Key Takeways
Introduction
This morning the Pacific Northwest feels like it knows something. The air is damp and softened by autumn. Cedars stand like guardians. The ground gives a little underfoot, the moss and fallen needles making a kind of hush. When I’m overwhelmed, I come to places like this. I put my hand on bark. I let my breathing find its pace again. I listen.
When I originally wrote this at the end of September 2024, my father had just died after nine years living with Lewy Body Dementia, an illness that gradually carried him away from ordinary time. In the later stages, fear-fuelled hallucinations braided themselves into reality, and there were moments when the world he was in felt both intimate and unreachable. As I move through the tenderness of this loss while also caring for my family, I keep returning to a question I think many of us quietly hold:
How do we accompany someone we love as they approach death?
Not perfectly. Not performatively. Simply through presence that is human and real.
This reflection is for anyone living inside a long goodbye. For anyone who feels anticipatory grief building—week by week, breath by breath while the person they love is still here. And for anyone who wants a steadier way to be present when words start to fail.
The Power of Presence
There is a particular stillness in the forest: not empty, not void, but alive with meaning. It holds rustling leaves, distant birdsong, the hush of wind moving through branches. Sitting with someone who is dying can feel like that. The quiet isn’t something to fix. It is something to enter.
To be with my father in those final hours was to witness a slow ebb of consciousness—like mist lifting from the ocean at dawn. It asked me to set down my urge to explain, comfort, or steer. It asked me to be steady, not clever. Patient, not productive.
In Being with Dying, Joan Halifax (2008) describes a kind of “radical optimism”: not the denial of pain, but the willingness to meet death with an open-hearted honesty. In grief therapy online, we often return to this same practice. We learn to stay close to what hurts without abandoning ourselves—without pretending it isn’t hard, and without rushing to make it neat.
Presence does not require perfect words. Presence says: I’m here. I’m not leaving. You don’t have to do this alone.
The Simplicity of Love
In the final days, love can become startlingly simple.
A hand held. A glass of water offered. A cool cloth against a forehead. A soft “I’m here” when the room feels thin. These gestures are ordinary in most contexts. But near death, they take on a different weight—like small stones placed carefully on a cairn, marking the trail when language can’t.
In Present through the End, Kirsten DeLeo (2019) reminds us that accompanying the dying isn’t about doing the right thing; it’s about being there. About shared quiet. About allowing care to be felt more than explained.
Sometimes I think nature teaches this better than we do. The forest doesn’t rush the season. The trees don’t try to fix the rain. They simply hold what is here. They let the weather move through.
And we can do that too—at least in small moments. We can offer a steadiness that says, without drama: You matter to me. I’m staying, here by your side or with you closely held in my heart.
A Few Words That Hold Weight
When someone is close to dying, a strange pressure can rise in us: Say the right thing. Make it count.
But what I learned is that what matters most often isn’t impressive. It’s true.
Drawing from Maria Popova’s reflections on Wendy MacNaughton’s How to Say Goodbye, I leaned on a simple set of phrases—words that can create closure without trying to control the moment (Popova, 2020):
- I forgive you.
- Please forgive me.
- Thank you.
- I love you.
- Goodbye.
You don’t need all of them. You don’t need a scripted goodbye. But sometimes one honest sentence is a lantern.
In those final hours, I noticed how the room itself became part of the conversation: the pauses, the breathing, the quiet between words. It felt less like talking and more like accompanying, like walking beside someone toward a threshold neither of you can fully see.
A Framework for Presence
In the gentle stillness of those moments, I found myself returning to a few simple words—phrases that don’t try to explain death, but can help us stay close when everything feels unsteady. Drawing from Maria Popova’s reflections on Wendy MacNaughton’s How to Say Goodbye, I leaned into a small set of sentences that hold quiet power: “I forgive you,” “Please forgive me,” “Thank you,” “I love you,” and “Goodbye.” They don’t fix what can’t be fixed. They simply offer a bridge—like the steady rhythm of tidewater—connecting us across the threshold of what is ending (Popova, 2020).
But presence isn’t only made of words. Often, it’s made of the state we bring into the room.
