Running late, and it is late. Fitting, given what this one’s about.

“Becoming a different friend” wasn’t on my bingo card of what would happen after Scott died. Running his March Madness pool, sure. Spending more time in LA than I did in NYC, definitely. But becoming less flaky? That one I didn’t see coming.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still late, but it’s less now.

And I want to be clear, I wasn’t a bad friend. I showed up for the big stuff — breakups, firings, illness, death. I’d have been anyone’s one phone call from jail. It was the everyday stuff I thought could wait. Like leaving a text sitting unanswered for four days. Skipping dinner because I was tired. Saying we should get drinks and fully meaning it, then never making the plan.

I loved my friends and I think they knew that. Or I decided they did.

At some point, canceling became a lifestyle. Protecting my peace. Low social battery. I’m dead, can’t make it. Everyone complains about flaky friends. Nobody thinks they’re the flaky friend.

I was the flaky friend. I had all the language for why that was fine. And the ones I bailed on most were the ones I was surest about. Thirty-five years in, nobody’s ending it over a rain check. They never did, so it kept working. But somewhere underneath it, I think I assumed there would always be a next time.

What changed wasn’t a book or a resolution or some podcast about the friendship recession. It was a Thursday night volleyball game in February.

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Those first few days without Scott, everyone was crammed onto one sectional with only grief between us. Me, my sisters, his sister, his friends.

It sounded like laughing and crying and total silence, sometimes in the same minute. Like someone always on the phone with someone, so my sister didn’t have to be.

It tasted like whatever was in the 165-quart Igloo cooler in the living room, which doubled as extra seating. Water, wine, beer, green juice.

It felt like someone’s leg against mine for six hours. Nobody had their own seat, and nobody wanted one.

There was nothing anyone could do for us. They were just there. And I started to understand that being “just there” is actually everything.

It’s like how your wants change the more you date. At first it’s tall, funny, handsome. Date enough frogs and all you want is kind, steady, around. It’s the same with friends. I didn’t need people who could make me feel better. I needed people who were fine if I didn’t. And somewhere in there I started wanting to be that friend: kind, steady, around.

So the four-day text is a same-day text now. I go when I say I’ll go. The drinks I was always going to get, I actually get. I sit on couches without filling the quiet. And I call, which nobody does anymore. I pick up, too.

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None of this is a personality transplant. I’m not walking around #grateful. I’d rather have him back than have learned anything, and if you put that on a mug I would throw it.

Grief is a terrible delivery system for a lesson. You can’t schedule it, can’t recommend it, and the ROI is absolute shit.

But I think I used to treat showing up as a nice thing you did for people. Now I think it’s kind of the whole thing. Not only when something terrible happens, but on a random Tuesday when nothing has. In friendship. At work. For the things you say you’re going to do.

Scott’s death rearranged parts of my life that I thought were pretty set in stone. Joke’s on me. I started a second career as a founder in the death space… it doesn’t get more rearranged than that.

There’s a page in the Fini brand guidelines describing who Fini would be if she were a person (she’s a she, obviously).

“She drinks a martini, very cold, sometimes with one other person who knows how to sit in silence. She knows when to stay and when to go. Her life is slower, but not smaller. More intentional. More precise. Still very much in the world, just no longer fooled by its noise.”

She sounds familiar.

Every relationship in my life is deeper than it was. All this noticing has me wondering, though: did grief just speed up something that getting older would have taught me eventually?

Maybe.

I just know I like the friend I am now. I hate what it took to become her.

P.S. A friend sent me this Muhammad Ali friendship poem years ago and every so often my algorithm digs it back up. Leaving it here.

I used to be the person people texted, “What are you wearing out?”

Now I’m the person people text things like:

She’s in hospice. What do I say? She’s not dead yet.

Ok, so his dad died like 3 months ago and I never said anything. Is it too late?

What do you wear to a funeral?

All different questions. The only thing they have in common is now they know somebody to ask — ME. And let me tell you, there aren’t many of us.

At first I would freeze and think, unclear why you’re asking me; I’m not a death expert.

Now I lead with the disclaimer and the credential. “I’m not a death expert, but I am an expert in my own grief, soooo…” Then I tell them what I’d say or do. All things I learned through trial and error.

She’s in hospice? “I’m so sorry” doesn’t work on someone who’s still alive. Ask about her while she’s still here. Let them know you’re thinking about them both.

Is it too late to text? No. Say it’s been three months and you’re sorry you never said anything sooner, but you didn’t know what to say.

What do you wear? Whatever you’d wear to a work dinner. Nobody is looking at you, I promise.

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The first outreach can be easy, as long as it’s honest. It breaks the awkward moment. It kicks any etiquette out the window in the name of just showing up.

There’s no cookie-cutter approach to anyone’s grief. There shouldn’t be.

A couple of years ago, my sister and I were walking in Venice when she ran into people she hadn’t seen since Scott died. They said something, of course. After, she said, ugh, I hate seeing people I haven’t seen since Scott. I hate having to talk about it.

Then, almost in the same breath: And I hate when they don’t ask about him. Like they moved on and forgot him. I haven’t. I live with it every day.

Everyone wants something different, and half the time they don’t know what that is either. You can want the question out loud one minute and feel like it’s the worst possible thing to say the next. That’s how unsure grief is.

None of that gets easier from the other side either, even though I get some version of these questions every week. Some days, I still send the broken heart emoji when I’ve got nothing, or ask how are you knowing it’s a stupid question. I’ve signed a pre-written sympathy card because I couldn’t think of anything to write. (Non-expert expert tip: ask how are you today vs. how are you. One day is answerable.)

