There is a strange choreography that happens when mortality makes itself known. Conversations slow down. Air thickens. Words get rearranged. People reach for platitudes like seatbelts in turbulence, trying to keep the moment from becoming too real.

But underneath it all, something undeniable whispers: This is happening. It happens to everyone. It will happen to me.

If someone is willing to speak openly about death (and to listen openly) the energy in the room shifts. The usual rules of conversation fall away. Gone is the posturing and the performance and the urge to fix. People stop trying to outrun time for a few minutes. And in that pause, something rare appears: truth.

These conversations are not tidy, and they don’t follow an arc. They meander, circle, contradict themselves, trail off. Sometimes this ends up being awkward or unbearably quiet or even unexpectedly funny.

When we talk about death, we are never just talking about death; we are really talking about life. We are talking about what mattered. What didn’t. What we held onto too tightly, for too long. About unfinished business and astonishing love. About being shown grace, having regrets, and the tenderness of how short our time here actually is.

Mortality is a mirror, and most of us spend our lives glancing away. But when someone holds it steady, everything starts ot look very different.

The most powerful thing you can do when death enters the conversation is simple: stay.

Not to fix. Not to cheer up. Just to stay. To let the words awkwardly fall where they may and let silence do some of the talking. To let the rawness be raw, without rushing to make it pretty. When death enters the room, life does too.