The Living While Mortal team: Shirley Riga, Julia MacMahon, and Minda Sanchez
Community Engagement
& Education
My end-of-life work is grounded in the belief that talking openly about death can help us live more intentionally, make choices that reflect what matters most, and feel more prepared for the end of life. Death education is a natural extension of this work: creating opportunities for people to build comfort, curiosity, and confidence around topics that are too often left unspoken.
As a co-leader of Living While Mortal, I help create safe, honest spaces where we can explore life, death, and what matters most. We use education, conversation, and reflection to bring mortality into the conversation and help people become more present, less fearful, and more connected to themselves, their loved ones, their communities, and life itself.
We offer workshops and educational programs for workplaces, houses of worship, senior centers, and other community-based organizations. Through this work, we explore topics including end-of-life planning, death and dying, grief, legacy, community care, and the many choices and conversations that can help us approach mortality with greater openness and intention.
Current Offerings:
Living Into the End: An Intentional End-of-Life Planning Series
A three-part workshop series with optional deep dives
We plan for so many of life’s milestones, yet spend remarkably little time considering how we want the end of our lives to unfold.
Living Into the End offers organizations and community groups a thoughtful, approachable way to bring end-of-life planning into conversation.
Rather than starting with paperwork, this three-part series begins with the person: What matters to me? How do I want to be cared for? How do I want to be remembered?
Through practical information, guided reflection, conversation, and concrete planning, participants explore their wishes for the end of life and begin putting them into words. The goal is not to create a perfect plan or control what cannot be controlled. It is to help participants understand their choices, communicate what matters, and make it easier for loved ones to honor their wishes.
The Three Core Workshops
Part One: 9 Things to Include in Your Departure Directions®: A Willow Workshop™
Departure Directions® is Willow’s term for written guidelines, shaped by participants’ values, beliefs, and priorities, for how they wish to be cared for and remembered after death. Completing Departure Directions® can offer peace of mind while alleviating stress and worry for those they leave behind.
Part Two: Claiming Your Own Death
Participants explore what the final days and hours of life may be like while considering the people, environment, rituals, and forms of care they would want around them.
Part Three: Planning Your Own Life Celebration: Designing Your Intentional Legacy
Participants imagine how they would like people to gather, remember, tell stories, and celebrate their lives, and consider what those wishes reveal about how they hope to live now.
Optional Workshops: Going Deeper
Organizations can add either or both of these workshops to the core series or offer them independently.
Your Voice When It Matters Most: Understanding Advance Directives & Health Care Planning
Explores health care proxies, advance directives, values-based medical decision-making, and conversations with loved ones.
What Happens to My Body? Exploring Body Disposition, Funeral Choices & Green Burial
Introduces options for after-death care and body disposition, with particular attention to natural and environmentally conscious choices.
Format & Programming Options
The three core workshops are designed to build on one another but may also be offered individually. Small-group conversation and personal reflection are woven throughout, with no expectation that participants share more than they wish.
Individual workshop: 2 hours
Three-part Living Into the End series: Three 2-hour workshops
Optional deep dives: 90 minutes each
Program Fees
Individual workshop: Starting at $600
Three-part series: Starting at $1,650
Complete five-workshop series: Starting at $2,400
Fees include program planning, facilitation, and standard participant materials. Reduced rates may be available for community and nonprofit organizations with limited programming budgets.
Bring Living Into the End to Your Community
These workshops are available to organizations, community groups, and other gatherings interested in creating meaningful opportunities for end-of-life reflection and planning.
For more information or to discuss programming for your organization or group, email Julia at julia@livingwhilemortal.com.