87 Decisions in 3 Days: What Nobody Tells You About Dying Without a Plan

When someone you love dies, you have roughly 72 hours to make 87 decisions, while your brain is flooded with grief and your world has just collapsed.

Stephen Garrett has spent over 40 years as a death doula, grief counsellor, cremation specialist and ceremonialist. He has sat with the dying, walked families through the aftermath, and watched what happens when people are prepared and when they are not. The difference, he says, is staggering.

In this conversation Stephen talks about what unexpressed grief does to a person, why one in three families stops speaking after a death, and the story of his first client, a 96-year-old woman who wanted to die in her garden — and what it took to make that happen.