Which is why none of the above is a script. It’s a way to start. And on the days when the questions get bigger, like what do you think happens when you die, my answer is the same. I have no idea.

I believe more spiritually fringe things now than I did before Scott died. But nobody gave me a handbook when I started working in the end-of-life space. There isn’t one. And shit, do we have questions. How much is a funeral anyway? How long is too long to wait to pick up my mom’s ashes? When do I cancel his phone? When do I stop saying we?

I’m fumbling in the dark on most of these, which is one of the reasons I’m building Fini. Somewhere to put the questions, and all the different answers to them.

None of them are new. Nobody is the first person to sit there wondering. They’ve just never had anywhere to go. Now they will.

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“Mommy, will you be here forever?”

We were mid-bedtime routine. Ninety seconds earlier my daughter had been explaining that her favorite lollipop flavor is unicorn rainbow.

Shit. I was not prepared for this.

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I hesitated for five seconds, which is a very long time when a four-year-old is waiting on you. Everything in me wanted to say yes, of course I’ll be here forever. That’s the job as far as I understand it. To protect her. To keep her world safe and permanent.

Eventually I said something like, “I’m here now and not planning on going anywhere, and there will always be people around who take care of you, and me not being here probably won’t happen for a really long time, like years and years.”

She looked at me for a second, then asked when we were going back to the place with the waterslides. I exhaled.

Once she was in bed, I did what every parent would — I opened ChatGPT and asked if my response had screwed up my kid. It told me I’d gotten most of it right. Next time, it said, stay in the present, name the people who will take care of her, and don’t promise anything I can’t deliver.

A few weeks later she brought it up again. Then again after that, a different angle every time.

What happens when you die? Is dying like sleeping? When are you going to die? Will I die too? How did Uncle Scotty die? Can you still be my mommy when you die?

Turns out this is normal for her age. Kids start grasping the basics of death around four or five, and the fear turns up most between four and eight, usually about a parent.

Every question she asked had the word ‘die’ in the mix. In some ways, I was relieved. She wasn’t scared of the word, just what it meant. Which apparently isn’t universal. She told me a kid in her class said, “You can’t say die, that’s a bad word.” Cool. Filing it next to “penis.”

No kid comes up with that on their own. They read it off us. The pause before the answer, the way we get quiet, the swap from “died” to “passed.” Underneath it is a superstition: that saying the word invites it to dinner.

There are countless chapters on gentle parenting, big feelings, and screen time. A whole script for the birds and the bees, and almost nothing for this. Probably because parents don’t go looking for the language until they have to, and by then someone has died, which from experience is the worst possible time to be looking for anything.

As a mom and a death founder (sounds like a strange combo when you say it out loud), I keep thinking about whether we can stop treating death like it’s a bad word that’s only scary.

Maybe we take a page from this dad, who went viral recently for turning death into something that isn’t hunting you, just waiting to meet you eventually, telling you to live and love a little more.

Or maybe we make the death symbols less terrifying (try typing “death” into the emoji search on your iPhone and see what comes back: skulls, coffins, tombstones, urns, two Japaneses kanji… and a cactus for some odd reason), and lean into the beauty of a cemetery instead of the haunted, ghost-filled version of it.

At home, I’m trying not to let death and anxiety turn into “death anxiety.” Nobody my daughter has loved has died yet. She was two when Scott died, so she doesn’t remember him. Whatever she learns about it, she’s learning while everything is fine.

So we say their names, not only on birthdays or anniversaries, but in regular everyday conversation. When she says “die,” I don’t do anything with my face. On planes we wave to the clouds, because that’s where I told her Scott and her great-grandmother are. We celebrate Halloween and Día de los Muertos, which means one night she's a rainbow unicorn collecting candy from strangers, and the next a dinner of everything they liked to eat and drink. We tell the same stories we always tell, the ones that keep them alive.

And when we drive past a cemetery, tombstones are little apartment buildings. She’s decided you get to design your own, which I have not corrected, because it’s better than anything I would have come up with.

Almost none of this is accurate. She’s four, Scott isn’t in the clouds, and tombstones are not apartment buildings. But it feels important to us right now and I’d rather she start here, with something she can hold, than start with nothing and fill it in herself.

Not that I can tell if any of its landing. I don’t think I’ll know for another twenty years. Every single time she leaves the house she asks, “Mommy, are you gonna be here when I get back?” Could be death anxiety. Could be separation anxiety.

Guess I’ll deal with that one later.

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I’m building a brand about death, and I have never been more interested in living.

When you spend your days thinking about endings, you pay way closer attention to everything in between.

I know you know a lot about me, mostly by way of what I’m doing and why. You may have even read a week in my life. But knowing what someone does isn’t the same as knowing them.

There’s this poem I love called The Dash, by Linda Ellis (I’m not sure who first sent it to me, but whoever you are, thank you). The gist: the little dash between the year you’re born and the year you die is the part that actually matters. The long dinners, the random Thursdays, and the people who make us laugh so hard we can’t breathe.

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Here’s what’s in my dash so far:

I grew up in Miami. (No clubs, no bottle service. Mostly Publix subs and humidity.) I went to school in New Orleans, where for one semester my official designation was “Displaced Tulane Student (Hurricane Related).” Back to Miami for a little while after college, enough time to see LeBron win us a ring, and then New York City, for fashion PR.

