Sarah Goldthwait: Life Lantern

There's the life we all planned on, and then there's the one that showed up.

Welcome to Founded Wyth Heart.

I'm Anne.

And I'm Katie.

We're the co founders of Wyth.

We built Wyth for the people that we were at our lowest when we needed it the most and it didn't exist yet.

Here's what we learned.

Since nobody's supposed to do any of the hard stuff alone.

So each week we sit down with somebody whose life didn't go the way they planned and who built something out of it anyway.

If you're in it right now, if you feel disappointed or alone, you're not.

We're glad you're here.

Today on Founded Wyth Heart, I'm so thrilled to welcome our very first guest, my good friend Sarah Goldthwait.

Sarah is the founder of Life Lantern.

Sarah, welcome.

We're so glad to have you here.

Thank you, Anne.

I'm so happy to be here.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Give us a little intro.

Who's Sarah?

My name is Sarah Goldthwait and I live in Minneapolis with my husband and our two daughters.

We've been here for about five years now and previously we were in San Francisco and Bogota, Colombia, and Paris, France.

So we've had quite a great adventure and it has allowed me to see how many different cultures deal with birth, death, day to day, life, etc, in such a beautiful way.

And professionally.

I started out in marketing and communications and then I got a master's degree in French, thinking I would become a French professor.

But life kept pulling me back to business and marketing and communications.

I launched a food company with a partner.

So I was in the consumer packaged goods space for a number of years, building a new brand and selling it to the large retailers that we all know in North America.

And then I took a step back and I thought, you know, I think really focusing on older adults and the state of aging in our country is where I want to invest my time and energy.

And that came at the same time as we are moving back from Bogota, Colombia to San Francisco.

And I was really struck by some of the cultural differences around aging.

I joined a technology company that focuses on operational systems to help home care agency operators work more efficiently.

And that then after leaving that, I decided I really wanted to go all in on specifically the very end of life hospice and planning for End of Life Space and created Life Lantern with a business partner named Bonnie Lau who was in Seattle.

We met through our daughters who shared a first grade class kindergarten class.

Something something.

One of those Class.

We've been good friends for many years.

Many a soccer team.

Practice.

Yes.

Volunteer.

Yeah.

You're one of the earlier faces I remember meeting in our school community.

And I know we connected on shared history in California.

I also remember learning very early on about your dad's death.

It might have been one of our initial conversations.

And it's just been such a pleasure to get to know you and your family and also to see you build with from an idea to being increasingly launch ready.

It's really exciting and I have a lot of admiration for what you're up to.

Well, and likewise, one of the things that I think has been so interesting about our friendship is watching us both enter the entrepreneurial journey at the same time.

Did you know you were going to be an entrepreneur?

No.

I've always said that I didn't want to start a business for the sake of starting a business.

I don't need to be an entrepreneur.

I don't need a founder title.

I think there's a lot of really hard work and vulnerability that comes with launching your own thing.

But I knew that for me to want to be in an entrepreneurial role, I had to have an idea that I felt so strongly needed to come to fruition.

And I really didn't have that until coming up with Life Lantern and putting all of my energy into making something come into the world that I feel so strongly needs to exist.

Absent that kind of litmus test.

No.

I'd probably be doing something very different.

Yeah.

You have a really incredible background, Sarah, and your journey to your work with Life Lantern.

And I was hoping we could start our discussion with just a bit about your family and the special role that your godfather played in your life growing up.

Yeah, absolutely.

I feel so fortunate that from a very young age, it sounds ironic as a thing to be grateful for, but death was really a conversation that happened very frequently in our family.

We could talk about death and talk about people who were passing away, how they passed away.

It really was dinner table conversation, as odd as that sounds.

And I really attribute that to my godfather, who left the corporate world and decided to found a hospice in Edina, Minnesota, a small residential hospice called NC Little that still exists to this day.

And so from a very young age, I would hear Bob talking about all of the hoops that he needed to go through to get this dream of a project off the ground.

So all of the city council meetings and approvals that he needed to get and the support from the neighborhood that he wanted to be in.

And so kind of Piece by piece, I was able to see Bob working on this dream of giving people a warm, loving, relaxing place to pass and to give their families and loved ones the same experience.

So it wasn't until many years later that my family actually needed the hospice services that NC Little provides.

And so from my first experience with a really profound loss, which was my grandmother, who I was incredibly close to, I was by her bedside.

