“How could you let your father die when he could have been saved? Even if it’s what he wanted, wasn’t that hard?”

♥♥♥How do we want others to remember us after we’re dead? How do we want to be treated in our final days?

Yvonne Caputo is no stranger to death. Before she was thirty, she could list seventeen family members and friends who had passed away. Among them were her uncle Claude and his son Jimmy, both dead by suicide; her cousin Alan, murdered in Central Park; and her brother Mark, killed in a car accident. Each of these deaths left her with many questions, the most important of which was: Why don’t we talk about the end of life before the end of life? While working in a retirement community, Yvonne learned about the Five Wishes®, a legal document that expresses a person’s end-of-life wishes beyond an advance directive. She decided to broach this difficult subject with her dad. What would the outcome of discussing such a dark subject be?

Yvonne Caputo’s first book, Flying with Dad, was about her father’s experiences in World War II. But this wasn’t what listeners focuse their questions on. Instead, they asked her about how she and her dad talked about what he wanted for his end-of-life experiences, how she walked him through his Five Wishes document and how, when the day came, she stopped the paramedics from reviving him.

In Dying with Dad, Yvonne shares the joy she felt when her father died on his terms. And the reason she knew what those terms were was because they had had a heart-to-heart conversation about it before it was too late.

Dying with Dad inspires us to think about meaningful discussions for when we or our loved ones are aging or preparing for death. Discussions about death and grief, but also about crossing the finish line joyfully and triumphantly.

You can have the conversations that matter, before it’s too late.