Dying Clarifies What the Living Should Stop Postponing

For Tig Notaro, the answer to “what is the meaning of life?” is not a heroic list of extreme experiences. It is the small daily thing that becomes visible when time is known to be limited. In Come See Me in the Good Light, the documentary Notaro produced about her friend Andrea Gibson’s final year, Gibson’s attention turns to moments that are “precious in the day-to-day”: squirrels eating outside the window, the presence of loved ones, the ordinary parts of being alive.

Notaro said she already had some appreciation for those moments, but Gibson’s dying deepened it. She travels constantly for work, and what she most wants is to be home with her family: walking with her wife, talking with her children while they eat breakfast. The point was not that death makes life sentimental. It was that the bucket list does not have to be skydiving, bungee jumping, or traveling the world. It can be the thing one would miss if time were suddenly limited.

Darnell Walker answered the same question with a different phrase: “die empty.” Walker, a death doula and writer, described life as the work of finding empty spaces and filling them. He meant emptying himself of what he has to give: art, writing, love, letters, poems, books, anything that can be put into the world rather than held back.

If someone later uses his writing “to sweep up garbage,” he said, that is not the point. “It’s out there. I’ve done the job.” Reception is not under his control. The work is to leave it here.

The two answers converged without being identical. Notaro described meaning as attention to the small moment. Walker described meaning as giving away what one has before there is no time left. Both treated death less as an idea to conquer than as a frame that clarifies what can no longer be postponed.

Darnell Walker defined a death doula first in plain terms: someone who helps a person at the end of life. That help can include funeral planning, holding a hand near the end, helping people have hard conversations, offering emotional support, presence, and companionship “right before we slide off into this next great adventure.”

His own version of the work is shaped by being a writer. He helps people tell their stories, often through what he called legacy projects. The task is not only to manage the logistics of dying but to help people get out the words, memories, and accounts they want to leave behind.

That definition widened as the discussion continued. Walker said people often tell him they could never do what he does, even when they have been sitting with a dying loved one for days or weeks. He will enter a room where family members have been present throughout the decline, and they will say they do not know how he can do this work. His answer is that they have already been doing it.

For Walker, death work is not a specialized capacity. He came to it through his grandmother, who did not know the term “death doula.” It was, he said, “what we do to take care of people we love.” That remains his most basic definition.

People practice versions of the same work at the end of relationships, jobs, identities, and other forms of loss. Holding space at the end of something is part of the same human competence.

Tig Notaro said she did not think of herself as someone who could do that work until Andrea Gibson’s death. She had lost her mother, father, stepfather, cousin, and many close people, often in “sterile hospital situations.” Those deaths had not made her think about planning her own death in terms of what she would want around her if she had the opportunity to choose.

Gibson wanted to die at home, surrounded by friends and family. Notaro was not present at the exact moment Gibson died, but she was there for the three days leading up to it. Before entering Gibson’s house, Notaro told her therapist she feared she would not be able to say goodbye to her friend the way she wanted. When asked what that goodbye looked like, she said she pictured herself crawling into bed and lying next to Gibson.

That is what happened, but it became larger than the private image she had imagined. Notaro described lying in bed not only with Gibson but with Gibson’s parents, spouse, ex-girlfriends, and friends. The room became a pile of people rubbing one another’s backs, crying, and saying “I love you” even to people they had just met. It was, she said, the most beautiful send-off she had experienced.

Walker recognized that as the work itself. Notaro had not been performing a formal role, but she had been present, intimate, useful, and willing to remain in the discomfort. In Walker’s account, that is not secondary to the job. It is the job.

Darnell Walker has a plan for his own death. He has had one since he was 18, when he was a college freshman sitting on his dorm-room bunk bed and was struck by the thought: what if he died that night and there was no plan? He wrote one then and has updated it every year since.

The plan includes a song. Walker likes to ask people: if hearing is the last sense to go, what is the last song you want to hear as you are going out? His answer is “Red Dust” by James Vincent McMorrow. The people in the room, he joked, would need to time it so that his last breath lands on the last note. There should be no Spotify commercials. Notaro said that means he needs the premium account; she, by contrast, would want the commercial because she likes an awkward moment.

Walker was serious that the plan exists, that it has been revised, and that the song has been stable for about 10 years. He was also willing to let the practical absurdity sit in the room: the people at the bedside trying to synchronize breath, music, grief, and streaming-service logistics.