I slept over at the hospice.

I was able to really see the magic and power of what Bob had built for myself.

And so walking through that death experience in a residential hospice with my grandma and knowing that my grandma was being treated exactly as she wanted to be treated.

She was being cared for where she wanted to be cared for.

She wanted to be at NC Little.

And I think in the wake of her passing, that just made a massive difference for my family and me.

And knowing that her final days were spent in such comfort, surrounded in love, having her hand stroked, and just knowing she wasn't going to be alone.

Yeah.

So that really set off a path of thinking.

I haven't always worked in a end of life adjacent role, but it's just a calling for me that has never gone away.

Even when I've done other work.

I feel like I've had a magnetic pull toward hospice and end of life the same way many people do toward beginning of life.

End of life is a very warm place for me.

Yeah.

I have wondered about you sometimes where it's almost kind of like when you begin with the end in mind, like you live your life a little differently or a little more intentionally.

And I see that in you, and I wonder if you see it in yourself.

I do.

For better or for worse.

So my father passed away when I was 25, and he was on the verge of retirement.

And he had a wonderful life while he was alive.

And there were many, many plans that he had for retirement that were never able to come to fruition.

So he wanted to build a boat, he wanted to travel around the world with my mom, and he wanted to be a grandfather right there.

Just.

There's so many pieces of life that I knew he was looking forward to that he didn't get to achieve.

And.

And so my dad's passing at a young age, especially while I was in a job that was.

It felt like 24/7 at the time.

I just thought to myself, you know, I'm going to make sure that I create space in my younger living years, career years, to really push myself to think outside of the box at times.

And that's Been through.

Very liberating and at times really confusing.

Right.

When you're trying to forge a path that allows for space with community and time with family and pursuit of hobbies.

And you're trying to pack everything in as intentionally as possible during the years that you can.

And I feel fortunate to think that way.

And it's the same for my brother.

He's had numerous adventures because of our experience losing my dad at the age that we did.

And so it's something I'm really grateful for.

Yeah.

Do you think sometimes about how to kind of relay that message to your daughters too?

Like, or that through line of, like you grew up talking about death and kind of the end and like you talk about it as a gift and I'm just kind of curious how you infuse it in your family too.

Yeah.

It's a great question and one that I'm thinking about increasingly as my daughters get older.

So they are now 10 and 11.

And I do feel like they're at that point where I want them to start to feel comfortable around the end of life space.

They know that I'm a hospice volunteer.

They know general information about the patients that I work with through volunteer opportunities.

And I had an opportunity a couple years ago to decide that my aunt was passing away.

And it was a rather prolonged process of her death.

And I had a choice of either sharing with them or keeping it from them.

And I chose to share a lot with them.

She had medical complications at the end that made activities of daily living very difficult.

And I shared that with them not only to build comfort in the fact that these things happen.

It's so common as the body is shutting down in various ways, but also to build empathy.

And when I, when my aunt was going through the dying process, I really did stop and think, can they handle this?

Do I want to add this to their young lives?

And I do.

I really feel like it's not something we should be afraid of and it's something we should be training our kids to really be able to embrace and empathize with and just dig in with.

Right.

Like I'm telling you about some of the medical day to day needs that, you know, your great aunt has.

Think about how you could show up for someone down the road who might be experiencing similar complications.

Yeah.

And I think we are so afraid of talking about death.

And I'm wondering, as somebody who has spent like so much time in the space, like where.

And somebody who isn't afraid themselves, like, where do you think that comes from?

Like what have you observed in terms.

Of the cultural kind of fear around that conversation?

I think it comes down to two things.

One is avoidance.

And none of us like to think about not being here, not being able to have interactions that are meaningful and see the sunlight and all of the small joys of daily life.

I think we're just accustomed to thinking of ourselves as vibrant human beings whose sparks will never go out.

And it's a dark place for people to think about no longer being present.

So I think there's a lot of avoidance.

I also think we live in a culture that really celebrates new beginnings.

Right.

If you look at the way we support in an ideal situation, the way we support a family that's just welcomed a new family member, there's a lot of joy in that time of life.

There might be a baby shower, There might be meals delivered to the family's home after the birth of a child or adoption.

And at the end of life, we really are not accustomed to showing up for people in the same way.

We don't have a end of life celebration.

Right.