Somehow I’m still everyone’s Miami person, even though I haven’t lived there in years. Any time someone asks me where to eat, I come up short, because the real answer is “Ummm, my parents’ house?” But whenever I am home, there are a few things I have to have. Enriqueta’s for the pan con bistec (Hablo un poco de español), Chicken Kitchen for the mustard curry sauce, and Joe’s for pretty much everything, but especially the chopped salad — the dressing is unreal. Not a vegetarian. Basic girl from Miami.

New York I could do all day, but my expertise is mostly sandwiches. Lunch is my favorite meal. Chips over fries always.

Mid-week bar-seat dinners are my favorite kind. The spontaneous ones, like when a friend calls and says, “Want to go to Pastis?” and my answer is always yes. Three hours later, somebody (usually me) orders one last round, and then another.

I take walks through Bloomingdale’s the way other people walk their dogs. Aimless, for the pleasure of it, usually without spending a dollar. Which, if you know me, is the impressive part. I read the print NYT every weekend and I still buy magazines.

I know a strange amount about things nobody asked me to know about. Commencement speeches, for one. I watch them every year, and I have five I go back to. This year, Conan at Harvard did not miss. If you want in, they’re all here. (Oh, you didn’t know that C-SPAN has a dedicated page for commencement speeches? You’re welcome.)

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Palm Heights in Grand Cayman is my favorite place in the world. I ran the New York City marathon in 2016 and have no plans to do it again. FaceTime is the best thing anyone ever invented. My screen time is necessarily high. Whatever.

I’m the middle of three girls, which explains more than I could. The humor runs dry. Sisters are everything and no one will protect you more while critiquing you just as hard.

I’ve never been good at losing touch. Some of my closest friends I’ve had for more than 35 years. And yes, I still talk to my intern from my first job.

I have one daughter. She’s my little grem and the best Bloomingdale’s buddy. She also thinks I’m the greatest person in the world… for now. My husband is a really good man who may or may not share her assessment. He has been at most of the long dinners, paid for the last rounds, and has never once been the one to call it.

None of what I’ve told you is impressive. It’s sandwiches and department stores. But I think that’s exactly the point. A dash isn’t just your greatest hits. It’s also the accumulation of small, ordinary things that, over time, make you who you are.

We spend a lot of time introducing ourselves by what we do and where we live.

I figured I’d introduce myself by what’s in my dash instead.

So hello. I’m Jana. It’s nice to meet you.

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The art of getting people to pay attention. That was the job, and what I spent my entire career doing. Not just getting people to look, but getting them to see. I drew them in, curated the moment, tied it up with a bow. I could produce an experience for anything and for anyone. I was good (even great) at it.

Then I left to build something of my own, where I’m good at almost none of it.

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Everyone warns you that starting a company is hard, lonely, and that most of them fail (90% to be exact), but what no one talks about is how much of what you learned you’re going to have to unlearn.

As a publicist, my job was to control the narrative. If I didn’t define the story, someone else would. That instinct runs deep, and it doesn’t turn off just because the job changed.

When I hired my first freelance writers, I learned they actually don’t want (or need) a one-pager with every detail spelled out the way a press release does. News. To. Me.

If I had a penny for every time I heard “done is better than perfect,” when building a site from scratch, I would have single-handedly kept the penny in circulation (RIP Abe and the lucky penny). Here’s something else “done is better than perfect” is teaching me: I’m great at listening (like really listening), but acting on that advice? Damn, I’m struggling.

For me, perfectionism isn’t really about perfection. It’s about context. I need to fill in the whole picture for everyone, so they can’t criticize what’s missing, only what’s there. My logic is that if nothing is missing, there’s no gotcha moment. I have the same instinct with Fini. I need to give you the full picture before you get to form an opinion.

The problem is this isn’t a narrative to control; it’s a living, breathing brand that changes every day. New points of view. New stories about loss that are so personal your opinion on them can only ever be subjective. I’m starting to accept that people will form an opinion on a half-baked version of Fini (a work in progress, if you will) and that’s not something I can control. I fucking hate it. But following Mel Robbins’ advice, I’m learning to let them.

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I’m putting things out before I’ve decided they’re ready. I fight the urge to send a full deck to everyone who asks a simple question. I've stopped writing talking points for conversations that are just conversations. And let me tell you, it’s the least natural thing in the world for me. Somehow though, the whole damn thing hasn’t fallen apart yet.

So if I have to share one thing I’m not unlearning, it’s this: I know how to give people a new lens. I know how to take something and make it relatable.

Death and grief are experiences that need a new lens more than anything I’ve ever worked on.

Sure, I’m not getting people to want the must-have handbag of the summer, or the exact shade of red lipstick T-Swift wore at her wedding. But a handbag is optional. So is the perfect red lip. This isn’t. It’s death. It’s grief. It’s end-of-life.

So, this is the job now. It’s what I’ve always done. Getting people to pay attention. Getting them to not just look, but really see. Only this time, it’s a new subject — the one we spend our lives avoiding. And when they look, they’ll see death was never the opposite of living.

It was part of it all along.

I always pictured a medium as a woman in a dark room with a crystal ball, too many scarves, 78 tarot cards, and enough gold jewelry to set off a metal detector. Someone who’d hold my hand, close her eyes, and tell me I’d come into money and meet a tall stranger.

Turns out I couldn’t be more wrong (shocker). A medium is not a psychic, which is what I pictured. A psychic reads the living, basically That’s So Raven. A medium talks to the dead. That’s the one I wanted. So I did what any reasonable, well-adjusted person does with their grief and drove two hours through Hamptons traffic to pay a stranger to talk to my dead brother-in-law.

I know how this sounds. But you know that cliché, “I’d give anything for one more hour with them.” Well, I put a number to it.

