By: Gunther Woods
Around the world, we have become fluent in nearly everything except the one experience every human being shares. We hand dying over to hospitals, give the bereaved a few days off and change the subject when grief walks into the room. Julie Wright Halbert has a name for what is missing: grief literacy. She has made it her calling.
Her teacher was loss itself. In 2018, her husband, Jim, was diagnosed with cancer and was gone three weeks later. He was fifty-one. At 3:33 on a Thursday afternoon, their sons each held one of his hands. Julie rested hers on his knees. They let him go together.
“My soul did not break,” she writes. “It cracked wide open.”
Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully (Rising Phoenix LIFE, November 4, 2026) is what grew from that opening: a love story, a guided practice, a primer on the end of life and a clear-eyed argument, all built on one idea. How we die is shaped by how awake we are willing to be while we live.
Halbert did not come to this work from the wellness world. She met Jim at the University of Miami School of Law, where both were students, and spent nearly three decades as a national education attorney with the Council of the Great City Schools, helping shape education policy for primary and secondary schools in the largest urban school districts in the United States.
Grief sent her in a new direction. In the fall of 2025, she trained alongside her mother, Cynthia, and became certified as a death doula with Going with Grace, the end-of-life organization founded by Alua Arthur, a leading voice in the death-positive movement. Today she volunteers as a death doula at the bedsides of the dying with Empath Health in Sarasota, Florida, and works as a transformational soul coach through Rising Phoenix LIFE, the organization she founded. The result is a rare combination: a policy expert who knows how systems work, and a doula who knows what people need in their final hours.
The book’s architecture is the Living and Dying Awake Framework™, which moves through Descent, Witnessing and Rising, and the Seven Presence Vows™. The first vow captures Halbert’s honesty: I vow to return to presence. It does not promise that you will stay present. It promises that you can always come back, again and again, as many times as the day requires. That is how presence actually grows in a life full of grief and distraction. Around that framework, the book offers readers a transformational healing arc of their own and a clear introduction to hospice, palliative care, and the work of death doulas, knowledge many families around the world meet only in crisis.
Best-selling author Sara Connell calls it “a blueprint, a balm, and the beginning of a global movement whose time has come.” Meditations, journaling prompts, and reflection pauses are built into the text, and QR codes open a companion library of 20 guided meditations recorded by Halbert, along with a reading of a poem, all available from November 4. The first meditation is already free at LiveAndDieAwake.com.
Her policy work starts with the most vulnerable grievers of all: children. Drawing on nearly three decades in national education policy, she advocates across the United States for bereavement programs in schools and for grieving students to receive formal support plans at school (known in the US as 504 plans) and other adjustments that recognize how loss affects learning. In Florida, she champions the expansion of the Blue Butterfly Grief Care Program of Empath Health Tidewell, so that no grieving child walks through loss without language, support, and care.
Her message belongs to no single country or faith: grief is for everyone who lives and everyone who will die. The only question is how awake we choose to be.
For anyone who has loved and lost, anyone walking beside someone through a terminal illness, and anyone who senses there must be a more awake way to live, and a more sacred way to leave.
Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully by Julie Wright Halbert publishes November 4, 2026. The book is available to pre-order on Amazon, and the first meditation is free now at LiveAndDieAwake.com: a first step toward living and dying awake.