That's one thing that many family members who have lost loved ones talk about is we had this amazing party for my mother.

She would have loved.

She would have loved to see all of the joy in the room and people remembering what she was like in her best days.

That's just not how we're set up as a culture in the US Currently.

And so I think it really just gets, like, pushed to the back burner and we kind of thrive on avoiding it in many situations.

Yeah.

Does it ever come up for your family where we should, like, pull forward the celebration of life?

Like, and how.

Yeah.

How do you.

How do you do that?

I think about that all the time.

I think it's a concept that can be built.

I have not.

I'm not aware of an event that has happened in exactly that way.

I mean, you see 100th birthday parties.

If people are fortunate enough to get to that point, I can see having an end of life party for some might be the right thing or ritual.

It doesn't have to look like the death version of a baby shower, for example.

And maybe you had the same experience with your dad's illness.

One of the things that was so touching as my dad dealt with a terminal cancer diagnosis, was that he mentioned multiple times in that process that he was so grateful that he was able to see how much people around him cared for him.

So he would receive cards in the mail, someone would drop off dinner, they would check in on him at work.

And many people don't get that opportunity for a number of reasons.

Death can come at any time, and it can come in very horrific ways.

And seeing my dad really look at being celebrated as a person and realizing how much he had meant to coworkers, family members, kids who he had gotten to know, friends of my brothers and mine was, you know, that's another way of being able to realize the impact that you've had on people.

Now, that's pretty specific to a terminal diagnosis when, you know, you're looking at a period of time, if we just dialed that forward.

Celebrate everything.

Yeah, right.

Celebrate the kid's birthday.

Celebrate the person who decides to leave a job that no longer fits them.

Just celebrate your friends and loved ones and make sure they see love demonstrated in their direction while they're here with us.

Yeah, I think that that just goes back to the intentionality that I see you show up with with your girls, with your life, with the work that you're choosing to do.

So in honor of your dad and in honor of your grandmother, like, I see you show up that way, and that's one of the things I really appreciate about being your friend.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That means a lot to me.

Yeah.

My dad had terminal cancer, and he passed away on his.

Right after his 70th birthday.

But one of the things I'm really glad that we got to do is we had his birthday, and he wanted not one birthday, but two.

Um, it about broke my mom, who's an introvert, but he had about 85 people come through the house, and she got these beautiful custom cookies, and they were golf balls.

And his favorite places.

It was Ireland.

And I think to.

To show up and, you know, at the end, even when he didn't have a lot of energy, to see all those people come through his life was so special for him.

When he still had energy.

Do you think he was thinking about that birthday as a moment to say goodbye and a moment of closure with people?

Yeah, he knew.

Yeah, I think he knew.

He went into hospice right after Christmas, and so I think it was.

It was good to spend that last Christmas with him, you know, and then it was like, it's okay.

And being there at the end was one of the most profound things.

Experiences of my life.

I think about.

It's fitting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think about how, you know, he was there for my first.

Breath,.

And I was there for his last.

Yeah.

And it sounds sad, but it was really beautiful.

It's such a beautiful closure of a circle that is full of so much love and relationship building and tension at times.

And to give that back to him is such a beautiful thing to be able to do.

And do you feel like that has helped you live with your dad's death as you've moved forward in a different way than if you hadn't been able to be there?

I think yes.

I think it was comforting to know that we were there and holding his hand and playing his favorite music.

So I think it was.

It was a beautiful end.

But I also think, like, the way he lived, you know, with so much joy, I can be not that joyous, but he is a really good inspiration for that.

So I think both in his life and his death, he provided a lot of really good examples of how to be.

And my.

My mom actually prepared.

About a year before my dad died, they started going to grief counseling, which was also a wonderful gift when you think about, you know, the intention that it took and again to your point, about facing the really hard stuff that they got to do it together.

And one of the things that, you know, they had shared with me when they started going was, you know, that he sat them both down and, you know, they said, well, Karl, this looks like it's for you, but actually it's for her, you know, because she's going to be the person who's living, you know, after.

And I just thought that, like, what a special thing to go in with that kind of intentionality.

And, you know, I think it really allowed my mom to kind of keep living her best life knowing that they had done all of that work together.

And like, what a...

What a gift.

A gift.

And that's so rare.

So rare.

Yeah.