4 hours, round trip. Cheaper than a therapy session, so basically free. And 2 hours spent sitting with a man who started by reading my aura.

10/10, would buy again.

Ever since Scott died, my own choices don’t surprise me anymore. And I’m not talking about my whole crystal situation (which btw started at Mount Meditation in Ojai, but that’s a story for another time). What used to feel “normal” now feels like too narrow a way to look at life. I believe in energy now, and in vibes, and in a kind of spirituality that doesn’t belong to any one religion or practice. Just an openness to whatever feels right in the moment.

I started feeling this way three weeks after Scott died, when I surprised myself by sitting on a Zoom with a medium. She opened with a prayer. She ended by telling me to revisit the idea that I kept pushing to the back burner. The idea is what Fini is now, what it’ll be this fall.

Oh, and Scott did come through too, but that’s not the story I’m telling.

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Driving through Long Island, I was giving this another go. This time, with a medium who had a two-year waitlist that I somehow just jumped to the front of the line. (A sign, if I’ve ever seen one.)

By the time I pulled up, I was ready to ask questions, listen, and give away as little as possible. I believe in vibes, but I also believe in bullshit. I signed up without my full name. I left no digital trail. If I was going to do this, I wanted to trust whatever I walked away with.

Two hours later, I walked away with a lot.

It started with us just… vibing? No crystal ball, no scarves, none of what I’d pictured. Just a man about my dad’s age, in a strip mall, at a round table in a dim room with incense burning, and one hell of a quote on the wall. And a handwritten wifi password on the table, because of course. He made small talk about my drive, the traffic, the weather.

Then he told me his story. The gift runs in his whole family, generational, and he can trace every bit of it. Very Encanto. Then he walked me through how it works. He feels energies, not beings. They talk to each other, not to him. He does a lot of listening. He tells me what he hears, when he hears it.

My grandmother came through almost instantly — my dad’s mom. A woman he couldn’t have found online if he tried. In my head, I asked her, “How’s Scott?” She knew him. I wondered if they had found each other where they are.

The room was quiet. Then the medium said, “How is Scott doing? How is Scott?” In the exact distinctive way my grandmother spoke. A little proper, always full words. Then he asked me, “Who is Scott?”

I was not prepared for that. Which is ridiculous because I absolutely was. My heart physically hurt; I thought, “The fuck?” then I started tearing up. All within a few seconds.

“He’s my brother-in-law,” I said. “I was just asking my grandma about him in my head.”

The medium nodded as if I’d just told him to pass the salt. Totally normal conversation here.

From there it only got more unbelievable, and more comforting. My other grandmother came through, then my uncle too. The medium named them one by one, learning who they were by listening to them talk to each other. He passed along messages from everyone.

Say hello to your father. (Except they used his name.)

It’s okay to take the trip in July. (Fine. I’ll go on vacation because the energies said so.)

Don’t be so hard on your mom. (Noted. But rude, you’re right.)

My business was about to boom. (Fuck yes.)

The details he gave me were so specific, ones barely anyone would know. I loved it. But sitting there, staring at this man, I remembered why I’d voluntarily sat in Long Island traffic in mid-June. So I did something that would’ve earned me a nasty look from my grandmothers if they were still around. I took the focus off of them and asked him about Scott instead.

“Do you hear anything else from Scott?”

The medium smiled at me and said the most bittersweet thing a medium has ever said to me in a strip mall: “He’s very busy. Socializing, planning things, making sure everyone’s having a good time up there, and making sure everyone down here is okay.”

I came all this way because when someone dies, you can accept on paper they’re gone, but part of you never stops wishing they weren’t. You wish they were right there next to you, walking through the door, sitting in their usual spot on the couch. The wishing never ends, so why should trying to connect with them?

And here I am, trying to connect with him, and Scott is… busy?

Sounds about right.

It’s like I can hear him saying, “Bad girl, go away. Thanks for making the drive, but let’s do this another time.”

The fuck. (Yes, again.) All I could do was laugh, and take what I could get. I didn’t come for proof of the afterlife, or to know what happens when you die. I came for connection, and some sort of comfort. And I got it. It just came with Scott being Scott. He was okay. He was busy. That was enough.

I will always wonder, and wonder often — about how he’s doing. Why him? Why then? Where we go when it’s over, and what’s left of us for the people still here?

But that’s a me problem. I don’t think grief is about letting go. I think it’s about finding a new way to stay close to the person you lost, in whatever way works for you.

We don’t all have to believe the same thing, but we’ve done a terrible job as a society of making room for the people in the middle. The ones who don’t want to choose between complete skepticism and blind faith. Who just want to wonder. That’s where I live, and it’s what I’m creating with Fini.

As for Scott, he’s good.

I still remember the look on my sister’s face when she asked us that. She didn’t look afraid. She looked at a loss… for words, for an answer, for how she ended up asking the question in the first place.

It was the first of hundreds of questions none of us could answer.

How do I tell my kids their dad died? Do I keep them home from school, or is normal better? Do I go see him? Do I even want to? Do the kids come to the celebration of life? His phone won’t stop buzzing; do I answer it? His bike is still at work; do I go get it? They need proof he’s dead, to cancel our ski trip? Who do I call first: his boss, the school, the landlord, the bank, the insurance?

And underneath all of it:

Will we ever smile again?

Will there ever be joy?

Is it going to be like this forever?

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We’re all taught the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Clean and sequential, like a progress bar. Not one of them is a question, which is strange to me because grief is almost entirely questions. Not why him or why me — the ones only someone who’s been through it can answer.

