By: Guillermo Zanky
We meditate to be present. We journal to be honest. We spend real time and money chasing a more awake, intentional life. Julie Wright Halbert believes the most powerful teacher of presence is the one we spend the most energy avoiding: death.
She did not arrive at that belief by choice. 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.”
What came through that opening is Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully (Rising Phoenix LIFE, November 4, 2026), a love story, a guided practice, and a gentle education in the end of life, built on one conviction: how we die is shaped by how awake we are willing to be while we live.
Halbert’s path to the bedside began in a law school classroom. She met Jim when both were students at the University of Miami School of Law and went on to spend nearly three decades as a national education attorney with the Council of the Great City Schools, helping shape K-12 (kindergarten through high school) education policy for the nation’s largest urban school districts.
After Jim’s death, she went looking for what no career had taught her. 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. It is a path open to anyone who feels called to sit with the dying. Today she volunteers as a death doula at the bedsides of the dying with Empath Health in Sarasota, Florida, works as a transformational soul coach through Rising Phoenix LIFE, the organization she founded, and is a national voice for grief literacy.
Most people find real clarity about what matters only after a diagnosis, a funeral, or a near miss. Halbert’s ambition is to offer that clarity without the catastrophe. Her book gives readers two tools: the Living and Dying Awake Framework™, a path through Descent, Witnessing and Rising, and the Seven Presence Vows™, a practice for meeting loss with presence, whether or not you are grieving right now.
The first vow will feel familiar to anyone who has ever sat on a meditation cushion and watched their mind wander: I vow to return to presence. Not to stay present, which Halbert never pretends is possible, but to return, again and again, as many times as the day requires. In Halbert’s hands, that small shift becomes a way of meeting grief, illness and ordinary days alike. It is the difference between a practice you abandon and one you keep. The framework is the spine of the book, not the whole of it. Readers are also guided through their own transformational healing arc and given a grounded introduction to hospice, palliative care and the work of death doulas.
Claire Bidwell Smith, author of Conscious Grieving, urges readers to come to it “with your heart open and your hand on your own life.” The meditations, journaling prompts, and reflection pauses woven through the book make that possible, and QR codes open a companion library of 20 guided meditations, each read by Halbert, plus a poem read aloud, so the practice continues after the final page. The full library opens November 4. The first meditation is free now at LiveAndDieAwake.com, ready for the next time you sit. This is grief told from the inside, by someone who has sat with it in her own home and at the bedsides of others.
Her attorney’s training shows most clearly in her work for grieving children. Drawing on nearly thirty years in national K-12 education policy, she presses nationally for bereavement programs in schools and for grieving students to receive 504 plans, the formal support plans schools create for individual students, along with other accommodations. In Florida, she champions the expansion of the Blue Butterfly Grief Care Program of Empath Health Tidewell.
Her message is plain: 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 deeply, lost suddenly, is walking beside someone through a terminal illness, or has sensed 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. Pre-order your copy on Amazon, and try the first meditation, free at LiveAndDieAwake.com.