You, through your dad's loss, it sounds like you have also established a family culture that your kids have seen around how we care for people who are passing and how we show up for them, how we can converse about that transition that's about to take place.

And that's really not common, but it's a multi generational gift.

I feel if you see that established, I don't think it often goes away.

No.

And you had talked about some of the research you are aware of about like what a good closure looks like and kind of the impact on multiple generations can have.

Yeah, there is a lot of research around.

So one of the biggest issues that families have when somebody passes away and there hasn't been any planning that's gone into that, they haven't had the opportunity to plan or it.

It hasn't happened for whatever reason is that you often see differences of opinion between siblings about how things should be handled.

And it can start with the care for their loved one in advance of death.

There are a lot of differences of opinion around things like life support and life sustaining measures that should be taken.

And that's one of the reasons I decided to really make advanced care directives one of the key focus areas of Life Lantern.

But what research has shown is that if siblings can be pre aligned on understanding their parents wishes and this works in different community structures as well.

It doesn't have to be just parent children that everybody walks away with more peace and family relationships remain intact.

But when you've got families that splinter off in different directions oftentimes that causes multi generational tailwinds of Fisher I guess is it?

Yeah.

It can break families apart and really for the long term.

And so I think that's something not all family fractures can be avoided and I think a decent percentage can be helped through advance planning and advanced conversation about what is right.

Not for me but for my best friend, for my mom, dad, et cetera.

And those conversations really are not had enough currently.

So talk more about your mission for Life Lantern.

Like what were you, you know the advanced directive was a part of it.

Talk more about what inspired you to create this.

So I worked for a number of years at a company in San Francisco.

We were focused on care for older adults.

And so through the folks that we were able to care for.

Death is a topic that came up regularly.

I was not directly involved in those conversations but I knew that I would hear about situations where maybe a fracture in a family had taken place or there was friction between maybe a caregiver and a daughter or daughter in law, et cetera.

And so I thought about that quite a bit as I exited that company.

I was thinking about where I really wanted to invest time and I became a death doula.

So I did done two trainings now and the training really was something I wanted to do as a friends and family skill.

I never saw myself as kind of a death doula for hire.

It's really just something I want.

It's a skill set I want to carry with me in any community that I'm a part of.

But going through that death doula training and pairing that with the experience that I had working with older adults through the technology company that I was part of made me really focus in on where do people have agency over the course of their lives to be the author of their own death.

And one of the tools that we have for doing that that is very underutilized is the advance care directive.

And so I knew that.

I knew that the advance care directive is a really critical piece of planning for your own passing.

And then going through the death doula training, I was struck by the fact that the tools I was seeing that were available did not cover what I refer to as an enhanced advance care directive.

So they don't get into the environment that you would ideally like to pass away with.

The option to write down any wishes you may have for loved ones or regrets that you might want to share with people after passing.

There was a whole host of more holistic questions that I feel are such a critical piece of making sure that your loved one is comfortable as they pass that are not covered on the advance care directive.

So I worked with a wonderful partner in Seattle and we built a tool that is an intake form that really.

We designed it to be as frictionless and frankly as emotionless as possible so that people can get this done.

Because some tools that are out there today make the questions.

I think there's such large life questions embedded in them.

And the way the questions are even worded can feel like a lot to sit and think through to the point of paralysis.

And a lot of these documents sitting on a shelf or a process being 20% completed.

So we came up with an intake process that is very straightforward and covers both.

An intake that's similar to what a death doula would conduct with a patient and through the information that you input into that form, it also creates an advance care directive that is specific to the state that you live in.

So it's a passport of sorts in terms of the wishes that you have encapsulated into one form that is a legal form.

And then a host of additional information that really brings color to how you've lived and how you want to carry that into your passing.

That's so beautiful.

I love that.

Do you think about what would show up on your form?

How would a person listening conceptualize what it could look like?

That's a great question.

I'll answer the advance care directive portion of that first.

For me personally, I wanted to make very clear that I do not want life sustaining measures that may impact my quality of life.

And that is something that I wanted to really make sure that I spelled out in black and white because it is so important to me and for others making the decision in a really difficult moment.

I think a decision could be made that doesn't align with what I would like for me, and so that was a critical piece for me is making sure that life sustaining measures that impact quality of life do not come into play in my death.

And I also have sketched out a party that I would like to be thrown after whatever form of remembrance ceremony that takes place.

