Why I write my own obituary every year for perspective on the life I'm living
A few years ago I decided to make my first vision board. The vision board phenomenon has been popular for a while, but for some reason I'd never felt the pull to make one. I can’t say for sure that my avoidance of vision boards is connected to my visual art practice, but I was in a midlife season of monumental stress, and if you'd told me there was a magical elixir in the gnawings of southern fire ants, I would have gladly slathered my naked body in Florida's finest orange blossom honey and lain face down in the dirt for a reprieve. The idea of a vision board sounded loads more fun and a lot less painful.
For over a decade I've been a professional artist and a maker of things since I could hold a pencil and scissors. Collage is a favorite way of making. So one weary afternoon, I sat down with a stack of old magazines and got to visioning.
The scissors and X-Acto blade did their swift work, the soft-crisp sound of cutting through pulped trees filling the air. Like a magpie, I was drawn to certain imagery out of habit. Earthy colors, globby shapes and scenes tugged at my subconscious while futuristic assemblages provided a compelling contrast. I remember a particularly evocative shiny black pendant lamp that looked like it belonged in an alien lab. It was a period of perpetual caregiving exhaustion but connecting with my creativity in this new, looser way was rather delightful. And I did have fun.
I glued everything down on a large sheet of drawing paper, hung my vision board on the back of my home office door and waited for its magic to sparkle forth. I kept waiting. I’m not totally into manifestation or affirmations (I’m also not not totally into them), but in my frazzled mind and body it was this or fire ants and I was desperate. I'd look at it now and then and imagine myself in a series of scenes I didn't really connect with. It took me a day or so to realize the composition had an altar-like quality, and the travel scenes felt strange. I struggled to picture myself and my beloved in any of them. If I'm honest, it was just, well, a really lovely collage. Its fragments of a possible future didn't light me up as my dreamy future. I just didn’t feel connected to it.
It turned out that I didn't have a vision problem. I was murky on my values, and no amount of visioning and collaging was going to address that.
Write Your Obituary
The first time someone asked me to write my own obituary, I admit that I didn't really understand the assignment.
It was 2015, part of a workshop for artists on building a sustainable creative practice. Among the business exercises was a single page with one instruction: Write Your Obituary. There was no explanation or discussion, just the suggestion that it might help us find greater clarity in our work.
Like many people, I assumed it was an exercise in legacy. I started thinking about accomplishments, exhibitions and the things I hoped people might say about me after I died. It felt strangely performative, almost false. Resistant to such elaborate promises, I gave it a half-hearted attempt, closed the workbook and didn't think much about it again.
In 2021, my father died. That very real death was so painfully suffused with denial that even the experts could barely whisper their wisdom. Over many sleepless nights, I wondered: how did an utterly natural part of life become so taboo?
Three more members of my family would die that year. I remember feeling unmoored, unable to navigate all that was unfolding. Still, writing my father's obituary became both a buoy and a healing balm.
Then in 2023, I completed INELDA’s End-of-Life Doula training. I thought it would teach me more about mortality, and it did, filling the holes in what I understood about death and dying with a rich, earthy humus I’d been longing for. I learned that a doula’s early work centers on life meaning and a remembrance project, something the dying person makes that helps loved ones stay connected after they’re gone. It is deeply human work, weaving together the emotional, physical and spiritual into a singular symphony that will be experienced only once.
After that training, I decided to sit down with my own obituary again. This time, I set an intention to remain open and curious. And I gave myself permission to linger instead of rushing toward answers. What surprised me most was how much I'd misunderstood the assignment all those years before.
The obituary wasn't really asking me to think about my death. It was asking me to pay closer attention to the life I was already living. The choices I was making, the conversations I was postponing, the work that felt meaningful. All the places where I had slowly drifted away from myself.
Those first drafts often felt embarrassing. I wrote about work I said mattered to me and realized, on the page, that it was actually contributing to my burnout. I wrote about people I called close and noticed how long it had been since I’d actually spent time with them. And I realized I’d spent years confusing my desire for achievement with the desire for a life well lived, and what that could look like for me.
A Lab for the Existential
So moved by what I was experiencing, in 2025 I turned my art studio into a lab for exploring the existential. I held my first death café and began inviting strangers to reflect and write about their life’s most meaningful moments for The Obituary. Many came who were recently bereaved, facing illness, or carrying old wounds from lives long gone. Others came just because they were curious about death. I was shocked by the interest just within my small pond.
People who've done this work with me find things they aren’t always looking for. One participant told me writing their obituary was unexpectedly enlivening. The work they dearly enjoyed doing didn't appear once in their reflections. Everything pointed instead to nature, to being outdoors, to how much they'd let that slide. They left already planning to change it. Another reached the end and said, almost startled by their own words: "Huh, I just realized I really like spending time alone." That wasn’t in the exercise as I had designed it. It was revealed through the experience.
Neither of them set out looking for those answers. They were curious and willing to try something in service of what might be unearthed. That's what careful, honest attention can surface.
When I talk about my death awareness work, I often hear some version of "My family will just write my obituary when I'm gone." Sometimes it's practical: it's just a task, so why do it now when someone else will handle it later? I've literally heard people say, "I'll be dead. It won't matter." To that I say fair enough.
Sometimes there's something floating beneath the surface: an avoidance, a sense that looking straight at your own ending is too much, so better to leave it to whoever's left. That used to be me. It certainly was part of my family culture.
Chase being remembered, and you're betting on people who will also die, and on the people after them, until the whole chain runs out anyway. What's left isn't who remembers you. It's who you actually were while you were here.
Some people write their obituary for themselves, to get honest about what they value while there's still time to live differently because of it. Some do it for whoever will grieve them, so the people who loved them aren't left assembling the pieces of a life while they're in the middle of losing it. Most people, if they're honest, are here for a bit of both.
That remembrance project works the same way. A dying person engages with their own life and leaves something behind for the people they love. There are so many ways a life can ripple outward. I like to think that becoming more fully yourself isn’t an act of self-improvement at all–it’s a form of reciprocity with the world.
A Life Compass
I write my obituary every year. What matters to me shifts, and the only way I’ve found to catch that shift, and get some perspective on the life I’m living, is to sit down and peer again into the void. It's the closest thing I have to a life compass, and for me it's a lot more authentic than a board full of aspirational photographs that leave me feeling kind of floaty.
As I write my annual obituary, I connect with my body before I begin to write. Somatic coaching taught me this: my body often registers something before my mind has the ability to articulate it. The breath that catches. The shoulders that tighten. The sacred pause before the more honest answer.
And I ask what I'm actually postponing. Not what I want someday. What I'm avoiding right now, and I get curious about why, sensing my way into all that I am feeling, even when it feels like nothing.
I don't think there's anything wrong with imagining what you want through a vision board. I just think most of us reach for the vision before we've done the harder work of figuring out what's most honest about what we want in the first place. Not what is expected. Not the shoulds.
The next time I sit down with the scissors and glue to create a vision board, I'll at least know what I'm selecting, and why.
Yours in wonder,
Michelle
P.S. Weird fun fact: one really big and important part of my vision board that year actually came true. Go figure.
P.P.S. If you'd like to try this yourself, I created The Obituary: two hours of guided meditation and reflective writing, ending with a first draft in your own words. It includes lifetime access, so you can return to it the way I return to mine each year.
Explore The Obituary →