your renters who haven’t paid rent since November and discontinue your car wash membership.
This way, your next of kin will avoid erratic Porsche rides with your lawyer the day before Christmas Eve, going 70 on a 45 throwing candy cane wrappers out of the window, making sure you are aware of the fact they once owned a golf course and that they have a hard stop at four to catch a plane to South Carolina.
Take out the trash. Alert the local media.
But maybe the most important way to prepare for death is to diminish the fear of it. And the only way to do that is to really live: sideways and upside down, with stories you share about that one time you hitchhiked to Colorado and the maybe slightly illegal kid things you did in high school and the ebb and flow of really falling in and out of love.
Which is why we need the dead and dying to teach us an urgent lesson on how we spend our time. Can I resist the lull of the mudane or is that part of it? To be in love with the laundry? To relish the morning commute? Fall head over heels for a sunset? If this is all going to end on a moody Tuesday in March while I’m in a supine position, how am I not desperate to go outside and feel all the things? How do I so comfortably waste so much time propped up on fear of being inadequate and alone that I scroll endlessly? How can I afford it? Why am I not desperate to see the life in everything I do when I’ve spent so much time with the dead?
I’m not sure I know the proper way to die as if there ever were a thing. But if we aren’t risking everything for joy, none of this matters. I do know that to be true.
So let’s not hesitate okay? Let’s say I love you and book the tickets and quit the jobs and kiss in public with the urgency that only the recently deceased can give us. We can’t afford not to.