A party that has, I've been pretty specific about it needs to have flowers and it should have pasta and there should be wine available.

And I've just sketched out those details in a way that I know my family and loved ones could execute and also in a way that would bring people together in a joyful moment of really celebrating times we shared together and community connections that exist maybe through the grapevine.

I envision people meeting each other at this party.

It's going to be a super fun one.

I would like to go and not go to your party.

Noted.

Noted.

Hopefully I go first.

I don't have to continue?

No, we don't hope that.

I think because of how you grew up and your training and your, you know, your work, you are so comfortable in this space.

For people who maybe grew up not talking about these things.

Do you have advice that you would give them?

How to start the conversations, questions to ask themselves before they would get to a tool like Life Lantern?

Yeah.

So we have conversation guides on the Life Lantern program that, that can help people just approach the topic.

I think the best way to do it is to think about removing the emotion.

So take the anxiety, take the fear and literally think about checking it to the side and letting a loved one know or letting yourself know, hey, I have a series of questions for you and they'll really help me take action in a way that I would like to be able to take action should an end of life situation take place.

And I think sharing the questions themselves with a loved one, somebody you care about, really just presenting it as a quick exercise.

Right.

This does not need to be a magnum opus that has tons of emotion flowed into it like at baseline.

What you want is to know people's kind of black and white list of wishes in terms of how they pass away.

And those can change over time.

I think that was one of the really important pieces to me about building Life Lantern.

The way we have is the way you think about passing away probably needs to be revisited once a year, maybe once every three to five years because your mind will change, your relationships will change.

And so it doesn't have to be a one and done situation.

So if you, Anne, want to do want to work through the Life Lantern intake today, just get it done.

That's what I tell people at first.

Just get it done.

If you're still thinking about it, you think you've.

There's more detail that you'd like to add to any of the questions.

Sure.

Go back and do that or give yourself grace.

Go back a year from now when we remind you to come back into the product and make any updates that are appropriate at that time of life.

So it can be a living, breathing, evolving document that you don't have to get perfectly right the first time.

Yeah.

I also think thinking about, like, ways that you can put joy in there is a really beautiful exercise, too.

Yeah.

And I think people can decide kind of what.

What degree of joy or what degree of sadness or frustration they want to document.

And we definitely see some people focus on joy, and we see people who feel good about closure being an eventual fact of life and others who definitely don't.

And there's space for all of that emotion.

I think what is most important is really empowering those around you to carry out your wishes.

And if you don't state what your wishes are, it gets very complicated in terms of different voices and different opinions.

So really, it's such an important agency of action that we all have the ability to take that I would love to see happen more frequently.

Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would be important that we know?

The other thing that I thought about in listening to your first podcast was just how, like, once death is a conversation topic that's on the table, how deep you can go in relationships really quickly.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a connection point.

Just similar to how with you, when you tell people what you're working on, they're like, oh, my goodness, I could use this personally.

Here's the story.

Why so it's a very.

I think death being put on the table and me sharing, anybody sharing that it's a topic that they care about enough to be working on really opens up some dramatically different pathways to grounding a new friendship or going to places that otherwise can take years for friends or acquaintances to even touch on.

It really gets to the heart of life very quickly.

When you tell people what you do, what are some of their reactions or what are some of the ways that you've been surprised that you can kind of get to the, like, really the heart of the person you're talking to?

Yeah.

I'm amazed at how people relax when I tell them what I do.

And by me bringing up death as a space that I think needs to be Talked about more.

And that has tools like the Life Lantern tool that can actually improve an end of life experience.

You see people who might be otherwise trying to present in, you know, a perfect form or something, just kind of,.

Oh, okay, I can talk about this.

With you and talk about this.

And so often it leads to a personal story.

Either a loss that has happened that could be positive or negative, or somebody that they know who really could have used an advance care directive at the point of medical decisions being made on their behalf.

And so relationships get really deep really quickly.

I've even had somebody came to our house to do a minor repair job and somehow we got on the topic of what we both do for work.

And I learned so much about this wonderful person who was in our house for something entirely unrelated and really quite surface level.

We went deep right in my dining room and had a conversation about her family's experience losing their mother and where advanced planning could have been helpful.

And it was beautiful.

And so I think the depth of connection that you can achieve when you share that you work in this topic, people are like, oh, okay, I'm going to open up to you.

Yeah.

And I really, really treasure that trust.

I think.