Each time, I’d sit. Stare. Wonder. Google. Then turn to my texts instead. Because the internet came up short. Not a little. COMPLETELY. I searched “do you keep your kids home from school after their dad dies” and got a Reddit thread from three years ago, then a blog post from a glass design studio in Scotland. A glass studio. In Scotland. From 2016. That was the answer the internet had for me. (You can’t make this shit up.)

None of this made sense because the internet has an answer for everything else. I’d just had a baby and there was a post for every inch of it. Which $1,400 stroller if you live in NYC? C-section or gentle C-section? Weddings too: ghost chairs or chiavari? Do we name the signature cocktail after the city we met in, or our first date spot? Every version of every happy thing, from someone who’d been there.

But for the worst thing that can happen to a person? Best of luck, you’re on your own.

So I went looking for the people myself. My cousin, the therapist. My BFF’s childhood friend who’d lost her husband too. Widows and widowers. Single moms. Friends of friends. Real people who’d been through it and could just tell us what they did. I took the calls, we took the advice, and the questions finally had answers.

And for my sister, it wasn’t about what to do. She needed to know she’d survive this, and that she’d keep breathing. I couldn’t tell her that; I hadn’t been through it. But the other young widows had. They told her there was another side, even if she couldn’t see it yet.

That’s when the bigger thing started to click. We were lucky (a fucked up thing to feel with Scott gone). Not everyone has a therapist in the family, or a friend who already knows what this feels like. It’s hard enough even with all the people around you. Alone, I don’t how anyone does it.

All of this led me to build Fini, the place I went looking for and couldn’t find. The answers, the guidance, the experiences, and the culture that finally talks about death out loud instead of around it. All from people who’ve lived it, and people we can learn from.

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I’ll leave you with one question I never would have known to ask. And an answer only another widow could give.

Should my sister bring the kids to Scott’s celebration of life? She didn’t know. But one mother had faced the exact same question. Bring them for the beginning, she said, then let them leave. It’s too much otherwise. And hire a videographer, so when they’re older they'll be able to watch.

So we did. They came for the start, then left. And one day, they'll see how many people loved their dad, and hear what losing him meant.

I’ll never ever forget her. We only spoke that once, over the phone. But she gave my niece and nephew the one piece of that day they’ll ever have.

Oh, and she answered the first question too.

Can I cry in front of my kids?

Yes. You can, and you should. Because someday, someone will ask them what it was like when their dad died. And you don’t want the answer to be, “my mom didn’t cry once.”

They won’t remember you crying. They’d remember if you didn’t.

My friend interjected with a smile and said, “No, it isn’t,” then gestured to me and said, “Tell them what you do.”

Mouth full of Nerds, I managed to get out, “I’m building a company about death, grief, and end of life.” …I still haven’t nailed the elevator pitch.

The guy instantly laughed and said, “Okay, you win. But what does that mean?”

Here’s a much more detailed version of what I said to him.

Monday

Most weeks for me start with some form of a to-do list. After 20 years of working I still haven’t figured out how to keep one. But somehow all the things get done.

Then I read. The Post for the vibe, whatever Substacks landed in my inbox, and enough of the weekend’s culture news to feel caught up. (I’m not caught up.)

The website is the real build happening underneath all this. Death needs a design, and right now that's me deciding on fonts, styles, spacing, and figuring out how someone moves through a site about death without it feeling like a funeral home.

Later while driving, I saw a billboard for the latest (and last) Jackass movie. For 25 years, the entire franchise has centered on guys flirting with death for a laugh. Now they’re ending with a kind of memorial to themselves. Even the trailer gives “full circle” energy.

Tuesday

By Tuesday, I’m still simultaneously behind and moving forward, usually on things I didn’t even realize would take up my week.

This week it was a call with a friend of a friend. A few minutes in, she was telling me about her dad, who died. People do this once they know what I’m building, and I love it. Ten minutes in, and she trusted me with one of the biggest things in her life. I don’t take that lightly. They’ve been waiting for somewhere to put it. That’s the whole reason for Fini.

The second thing was less emotional, and more emotional. I voluntarily bought my gremlin daughter a ten-pack of whistles. (I know.) She pranced into the apartment and found them. (I know.) And for the rest of the afternoon, all I heard were high-pitched shrill sounds punctuating my every thought. And somewhere in the noise, I thought: I should call my dad.

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Wednesday

Turns out there's a lot of fine print before Fini can even go live. By mid-week, I’ve probably had three or four calls with my lawyer, my developer, my insurance broker, or some combo of the three. Each telling me a piece of bad news or information I have to ask Claude about.

In a single day, I’ve become fluent in dev and can basically code now. Ask me about a slug or GEO. My JavaScript is on point. My tech stack is tall. I’m basically an engineer. I know all about “fictitious name,” “foreign qualification,” and “registered agent.” (Ask me sometime about that registered agent storing my mail in an inbox I’m not allowed to open!!!) At some point I also spent two hours figuring out what CCPA and DMCA stand for, admitted vs. non-admitted carriers, and whether a “safe harbor” was actually safe. At no point did Jake from State Farm ever show up at my door.

Thursday

The one day I feel like the week resolves into something tangible. The substack goes out. I’ve got the process down pat-ish. (There are always surprises, like getting off a two-year waitlist to see a medium. More on that one soon.)

But here’s what’s guaranteed: I read the newsletter at least four times. I hover over send, and don't send. (Part of the process.) I read it again, then call my head of editorial and have her read it back to me out loud. She says, “Ship it,” and I'm good at following directions, so I press send, shut my laptop, and literally run away. By the time you’re reading this, I’m in a yoga class that I’m actually not great at, but it doesn’t matter because I just need an hour to myself and to hear the teacher say, “Trust that I will guide you out when it’s time.”

