I had a “reconnect” meeting yesterday with a dear fellow coach, Nathalie Ducrot, I don’t see nearly enough of. There was a brief moment of re-remembering, Do we usually speak together in English? In French? I suggested “Franglais” — my favourite language. No agenda other than following our hearts. A spacious conversation where topics wander and curiosity wonders.
When two people who have lived long enough and lost enough meet like that, certain themes don’t need to be introduced. They arise spontaneously. Nathalie and I both know child loss by suicide, an experience that rearranges life from the inside out. Perhaps that is why we spoke so easily about death and dying, right alongside conversations about our work and our broader lives, and about what it means to live consciously in the presence of our mortality. There was no skirting around anything.
At some point in the conversation, Nathalie used an expression that gave me goosebumps and that I have been noodling ever since. She said something to the effect of, “La vie, c’est une promenade vers sa mort.” When I asked how she might say that in English, the phrase that came to her immediately, rather than a literal translation, was, “All of life is about dancing towards our death.” I refined the language further to, “Life is all about gently dancing towards our death.”
It felt soothing. Inspiring. Somehow lightening, despite the topic. What if this were our approach to life? And knowing that we cannot, or only very rarely, choose our deaths, what might this mean for how we choose to live?
I often have death on my mind — because of personal losses, some more recent than others, and because of my volunteering at an end-of-life hospice. I notice, and learn, a great deal about how people meet their deaths. I have written before about those close to me, and about what I could glean from how they met theirs, but most of the time, death has not been wanted.
With Mike and Edward, death came through serious, terminal illness. They did not want to die. They would very much have liked to go on living. With Julia and others, suicide appears, on the surface, to involve choice, and yet I wonder. In that moment of deepest despair, is there really a choice? My jury is still out, but I lean towards believing that in those moments, choice has already collapsed. Life may no longer be wanted. Death may not be wanted either. Something simply wrenches the person out of their life.
Very recently, I had a rich experience, this time with a woman who was intentionally and consciously in the final twenty-four hours of her life. In her early eighties, she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour — terminal, certainly, but she might have had a couple more good years. She could see well enough, even if her vision was blurred, hear with the help of hearing aids, walk with a frame, speak clearly and articulately, follow a conversation, and reflect on her life with remarkable lucidity. There was nothing frantic or despairing about her. Serene is the word that comes closest to describing the quality of her state, her presence.
We talked openly about her choice, with an ease that surprised me by how natural it felt. She spoke of her life, her loves, her passions and interests. We also spoke of her many losses and her fatigue from living with multiple griefs.
She had lost her mother when very young. The youngest of eight children, she had outlived most of her siblings. Her husband had died suddenly just a year earlier. Of her four children, she had lost three — two at birth and one later in life, also suddenly. Loss was not new; it had been woven into the fabric of her life for decades. She was not afraid to die, even though the idea of dying brought sadness and tears to her eyes. She simply wanted the heaviness of living with grief — and knowing it would only deepen with illness — to end.
After our last supper together, after her final night’s sleep, she would be accompanied by EXIT, the Swiss assisted suicide organisation.
I have been thinking of this woman ever since we met. Her soft, luminous skin. Her beautiful hair. Her bright eyes and smile. Her healthy demeanour. Her calm serenity. She positively glowed, so different from how we often imagine people standing on the threshold of death. What has stayed with me most is the quality of her presence as she approached her final hours. She was ready to end her life while it still felt like hers.
After my conversation with Nathalie, I realised that this was exactly what I had witnessed in her. This woman, despite so many hardships, was gently dancing towards her death, moving towards the end with clarity, dignity and an absence of struggle that felt refreshing.
Her imminent and intentional death felt like a conscious closing of this experience called life, one that arose naturally from having lived with death in awareness rather than in denial. She knew she was done. Of course, things were left undone, incomplete, unresolved, but she was at peace with that.
I don’t believe we get to choose the details of how we die most of the time, and I know all too well that suffering, trauma and mental illness can make the idea of gently dancing towards death feel absurd. And yet I am increasingly aware that how we live, how we meet each moment, how we face what ends and all that we lose, can shape whether death feels like an enemy or a companion to life.
This is the ground from which Mortal Leader has grown, from the conviction that allowing mortality into our conscious awareness changes how we make life choices, how we love, how we work and how we lead during the short time that we are here.
I now find myself carrying an additional question into 2026:
What might it mean, today, to dance gently towards my death?