Tig Notaro realized, as she put it, that after “big talking” about being changed by Gibson’s death, she still did not have a plan for her own. Walker told her she was in the right place.

The planning Walker described is an acknowledgment that, when a person has the chance to shape the conditions of dying, the details are not trivial. Music, people, place, words, and timing become part of how the living care for the dying and how the dying communicate what matters.

Notaro connected that kind of presence to the Ram Dass line, “we’re all just walking each other home.” Sitting with her mother, stepfather, cousin, and Gibson had been difficult, but also bittersweet. In those moments she saw why people are drawn into the space around a death. She called it an honor, and said Gibson’s death in particular made the phrase feel literal.

Tig Notaro resisted the idea that the comedy in her work is engineered. She described it as instinct. When she was ill with cancer, C. diff, intestinal disease, and pneumonia, and had also recently lost her mother, she was preparing to go on stage and tell an audience what had happened. She first imagined sitting on a stool and meeting the intensity directly. Then, in the shower, she thought of opening the set the way comics sometimes begin with crowd work.

The line made her laugh “maniacally” in the shower. It was dark and strange, she said, but she knew she had to do it. Onstage it “cracked the moment open.” The audience was confused at first, but then came with her. Notaro did not describe the joke as a way around suffering. It was a way into it.

Darnell Walker sees the same need in death doula work. Dying people often want to laugh, he said. One current client told him she wanted to die, not because she was ready to go, but because her family was awful. They kept coming in with medicine and suggestions. What she wanted was laughter. For four months, Walker said, they had been finding ways to laugh.

Laughter also helps him ask one of the first questions he asks clients: “How do you want to die?” Many have never been asked that. Some respond with surprise that they have any choice. To help them answer, he often goes back to the last time they felt fully alive. Frequently, he said, that was the last time they laughed: who they were with, what they were doing, what jokes they shared. They may not be able to go backpacking again through Rome, but perhaps the people from that trip can be brought into the room, and the jokes can be told again.

Notaro’s story of Gibson’s deathbed gave the claim its most concrete form. When she first crawled into bed beside Gibson, she felt the intensity of the moment. Gibson was weak. There was a small brown stain on the sheet. Gibson turned to Notaro and said they did not know what it was, but they would blame it on Meg, Gibson’s wife. Notaro said the joke hit her from behind; she had not expected comedy in that moment. But of course, she said, Gibson was making her laugh from the deathbed.

“When you care about somebody,” Notaro added, “you snuggle up on that brown spot.”

Walker said that is exactly what humor can do: crack open the moment. He recalled a story from an HBO show based on a true account of a woman who had been sexually assaulted. At the police station, she saw her best friend playing Pokémon Go because there was something to catch in the station. She started crying with laughter and thanked him, because the situation had been so intense. Walker’s point was not that comedy makes pain less real. It gives people one more way to breathe inside it.

Notaro offered another example from her stepfather’s funeral in Mississippi. Her stepfather had been rigid, buttoned-up, and “robotic,” and her relationship with him, as well as her brother’s, was complicated. At the cemetery, Notaro and her brother were conferring with the priest about who would speak first. Her brother said he would go quickly, then she could speak, then the priest.

Then her brother fell into the grave.

The cemetery had forgotten to put plywood over the grave; there was only a tarp. Notaro described him dropping like an elevator, disappearing as family members shouted in shock. He insisted he was fine, then dragged himself out “like the Night of the Living Dead.” She still gave the speech she had written, but the accident became, in her telling, a fitting ending to her stepfather’s life. Her mother and stepfather would have laughed. Later, after acting as if he was fine, her brother quietly asked for Advil when he got back to the house. The grief did not vanish. The absurdity entered the room with it.

Darnell Walker’s work as a death doula and his work writing for children’s television meet, in his view, around endings and transitions. Both are about helping people get from where they are to wherever they need to go next.

He has been writing for children for nearly a decade. He now sees part of that work as preventive: creating material so children do not become adults who are deeply afraid of death or unable to grieve. Children, he argued, need “millions of little goodbyes along the way” so the big goodbye becomes more bearable. Many of the adults he works with never had that. They were not given space to grieve the loss of a job, a relationship, an identity, or other non-death endings.

Walker has spent years asking studios to let him write an episode about death. One finally agreed. He invoked the Sesame Street episode about Mr. Hooper’s death as an important precedent, but noted that it was almost 50 years old. He also said the number is now eight million children in the United States who have experienced the death of someone very close to them. His question was direct: why are we not talking about that?

