You plan everything
except this.

I help people plan the end of their life. An attorney handles the will and the directive. I handle the room: who is in it, what it looks and sounds like, what gets said, and what you would need from the people around you once you can no longer ask for it.

Based in Austin, Texas  ·  Working with clients globally
What this is

The part of dying nobody plans.

You may already have an estate plan, a will, and an advance directive. If so, good. They matter, and I will never tell you otherwise. They also stop at the door of the room where you will die.

An advance directive answers the questions a doctor needs answered. Resuscitation, intervention, life support. It has no opinion on what the room will be like, or who will be in it, or what you would want someone to say to you when you cannot answer back. Those turn out to be the things the ones left behind wish they had talked about.

For some people this is a spiritual passage. For others it is the last practical problem they will ever solve. I have sat with both, and both deserve the same care. Most of us discover this gap at the worst possible hour, standing in the room with no time left. I would rather ask you the questions now, years early, while the answers are still yours to give.

How it works

A small number of clients, served slowly.

We meet about six times, usually over several months. I ask the questions and you take your time with them. At the end you have a custom bound book that the people around you can hold in their hands and follow without guessing. We go through it together once a year, because what you want at forty is rarely what you want at seventy-five. It is a physical book for a reason. Nothing about it lives online, and the only copies are the ones you choose to hand over.

Before, or as soon as you can

This work goes best in the healthy years, when you are clear-headed, free to change your mind, and able to sit with a hard question for a week before answering it. If a diagnosis has already arrived, I compress the same work into weeks. The work is the same, start to finish, and I do not charge more because the time is short.

An honest evidence standard

Every option I offer comes with a plain label about how much research supports it. Some things are well established. Some have no clinical evidence at all, and I will tell you so and offer them anyway. That covers the measurable and the unmeasurable alike. Whether something is clinically proven or simply matters to you, you will know which it is before you choose it.

Presence that doesn't divide

Most clients need only the planning and the book. Some also want someone there in the final days, in the room, for however long it takes, and that can be added when the time comes. I do that work myself, and I cap it at two households at a time. That number is the limit of what I can do well, and I would rather turn someone away than show up with half my attention.

Discretion as structure

I do not tell client stories and I do not publish testimonials. Who has worked with me will never appear anywhere, for as long as this practice exists. What happens in that room belongs to the people in it.

Free, and freely shareable

Before You Need It

A short guide to the questions worth answering while they are still hypothetical. There is nothing to sign up for. If it helps, use it. If you know someone who needs it, send it along.

What's in it

What an advance directive leaves out. Four things most people never hear until they are already in the room. A sample of the questions I ask. How to choose who speaks for you, and what to do with your answers once you have them.

Read the guideDownload PDF
Contact
Maria Long

Maria Long

I have spent more than fifteen years producing experiences for people who notice everything: Formula 1 weekends, invitation-only AI summits and dinners for C-suite executives, private luxury travel for ultra-high-net-worth clients, global events for a Fortune 500 technology company. My job has always been to see the detail before anyone else does and quietly handle it. It still is.

Early in that career, someone I loved died in hospice. I was the one in the room, and nothing had been planned. Not the light, not who should be there, not what they would have wanted said. I have spent the years since learning what that room needs, and why almost no one prepares for it.

This practice is the result: the care I have built a career on, turned toward the one occasion that gets none. I have sat in that chair, and I know how to plan a room.

If you want to talk.

Write to me. There is no sequence of intake emails waiting on the other side, and I will not chase you if you go quiet. A single question is reason enough, and so is asking where to find something the guide mentioned.

Based in Austin, Texas  ·  Working with clients globally