Friday

This is my catchall days. Whatever’s left from the week gets sorted into the one list system I’ve ever been able to stick to: MSN.

Must.

Should.

Not right now.

The must-dos get done. The should-dos move to the weekend. The not-right-nows get a prime spot on next week’s list, where they’ll be not-right-now again.

The other list is my Notes app, which is less a list than a record of how the week actually went. A thought about grief I didn’t want to forget. Important shit I heard on a podcast. Someone I need to connect with. And, always, a running tally of what my little gremlin needs. Life, death, and more whistles, on the same note. Living side by side. Just like my sanity and insanity most days.

The Weekend

The weekend is when I close my laptop, even if my Notes app doesn’t. I may be tired, but I’ll still find ways to rally. To meet my friends for overpriced rosé. To sit on a park bench at 3pm watching my daughter play with other people’s kids. For groceries, time with my husband, the FaceTimes with my sisters, nieces, and nephews — every weekend, like clockwork.

Throughout the weekend, I'm half-thinking about Fini — how to pull people into conversations around death through culture, product, and lifestyle, rather than pushing death on them before they're ready, or even interested.

Some work sneaks in on a Sunday night. It always does, and so does death. A story five different people DM’d me. The NYT obituaries, which I read on Sundays — yes, it’s a cliché, but I read the wedding announcements too, so whatever.

Then it’s Monday again, and back to that fucking to-do list I can’t keep up with. All of it for a website that isn't live yet. But it's almost there. And it's going to be beautiful.

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P.S. Happy 4th. America's 250, which in my line of work, is a very good run 🇺🇸

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I met Scott in July 2011. I’d just toured ten shoebox apartments in a single day and was roughly 12 hours away from signing a lease in Times Square. That’s how new I was to New York.

We were having a drink at Walkers when my sister said her friend Scott was coming by. He walked in wearing American flag swim shorts, a Raiders hat, and a Jansport with a volleyball sticking out of it. He sat down, ordered a gin martini with the confidence of a man who has never once second-guessed a decision, looked at me, and said, “There is no fucking way you’re living in Times Square.”

This is my first Scott story. It’s also the best advice I ever got.

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One day, one of his kids is bound to ask me, "Do you remember the first time you met my dad?" This is the story I'll tell.

There are plenty of things to be afraid of after someone dies. The one that scared me most (and it’s a competitive field), was this: will we be able to do Scott justice when we tell his kids about him?

As they grow up. Middle school. College. 21. The first apartment, where someone will have to explain that their dad would’ve had a lotttt to say about it. Will they actually know him? Or just nod along when people tell them, “God, that's so your dad” and have to take our word for it.

Facts don’t keep a person alive, stories do. And every one of these lines has a hundred stories behind it.

That he loved his family, my sister most of all. That his nickname was Pup. That he could turn any flat surface into a beer pong table. That USC football Saturdays were sacred. That vacation wasn’t a luxury; it was a priority. That he never met a dinner reservation, beach volleyball game, or short-sleeve button-down he didn’t like. That if he teased you, you were in. That he made everything more fun.

And that a few days before he died, he made an eagle at Rancho and celebrated like he’d just won the Masters.

One day someone will tell his kids they’re just like their dad. I want them to know what that means.

I only got Scott from 25 on. I can tell the stories from there, but it will take his childhood best friends, or his parents, to talk about what he was like at 4, 10, or 17.

Our moments together were limited. Scott was the reminder that everyone’s are.

In the days after he died, the house was full of so many people. Everyone who knew him, every story he had, all in one place. I felt desperate to collect as many as we could. While the people who could tell them were still around.

So that’s what we did. One morning in March, at 9 am (because grief makes you do weird administrative things), we made an email address — ScootsStories@gmail.com — and texted everyone.

We wanted them all. So that when his kids ask the things we’d have no way of knowing, maybe we’d know.

The email worked…for a while. Then, like the Erewhon deliveries and the “how are you holding up?” texts, people moved on. I get it. Life kept going. But his kids are older now, and we need more.

And bluntly, I want to know Scott more than I got to. We can’t make new memories with him. As Alex Warren said (and I'd like the record to reflect that I have a daughter, a 401(k), and no business being this devoted to a 24-year-old) “people die twice. The second time is when we stop telling their stories.”

I don’t want him to be frozen in time, or for our memories to become a blur. I heard that fear in a conversation between Pete Davidson and Michael Gandolfini — two people who lost their dads young. Even with all the video footage in the world, Michael said his dad fades a little every day; that he forgets his hands, his voice.

You keep them by alive talking about them, which gets harder, not easier, as time goes on. That’s why the email worked at first. We were all overflowing with stories and he was still someone we had just seen. Now, it’s been years.

How do you keep someone from fading? How do you not lose them a second time?

I won’t pretend I figured it out. Fuck, I haven’t figured any of this out. But I will tell you that I have a place to start.

Last year at an end-of-life conference, someone said: the next time someone tells you their person died, don’t say “I’m sorry to hear that” and end the conversation. Ask for their name. Ask for a story.

“I’m so sorry. What was their name?”

“I’m so sorry. Tell me about them — what were they like?”

P.S. Worth the watch: Right after I finished writing this, I listened to Mikaela Shiffrin on Anderson Cooper's All There Is. Her dad, Jeff, died suddenly in 2020, and she described the exact fear Pete and Michael have — that the memories fade until you're left with a handful you have to reach for.