For parents, the difficulty is often the instinct to shield children. Walker’s advice was not to pretend to certainty. It was to have the conversation and be honest about not having the answers: “We can find this together.” Children may ask what death means, receive an answer, and then go do a cartwheel. Three days later, they may return with another question. He said children are often more open to death than adults are; adults are the ones afraid of getting it wrong.

Walker’s own son grew up with mortality built into his birth story. When Walker was 22, he had been short of breath for about a month. He thought he was out of shape and had pulled a muscle in his leg. When he went to the hospital after waking up unable to walk, a doctor asked how long he had been out of breath. Walker said a month. The doctor told him they had no idea why he was still alive. Walker had three clots in his lungs and 16 running from his ankle upward. His son’s mother was pregnant at the time. The day Walker learned to walk again was the day she went into labor; both parents were pushed through the hospital in wheelchairs.

That story became part of his son’s understanding of life and death. As his son grew, Walker used it to talk about what had happened, what death means, and the hereditary issue his son would one day need to be checked for. At six, the language was simple: people die. Later, the conversation became “touchups and tuneups.” His son, now 21, also had to face the death of a friend who was killed by a brother a few blocks away.

Walker said some parents look for indirect ways into these conversations, even adopting older dogs so children will experience a pet’s death and have a way to talk about mortality. He presented that with humor — “the dog needs a home, my kid needs to learn about death” — but the underlying point was that families are often searching for permission to begin.

Tig Notaro described being caught unprepared during The Lion King. She and her wife took their young sons to the film; Notaro had not seen it before. When Simba’s father falls from the cliff, her son became distressed and asked what had happened. They had never talked about death. Because Notaro used to call it “kerplunking” when her children fell while playing, she told him Simba’s dad had “kerplunked.”

Their family has since been through more loss, including the death of their cat, Fluff. That became a major family moment. One son was too emotional to speak, so he asked whether he could journal about it and pass the journal around for the family to read. He wrote that he knew they would be putting Fluff to sleep the next day, and he was confirming that he felt they were doing the right thing even though he was very sad and would miss her. Notaro and her wife had talked with the children about how, at a certain point, keeping a suffering being alive can become selfish. Each child wanted a private moment with Fluff to say goodbye and share memories.

Walker endorsed “kerplunk” only with follow-up. Euphemism can soften the moment, but children need concrete language first. If a child is told “grandma went to sleep and didn’t wake up,” the child may become afraid to sleep. “Passed away” and other softer phrases may have a place later, but the initial explanation should say what death means.

Tig Notaro’s role in Come See Me in the Good Light began partly from practical knowledge. She had been the subject of the Netflix documentary Tig, and she understood that a documentary crew would not need to move into Gibson’s home around the clock. Filming could happen on targeted days, around doctor appointments, birthdays, and life as it continued.

The idea came from Notaro’s friend Steph Willen. Notaro, Willen, and Gibson had met in Boulder about 25 years earlier. When Gibson was very sick, friends took on different tasks to help. Notaro and Willen were working on Gibson’s podcast, trying to edit it, streamline the story, and clarify what it was trying to say. Willen said Gibson’s life at that moment would make a great documentary. Notaro immediately felt the idea had been obvious but unseen: Gibson was an “absolutely compelling person” facing mortality, brutal moments, and horrible news from doctors.

Notaro was careful to distinguish the project from a story of “toxic positivity.” Gibson was not being filmed as someone heroically pushing through everything with a fixed grin. The film, in Notaro’s account, was about processing. The compelling thing was how Gibson handled the reality of dying, not how they denied it.

Notaro moved quickly. She called a director and described Gibson as a nonbinary poet friend with stage four cancer. The director was initially cautious — “A poet, huh?” — and Notaro told him this was not simply someone standing onstage reading poems. She sent videos of Gibson. Three days later, he replied that if Gibson wanted to do it, they would fly to Colorado the next week and start filming. He also said they could not pitch it in the usual way because it was not a “sparkly Hollywood” story. They would have to make the most beautiful film they could.

Notaro said Gibson had always opened themselves up to be of service to others. At Gibson’s memorial, the poet Buddy Wakefield told a story from when he and Gibson first met in Boulder. A marathon was passing by, and they decided to cheer for the runners, though they did not know anyone in the race. Wakefield described that as the epitome of Gibson: their purpose was cheering on exhausted runners in life.

For Notaro, that is also what the film was: a gift to others. Gibson’s poetry, the documentary, and the openness of their dying all belonged to the same impulse.