I don't know if this is true for you, but I think sometimes it's easy to stay surface level, but once you kind of open the door a little bit, people are pretty happy to walk through with you.

And for us doing this work, it's just been.

It's been such a privilege to talk about the hardest stuff.

And I think once you've talked about who you're caring for, end of life difficult time, I mean, it's just easy to stay there.

And I think that person feeling like they've been seen in sharing something with you just for just something quickly that might have taken a long time otherwise.

Yeah.

And it's such a gift.

And I'm wondering if you feel this way to be.

I feel like once you announce that you are working on a business like, with or like Life lantern, that does get to one of life's most difficult topics or hidden topics.

People respond to you differently.

Have you found that as well?

I think so, because I think, I think we don't do enough to talk about the hardest stuff.

And I think when we don't, you don't really reveal what's going on inside.

And if that person was carrying around pain from, you know, this prior death or, you know, their mom, you walk around not really feeling seen.

And I think the quicker we can get people to feeling seen and understood.

I think that when you walk around like that, you walk around in a new way and, you know, the.

The actual paperwork for both of our products, it's like, it is.

It is the tool that makes, you know, an outcome better, but it's really this process for, how am I going to show up?

How am I going to support you in this time where you need support?

Like, that's just, like, the biggest gift to be able to do this kind of work.

I completely agree.

Yeah.

It feels like there's a lot of responsibility in being in a role where you are working on a product that asks people to put all their cards on the table.

Right.

And there aren't a lot of places in life where you show up to a product or a potential new friend who's asking you, who's giving you that space to just put the cards on the table like, we can handle them.

And I am loving being in a space that.

Where you can really connect with people at their most vulnerable points and with some of their most vulnerable feelings.

It's really.

It's a big responsibility, and I take that trust really seriously.

Well, and from both of our personal experiences, having lost our dads, you know, way too, way too soon, and thinking about how we now show up for people, because we've lived through that experience, I think, you know, I. I treasure the learnings that I got about how to support somebody going through losing a parent because it's uniquely painful.

It's.

There's no pain quite.

Quite like that.

But it.

For me, I don't know if this was true for you, where it's like, there was this community of people who had experienced what I experienced, and those were the people who were able to show up in a really different way than people, you know, just in.

Who were supporting me through losing my dad.

And I wonder if you could talk about, like, what did support look like for you when you lost your dad?

And how do you show up for people now who have lost a parent?

Yeah, I think in losing my dad at 25, I was really on kind of the front line of my peer group in terms of experiencing a loss.

And my friends were incredibly generous about how they showed up for us.

And looking back, did an incredible job with a very minimal toolkit.

But specifically, I remember there was a place in southwest Minneapolis where you could go and create a meal for people.

It was like you put all the ingredients in these different.

Yeah, okay.

Yes.

So my friends went and did that, and they dropped off a handful of these wonderful meals at Our doorstep.

And I just knew, like, okay, I've got like, nutritious food I can heat up.

It will feel like a real homemade dinner on any night that I need it.

And that was just a beautiful gesture and just one of many.

But I learned through the way my friends showed up for me and then what I felt I really needed after my dad's death, that being specific is so important.

So now what I try to do if I have a friend doesn't have to be an end of life experience, but going through a difficult time.

It sounds a little bit mechanical, but I will send a text and I'll say, hey, Ann, here's what I'm thinking I could do for you this week.

A, come fold laundry.

And like, I'll go there.

I don't.

I don't care that you might think that's a little weird.

I will come fold laundry.

You can fold my laundry anytime soon.

Perfect.

Perfect.

B, I will drop off dinner at 6pm on Tuesday.

C, I could take your kids to XYZ activity.

I will be extremely specific.

And then I'll say, choose as many of these.

Like choose one or as many as you would like or.

Or just don't respond.

And if you don't respond, I know that that is just you not even having space to think about this.

So I try to be very specific.

And I always say, don't respond.

Don't put the burden of response on the person who already has a lot on their plate.

And that's one thing I experienced personally.

It was one situation where someone came up to me at my dad's service and said, well, I've reached out to you so many times, but I never heard back.

In kind of a way that made me feel awful and guilty.

And I was like, wait a sec,.

This is not my guilt to carry.

I was literally just trying to get through every day.

So I always say, no need to respond.

Another thing I think is really nice to do after a loss is to mark your calendar for six months after somebody has passed away.