More where this came from…

Welcome to my quarterly account of how death and grief keep showing up in everything you’re already reading, watching, or sending to friends.

The TL;DR is that we can count on death never having a down quarter. There’s no competition and no exceptions; it’s a product everyone buys eventually — we just don’t market it that way. We call it biohacking, estate planning, or even a bucket list.

It’s June, and outside of random Pomeranians, whatever my daughter is destroying, and clothes I keep almost buying, most of what I photograph or screenshot is about death. You’re getting the highlights — I know, it’s still long. Brevity is not my gift.

Father’s Day is Sunday.

Everyone is navigating it differently. Be gentle, be curious. If someone lost their dad, don’t be afraid to ask about them. You’re not reminding them they died — trust me, they haven’t forgotten. You’re showing them you care.

One of the most useful pieces of death etiquette I’ve learned doing this: when someone tells you they’ve lost someone, ask their name. Then ask, what were they like? Most people ask about the death. Ask about the life. Give them a chance to tell you about their dad.

Chrissy Teigen just lost her father — “I woke up with a daddy and went to bed without one,” she wrote on Instagram last week. A few days later, she removed the post because she said it made her too sad to see. That’s grief for ya.

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Q2 at a Glance:

Market penetration: 100%. It always is.

Gains across every segment:

• Tech. Meta patented a way to keep you posting after you’re dead.

• Wellness. The longevity industry raised another round to outrun the product.

• Travel. Resorts started selling grief by the night.

• Retail. Supreme dropped a red casket.

• Sports. Karl-Anthony Towns dedicated the Knicks' first title in 53 years to his dead mom.

• Entertainment. Hamnet won Best Actress for a mother burying her son.

• Music. Alex Warren played his dead dad a song through a Spotify x Liquid Death urn. (I own one too, naturally.)

Departures: a Grateful Dead founder (Bob Wier, 78), an immortal action hero (Chuck Norris, 86), a face of millennial adolescence (James Van Der Beek, 48), creator of the 24-hour news cycle (Ted Turner, 87) — and a civil rights pioneer (Claudette Colvin, 86).

Outlook: unchanged.

AND THERE’S MORE…

REST IN…THE CLOUD

Tech, and the part of you that stays online.

• AI is coming for grief. First the deadbots, now a whole grief-tech industry. Seance AI lets you text a ghost version of someone for free; others build voice clones and lifelike video avatars. Talking to the dead used to take a Ouija board. Now it’s an app.

• You have a digital estate. You’ve just never called it that. The photo library, the Venmo debts, the Spotify playlists, the Sephora points — all of it meant to be passed down. Who’s your “data heir” when you go offline?

BUYING TIME

Wellness, beauty, and the people paying not to die.

• Anti-aging is dead — long live longevity. Dior, Shiseido and Lancôme all swapped the word this year, and a dermatologist told CNN it’s the same thing, renamed. Death’s turn in the focus group can’t be far behind.

• Kiss the ring. A study this spring confirmed the Oura ring can read your “cardiovascular age” off your pulse while you sleep. Every morning, millions wake up and ask a ring how alive they are.

FINAL DESTINATIONS

Travel, and the trips that are really about death.

• Now booking blue zones worldwide. Travel companies are selling weeks in the handful of places people live to 100 — Okinawa, Sardinia, Costa Rica. These centenarians eat beans instead of supplements, know their neighbors instead of their biomarkers, and outlive us all.

• Mars is the last resort. Celestis is taking reservations for the first 300 to send ashes — or DNA — to the Red Planet, $24,995 a spot. The first humans to reach it won’t be alive.

DEATH SELLS

Fashion, film, and the business of death.

• Valentino died, and the red still sells. He dressed Jackie Kennedy’s wedding and Julia Roberts’ Oscar, then died in January at 93. Taschen’s tribute book — his signature red, 2,000 copies — was already a collector’s item. Nothing appreciates like a dead artist.

• You can be composted now. For about $5,000, more than a dozen states will turn you into a pickup truck’s worth of soil. Arizona’s bill is known as “Grandpa in the Garden.”

THE EMPTY SEAT

Sports, and who wasn’t there to see it.

• For the friend who lives and dies with their team: Turns out they can still be brought to the game after they’re gone. A dad’s ashes to the Super Bowl, a husband’s to the NBA Finals. Some things you don’t watch without them.

• Team USA won it for their teammate. Their first hockey gold since the Miracle on Ice — then a lap with the No. 13 jersey of Johnny Gaudreau, killed by a drunk driver in 2024, as his parents watched from the stands.

TEXT A FRIEND

Five things you probably didn’t know an hour ago. Now you can’t unknow them.

• Costco now sells Titan caskets. Pet ones too.

• For $400, NYers can scan their bodies for what might kill them before it does.

• According to T-Swift’s producer, Jack Antonoff, grief is an effective bullshit filter.

• 52% of parents want to teach their kids about grief before age six. The rest of us learned when our dog went to “the farm.”

• Elmo won an Emmy for grief.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dad’s out there. Scott was a great one.

FIN.

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I’m not a love-at-first-sight person. Just ask my husband. We were a slow burn. We liked and then loved. Honestly, naming Fini felt exactly the same.

It was like dating. Once a week, our branding agency walked me through new names while I sat on the other side of a MacBook with a broken camera.

The first name was one I brought in myself — Guide You Out. I heard it in a CorePower yoga class a few months after Scott died. Something between the humidity and the savasana made “Trust that I’ll guide you out when it’s time” sound like the perfect idea. That’s what people wanted in grief, right? For someone to hold their hand and guide them through. I’d call it GYO for short. It would be perfect. Except, then it wasn’t. Our conversation made it through drinks but not dinner.