Asked whether dying people’s outlook changes depending on religion, Darnell Walker said religion rarely enters the conversation at the end, at least in his experience with clients. It does come up in planning. Ritual, funeral arrangements, and family conflict over religious choices can matter greatly. In his book Never Can Say Goodbye, he describes a man who had converted to Islam and wanted a funeral in accordance with that decision, while his family refused. In such situations, Walker may have to maneuver, pivot, or fight family members on behalf of the dying person’s wishes.

But when the dying are asking existential questions, Walker said, they more often ask whether they were a good person, whether their relationships mattered, whether they were witnessed, whether they felt seen. They ask if they lived a good life, were good to others, did the things they wanted to do. Regrets surface. Religion is not absent, but it is not usually the center of the emotional work he described.

Tig Notaro’s account of Gibson’s final days added another dimension to the relational complexity of dying. An audience member asked about Meg, Gibson’s wife, and whether such an attended death might have conflicted with a spouse’s desire for private time. Notaro said Meg seemed fully committed to serving Gibson’s needs and wants, and that everyone present was also deeply supportive of Meg. There were private one-on-one moments, including for Meg and for others. The shared scene did not eliminate the need for privacy.

Notaro also said the room contained fractured relationships, and that the experience became healing for many people. Before Gibson received a large dose of morphine, Notaro left. She did not tell Gibson she was leaving. The last thing Gibson said to her was in the past tense: “I loved being your friend, Tig.” Notaro called it beautiful because Gibson was truly aware they were on their way out.

The attended death Gibson had was not the only kind Walker sees. Asked about people who are very alone, he described a 21-year-old client who knew he would die in April when symptoms appeared, because his mother had died of the same condition. After surgery, the young man went home to his father and stepmother. Before another surgery, he told the nursing team that when he woke up, he could not go home; his father had told him not to come back.

He remained in the hospital. Walker arrived months later after the nursing team called and said no one came to visit. By then, the young man was blind and deaf on one side, paralyzed, and unable to speak. Walker’s work was to figure out what he could do. Presence, he said, is everything. He was not there to fix. He was there to observe. Looking around the room, he saw headphones and understood the man loved music. He saw a hairbrush and understood he cared about his hair. During the weeks he was there, Walker massaged his scalp and called in music therapists to play.

The family returned only at the very end, after the hospital told them he was completely blind, completely deaf, and could not respond. Walker said they kept him alive an extra week to determine who would get the estate, which consisted of two cell phones and a PlayStation. He called it a hard death and a hard end to a life.

Walker connected that case to the origin of his commitment. He said he has been doing this work since he was 12. In 1994, his cousin came home to die from AIDS, at a time when people did not want to be around those with the disease. Walker’s grandmother said she would take care of him, and because Walker was always with his grandmother, he helped. He knew then that he did not want anyone to be alone.

Even when the work is hard, he said, there is some solace in being able to say: at least I was there. The person did not do this by themselves. Walker also described sitting with people who choose medical aid in dying, including people whose families have not accepted the choice. He has a doctor friend in California whom he tells: if you have people who are alone, I will come and be with them.

An audience member drew a comparison between pets and humans: many people grant more compassion to animals at the end of life than to people. The question was what can be done to advocate for more compassion in human death and dying. Walker’s answer began with showing up and being vocal about why: “I care about people. This is why I’m here. I don’t want you to be alone.” He said he became more intentional about death work while living in New York City when COVID came through and he saw just how alone people were.

For Walker, advocacy also includes speaking up where one can about medical aid in dying. He said more states are saying yes to it, described New York as “on the list now,” and said Colorado is ahead of the curve. His appeal to the audience was simple: if there is someone you can be there for, be there. Even if you do not know the person, he suggested going to hospices, hospitals, and nursing homes to offer presence when possible.

Near the end, the earlier prompt about a “tiny bucket list” returned. Walker’s item was birdhouses. He lives in the Chattahoochee National Forest and has wanted for years to put birdhouses on the trees. The conversation made him decide he would go home, build them, and welcome birds into his place. Notaro had done that years before, hanging birdhouses by every window. It was, she said, incredible.

Notaro’s own answer was a future hike. She was planning to hike from Crested Butte to Aspen, an 11-mile mountain route she expected would take six to eight hours. Her children wanted to go, but she knew there would likely be complaining if they went now. Her wish was to do that trek with Max and Finn someday, when they are ready. Her wife, Stephanie, had no interest and would wait in an Aspen hotel.