Reach out to their family, put a card in the mail, send a text, pick up the phone six months later.

Because the likelihood that they are feeling as warmly supported as they did around the death itself, chances are very slim.

Yeah.

So show up in the unexpected months after death.

There are some people who I reach out to annually on a death anniversary.

So I feel like continuing that thread.

Really think about how you can show up after everybody else disappears.

One of the things that was so surprising to me, and now it's Been three and a half years since my dad passed is that it still feels very fresh in a way that like, I don't think I had expected.

But certainly nobody who has been through it, you know, could maybe even think about or relate to.

And I think, you know, to your point, about like the six month check in, you know, my dad's first birthday since he passed was, you know, like this, like, very profound day for me.

But it was quiet, you know, because I think, you know, friends didn't necessarily know that day.

So I think if you're a close friend, another maybe build on yours is like, check in on that anniversary or the Christmas, you know, the first Christmas, Christmas holiday or the first, you know, whatever those days were, you know, just as like you're today, you're not alone.

I am thinking of you today.

And I think that carries a lot of meaning that goes so far.

You're absolutely right.

I experienced similarly quiet anniversary markings for my dad.

And one of the things we do in my family on the day that my dad passed away, we always get ice cream.

Oh, that's beautiful.

And it's a little funny, but we just do.

And there's usually a text sent out to the family chat like, who else is getting ice cream today?

And there are a lot of ice cream remembrances of my dad.

So if things are feeling hard or there's an anniversary that is.

And those are always tough.

It's not full consolation, but we do get ice cream.

Yeah, a little.

A treat and a ritual.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did your dad love ice cream so much?

Yes.

He passed along a deep love for ice cream.

So if you ever want ice cream tips, let me know.

Okay.

Well, I know you make good marshmallows or.

Marshmallows.

Yeah.

Do you also make good ice cream?

No.

I have my dad's family recipe up on the wall in our kitchen, but I rarely make it because I don't have the old fashioned, like thing that you churn for a long time with the big salt rocks.

I know they exist, but to me it should be done in like a really old musty wooden thing.

And the modern ones just don't quite.

No, I mean hygiene.

Right.

I know you're uniquely suited to this work because of your multiple journeys here, but do you think you were kind of born for this work?

I don't know that I was born for this work.

But as life has continued to unfold, I do feel uniquely positioned to think about this work and how end of life can be vastly improved in the United States.

And I do feel like I'm a very.

I'm happy to be a voice around death in a way that I don't think most people feel comfortable.

And so I don't know that it was a calling from day one, but it certainly feels like it has been a mounting calling as time has gone on.

I can't help thinking that your background in marketing and communications, your passion for the work, the need you see in the space, like, really uniquely situate you to bring something so positive to something that people have thought of as being so scary.

And that's.

There's so many beautiful things you bring to life.

Lantern.

But I think your.

Your professional background is just, like, exquisite and.

And like, you.

You're just.

You talk about it with such passion and such calm.

And I just think that that's what people who are afraid of the space need to hear.

Yeah, I think it.

It's really.

I think it can take people by surprise that I genuinely have so much enthusiasm for bringing a product to life that is focused on some really difficult, dark life moments.

And I also think there's so much that can be done in terms of advance planning and conversation that can make those moments that much lighter and make generational ties that much closer in the wake of somebody's passing, that I love being here.

I love having the opportunity to invest my time and energy in a space that I think really needs and deserves it.

If people want to learn more about what you're working on, how do they do it?

How do they find you?

People can go to our website, which is Lifelantern.co, and they can sign up to be notified about our product release.

We currently have a growing number of people who are asking to be on our wait list as we continue to pilot with a few different professionals who we're working with.

So please go to lifelantern.co and we'd be really honored to have you sign up for our product release.

Sarah.

Thank you.

I will be going there as soon as we finish today when I'll be on your wait list.

When Katie and I started this podcast, these were the conversations we wanted to have.

And I can't think of a better first guest to have than you.

So thank you for sharing your vulnerability and your story and your experience and just all of the joy and passion that you bring to the space.

So thanks again for being here with us.

Thank you so much.

And thank you for giving me a space to share and also for being such an incredible sounding board.

As I've thought about this project and worked on bringing it to life.

And I know it's not the end of the supportive conversations that will go both ways.

So thank you, Anne.

Thanks, Sarah.