We tried Closing Times (too on the nose), Sheeva (I’m Jew-ish, but not Jewish, ya know?), Mouri (come on!?), Embers (too Harry Potter!), Stillness (I’ve still never met her), and another one I lobbed into the mix, Nothing Dies Pretty (anti-aging is proving us wrong daily).

So, onto the next one. The graveyard of names kept filling up.

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Fini was on the list from the beginning. FIN-ee (rhymes with mini). French for “finished.” My branding team loved it right away. I didn’t. My first thought was of my friend’s dog, who has the same name. My second was that people would hear “Feeny” and think of Mr. Feeny, the teacher from Boy Meets World (who, btw, turned 99 this year). Not the name correlation I was looking for.

But it stuck around.

And as good relationships do, my love for Fini evolved. We moved from drinks to a deeper getting-to-know-you phase. We built out the world, and she came alive in it — Fini as a person: A woman who used to live entirely inside the city’s forward motion, and now leaves the party earlier because life has shaped her values differently than they once were. She still drinks a martini, very cold, but now with people who know how to sit in silence too.

I couldn’t have built her on top of any of the other names. I know that now. Because when I looked back, I noticed a pattern in the ones we were rejecting.

The ones that didn’t make the cut were all names that hid the word “death” or “grief,” like Soffi, Lutto, Sheeva, or even Delores.

Or that turned grief into a joke or a pun — think Graveitas or To Be Continued — or felt like we were naming a peaceful destination, like Last Rites Club or Guide To Being Alive, instead of the messy reality that is death and coping with it.

Fini didn’t do that; it didn’t perform for me. It didn’t feel like what I’d come to expect from death and grief, which turns out to be exactly what I think modern culture needs.

We don’t need unnecessary insider language for a dialect we actually all know.

Our default is to reach for death in disguise (the whole longevity wellness trend is one example that comes to mind), but with Fini, it felt like choosing a name that could live up to its mission, without translation.

Finding the name that fit my vision helped me uplevel as an entrepreneur. Once I knew the name, it was easier to move brand development forward. All of a sudden, I had an opinion on the colors, the logo, and the way Fini should come alive across an editorial platform.

The name didn’t give me purpose or a mission. I had those before I ever found a name. But it did offer a lens. It was less of an “aha” moment and more like, “Hi, nice to meet you. Now. Where should we go from here?”

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It was 2024. The day after Valentine’s Day. I was on the phone with my brother-in-law, Scott, as he walked into his usual Thursday night volleyball game in LA. We were talking about our ski trip to Colorado that Saturday. The snow was supposed to be terrible, but it didn’t matter — we’d still have fun. My older sister was flying back from New York to LA. Scott said, “Gotta go, bad girl, I’ll call you after.”

Two hours later, my phone rang. It was Scott’s mom. Scott had collapsed on the court. An ambulance had taken him to the hospital.

My first thought was that he’d had a couple of margaritas before the game and was dehydrated. I figured he was probably lying in the back of an ambulance getting an IV. While she was telling me everything she knew, I was texting him: Are you ok? What’s going on? I’m talking to your mom.

It didn’t cross my mind for a second that the next call would be that Scott had died. No one expected him to die. But he did die. We were alive. He died. We were instantly different.

His kids’ lives changed forever. His wife’s life changed forever.

And while not in the same way as them, we (his friends, his in-laws, his coworkers) were changed forever by losing him.

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I think if you let it, the impact of mortality can change you at any time. Culture is full of proof. The loss of a friend brings art to life. A deathbed promise is the reason Scary Movie 6 exists — all 1 hour and 36 minutes of it. Or losing your best friend can lead you to build the modern editorial platform for death, grief, and everything that follows.

This is my story. His death is why Fini exists.

When Scott died, my mind went straight to logistics. Flights. Calls. Instacart orders for enough cups and plates for everyone coming to my sister’s house. I started moving without thinking. And then it was done — and all that was left was the biggest, most unanswered question: how the fuck do I support my sister through a different kind of grief than the one I was feeling?

Even though grief looks so different for everyone, I still wanted a starting point — one place that could tell me what to do, what to expect, how other people were feeling, what comes next... or even what to text back when the red bubble says 220.

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I came up short. There was no one place to go. Just 17 open tabs, all pointing to different blogs, Instagrams, or Reddit threads.

When you get engaged, you go to The Knot.

When you want a new version of yourself, you go to Goop.

When you want to know what size fruit your baby is, you go to The Bump.

But here? For death? Grief? Nothing.

That’s the gap. Fini is the place. A home where stories live next to each other — from your favorite follow to your neighbor — and start to form a clearer picture of how death is always a part of everyday life. Because when it comes to death, you don’t want ten different places to look. You want one place with ten different perspectives.

The fight over who gets the house after a parent dies is a money story. The last meal someone asked for, or cooked, or never finished is a food story. Sleeping with someone for the first time after your husband dies is one of the most alive and complicated sex stories there is. We tell these stories constantly. We just cut the death out of them and call that tact.

That’s why I’m building Fini. One place. Stories from writers of all ages, experiences, and backgrounds, sharing their own way of seeing death, grief and end-of-life. Each offering new ways to understand, move through, and bring personality, even beauty, into moments that we usually treat as black and white. Before the full site launches in the fall, I’m letting you in on what it takes to build an editorial destination that combines mortality and culture. One newsletter at a time.

Because death isn’t separate from life. We just looked away.

Before Scott died, I wasn’t looking either.

Now I am.

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