In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek (2013) writes about the importance of training the mind toward peace—not as a way to bypass grief, but as a way to soften fear and create an atmosphere where compassion can lead. The inner weather of the person who is dying matters. So does the inner weather of the person staying beside them. When we can settle our own nervous system even a fraction, we offer something steady: not an argument against death, but companionship within it.
This is where nature keeps teaching me. Cedars do not strain toward steadiness; they are steady. The forest doesn’t demand that the mist hurry up and lift; it simply holds it. The ocean doesn’t ask permission to keep returning. Presence can be like that—less a performance, more a practice. Not passive, but intentional. A willingness to stay, to breathe, to offer warmth without pressure.
With my father, as his mind moved further into that liminal place between life and death, I realised the most meaningful gift I could offer was not insight, not reassurance, not the right sentence at the right time. It was my calm. My hand. My attention. A steady heart meeting the moment as it was.
Mary Oliver has always helped me understand this kind of companionship—not because she explains death, but because she honours the natural world as a teacher. In her poem White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field, she writes:
“maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—” (Oliver, 2003).
When I read those lines, I don’t hear a promise that dying will be easy. I hear an invitation to soften the grip of dread—to imagine that the transition might be held, even if it is also painful. Oliver’s owl rises and disappears into the marshes without argument. Her language reminds me that death, like the seasons, is not a moral failing or a problem to solve. It is a passage.
Creating a Sacred Space for Transition
Building on this, Holecek (2013) speaks to the importance of environment—the way a room can become a container. Not through perfection, but through intention. A gentle light. A familiar object. A playlist that steadies the air. Fewer interruptions. A quiet hand on a shoulder. A voice that doesn’t rush.
I think of the forest floor—the way fallen leaves create something soft and protective, a layering that holds what’s decomposing and what’s becoming. We can do something similar for the people we love: create a space that is kind to the body and respectful of the moment. A space where words can be secondary, and presence can do what presence does best—hold.
Accompanying someone close to death is rarely about knowing the right thing to say. It’s about bringing steadiness, love, and attention into a moment we cannot control. And when we don’t know how to do that, we can borrow wisdom—from teachers like Oliver and Holecek, from the tides, from the trees—until our own capacity for presence grows strong enough to carry us.
Embracing the Unknown
There are mornings in this part of the world when fog moves in like a living thing—quiet, patient, unbothered by our plans. It softens the edges of everything: the shoreline, the trees, the path ahead. In grief, the unknown can feel like that. Not a dramatic cliff, but a slow, enveloping veil that changes what we can see and how we walk.
During those final days with my father, I kept returning to Rebecca Elson’s Antidotes to Fear of Death. I won’t quote the whole poem here, but one image stayed in my body: her line about eating the stars—taking something vast and bright into herself as a response to fear (Elson, 2001). It felt like a refusal to look away. A way of meeting the enormity of death without collapsing into it.
Elson also writes of lying down beside our long ancestral bones—an image that grounds death in continuity, in lineage, in the steady rhythm of what has always been true. That helped me. It reminded me that dying is not an interruption of life’s order, but one of its oldest movements. Like tidewater turning. Like leaves letting go. Like the forest floor receiving what falls.
As my father’s breath slowed and his eyes grew distant, I realised accompaniment isn’t about resisting what’s coming or clinging to what’s already leaving. It’s about staying near. It’s about letting love be simple in a moment that can’t be managed. The fear didn’t disappear all at once—but it loosened, the way mist loosens when daylight keeps arriving.
What changed was not my understanding of death, but my relationship to it. I stopped trying to be a protector against the inevitable. I became a companion at the threshold. And in that shift, there was a strange kind of peace—not a happy peace, not a tidy peace, but an honest one. The kind that comes when you stop fighting the weather and start listening to it.
In the end, Elson’s antidote didn’t feel like denial. It felt like acceptance with eyes open. The willingness to hold the reality of death alongside the reality of love. To be present, not because it makes death easier, but because it makes aloneness less absolute.
And maybe that is the gift we can offer: our presence, our willingness to stay, and our quiet consent to the mystery unfolding …one breath, one moment, one soft turning at a time.
Conclusion
Accompanying someone at the end of their life is a sacred act—not because we do it perfectly, but because we agree to stay. It asks us to feel what we feel without turning away, and to offer a loving presence that doesn’t depend on having the right words. So much of the time, what matters isn’t what we say. It’s that we are there. That we return. That we let love move through the room in small, ordinary ways.
