“If we haven’t made ourselves comfortable with this conversation, we end up being oppressed by it.” 3. “Thinking and talking about death can identify how you want to live,” he says. “How prepared do we want to be? How comfortable? How much grace do we want to have in the face of it?” He argues that it is better to talk about death when you are well than when you or your parents or other members of your family are terminally ill. “Death is a reality for all of us,” Hebb says. “If we haven’t experienced something, it’s hard to know it or to discuss it.” But there are no exceptions, and sooner or later you will have to confront it. “We believe we are an exception to basic rules,” he says. Hebb says we have “ingrained cognitive bias” not to talk about death because we don’t really believe in our own mortality. You may not be able to conquer death, but you can at least exercise some control over how it happens. We are death-illiterate, and when we don’t discuss death we are not empowered to make decisions.” In a long phone conversation from his home in Seattle, he spells out his philosophy for dealing with dying. “I had a hunch that open conversation about our end-of-life wishes could be the most impactful thing we could do to heal that system and to heal the way we die. Now 42, he was 13 when his father died, leaving a gap that he felt his mother and immediate family were unable to properly address. “The way we die in western society is broken,” says Hebb.
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