As I continue to walk through my own grief, I keep thinking about how presence isn’t only an end-of-life practice. It’s a way of being with the people we love while they’re still here—learning to soften, to listen, to touch the world gently, to make room for what’s true. It’s in these quiet moments that connection deepens, and the fear of aloneness loosens its grip.
When I need reminding, I go back to walk among the tallest trees of these nearby forests. I rest my palm against cedar bark and let my breath slow. The forest doesn’t rush anything. It holds what is here—rain, mist, loss, light—and somehow makes space for all of it. We can do something like that for one another. Not as a grand gesture, but as a steady offering: I’m with you. I’m not leaving.
If you’re walking alongside someone who is nearing the end of their life, I hope this reflection offers a small lantern. Not instructions, but more like permission. Permission to be human. Permission to be quiet. Permission to let presence be enough. If my grief counselling team or I may support you in any way, please book a free 15-minute consult to explore fit. We're here to walk alongside you during your experience of grieving.
References
DeLeo, K. (2019). Present through the End: A Caring Companion’s Guide for Accompanying the Dying. Shambhala Publications.
Elson, R. (2001). Antidotes to Fear of Death. In A Responsibility to Awe. Carcanet Press.
Halifax, J. (2008). Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death. Shambhala Publications.
Holecek, A. (2013). Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition. Snow Lion.
Oliver, M. (2003). White owl flies into and out of the field. In Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (pp. 27–28). Beacon Press.
Popova, M. (2020). How to say goodbye: An illustrated field guide to accompanying a loved one at the end of life. The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings). https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/05/25/how-to-say-goodbye/
Frequently Asked Questions
1, What is anticipatory grief, and why does it feel so intense during a long goodbye
Anticipatory grief is the grief that begins while someone you love is still alive. It often shows up when illness, dementia, or gradual decline stretches goodbye over months or years. It can feel so intense because your heart is holding two truths at once. They are here, and they are also changing, receding, slipping out of reach in small ways. You might feel tenderness, dread, irritability, numbness, relief, guilt, or a quiet kind of shock. None of this means you are doing grief wrong. It means you are responding to a love that is being asked to adapt in real time.
2, I do not know what to say to someone who is dying, is silence okay
Yes. Silence can be one of the most faithful forms of care. When the room gets quiet, you are not failing. You are listening. If words come, simple is often best, I am here, I love you, I am with you. If words do not come, your presence still speaks. A hand held, a steady voice, your breath slowing in the same room, these are not small things. They are often what the body trusts most.
3, What if my relationship with the person who is dying is complicated
This is more common than we admit. Complicated love can bring complicated grief. You might feel devotion and anger, longing and distance, grief and resentment, sometimes in the same hour. The end of a life can stir old stories, unfinished conversations, and the pressure to make everything right. Sometimes there is time for repair, and sometimes there is only time for what is honest. You do not have to force forgiveness, or closeness, or a polished goodbye. You can offer what you can offer without abandoning yourself. Even a quiet visit, a brief touch, a simple thank you, or a steady goodbye can hold real meaning.
4, After someone dies, why does grief sometimes feel quiet or unreal
Sometimes grief arrives as fog. You might feel numb, unreal, strangely calm, or as if you are watching your life from a few steps away. This can be your nervous system doing what it knows how to do, protecting you while reality settles in. If you have been caregiving for a long time, the quiet after death can feel especially stark. The vigilance stops, but your body still expects to keep listening for the next need. Over time, grief often moves like the tide. It comes close, it pulls back, it returns again. Quiet does not mean you did not love them. It often means your system is trying to survive what happened.
5, When might grief therapy be helpful after a loss, or during anticipatory grief
Grief therapy can be helpful when you feel alone inside what you are carrying, or when grief starts shaping your days in ways that feel hard to live with. That might look like sleep falling apart, anxiety spiking, shutdown, irritability, exhaustion, or a sense that you cannot find your footing again. It can also help during anticipatory grief, when you are living inside a long goodbye and trying to keep functioning, caring, working, showing up for others. Therapy does not erase grief. It gives you a steady place to be with it, to make meaning, to feel what you feel without being rushed, and to be accompanied while you learn how to live in a world that has changed.
