A Letter From Our Founder

To all those celebrating today, happy Mother’s Day. And to all those grieving, I see you. 

Mother’s day has always been an interesting holiday for me. That’s because I grew up with lesbian moms. Having two moms meant double the food, flowers, and fun. Every year on the morning of mother’s day, my godmother Kristine would come over to help my older sister, Kate, and I make breakfast in bed for my moms. As little kids we needed adult supervision to make sure we didn’t burn the house down when attempting to make the perfect heart-shaped pancakes. 

But on Sunday, May 13, 2012, we only made a single batch of pancakes. My mother, Maureen Kearney Rowley, died on October 17, 2011. From that moment on, my life was changed forever. 

My transition to adulthood was marked by the loss of my mother during my junior year of college. She died less than two months before my 21st birthday (which we had been planning for together), and it rocked me. I was absolutely devastated, and nothing could have prepared me for it…Instead of having my first legal drink with friends and family to celebrate coming-of-age, I was over-consuming substances by myself to numb my newfound grief. I graduated from college adrift, feeling unmoored and unsure of what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew was that I wanted to enjoy what was left of it because why not, if you could die tomorrow? I adopted a “go big or go home” attitude and ended up becoming a wedding planner for the rich and famous in Aspen. 

Interestingly, years later, it was at a Colorado wedding (where I was a guest, not the planner) that I took another unexpected step in the journey that began with my mother’s death.  

On a sunny August morning in Boulder, I woke up excited and energized for the day of joyful festivities ahead of me. I was up in the mountains to celebrate the wedding of a couple I cherish dearly. The bride was a dear friend whom I’d initially bonded with over losing a parent around the same age, and she’d asked me to read a beautiful poem about lost loved ones during the ceremony. Little did I know the poem would soon take on new meaning when, within hours of waking, we received the devastating news: A guest (one of the bride and groom’s close friends from college) had tragically died the night before. He was 30 years old—the same age as me. 

As a former wedding planner, the juxtaposition of a death at a wedding sent my mind into a flurry of questions: 

Who would notify the family? How would they break the news? 

When and how would they get his body back to his hometown of Massachusetts?

What would the obituary say, and who would write it?

Who would help the family plan the funeral? Would my friends have to miss their honeymoon to attend?

According to The Knot, it takes 15 months on average to plan a wedding. Meanwhile, most funerals are thrown together in a matter of days. (When my mom died, we planned her funeral in two weeks.) In most people’s minds, weddings and funerals are polar opposites on the spectrum of important events. And yet, both funerals and weddings are, at least in theory, a celebration of life and love. They both look to tradition, ritual, and ceremony to mark a rite of passage, an important moment of transition; they gather family and community as witnesses and participants to honor the importance of what is taking place.  

Looking back, the wedding was a pivotal moment that sparked my deeper life’s mission: to reimagine end-of-life care and transform the denial of death into a celebration of life. 

For death is not the opposite of life, but an integral part of life. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that we shouldn’t grieve. But it means that if we can expand ourselves to hold both the joy and the pain, the love and the grief, we might come into a relationship with death that is life-affirming rather than fear-based. 

Whether death is expected or not, we will never be ready. Death has a finality that you can’t 100% prepare for. However, what we can do and what we can control is how we celebrate and honor someone’s life. We can talk about it. And we can share our end-of-life wishes to alleviate some of the pain for loved ones when we die. 

And that’s what we are here to do.

Allow me to introduce myself: For those of you who know me, and those who don't, I’m Maura McInerney-Rowley, founder of Hello, Mortal, and I'm so glad you're here.

When we first began dreaming up this newsletter, I had hoped that people like you would read it. But when it comes to an emotionally complex and taboo topic like death—one that many people have a great deal of unconscious fear and resistance around—you can never be sure quite how your message will be received.

And I’m happy to report that we’ve been blown away by the response. Every other Sunday, 600+ fellow mortals take 5-10 minutes out of their morning to contemplate mortality with the intention of living a fuller life right now. We’ve received so many heartfelt responses about your own journeys with grief, loss, death and impermanence, and your own insights and stories about how contemplating mortality has changed you. We’ve been touched and inspired by your wisdom and reflections. 

I’m a death doula and former hospice director, building tools and working in the end-of-life space. But more fundamentally, I’m just a human being who has been forced to confront my own mortality. I’m just a regular person who, like countless others, has experienced the pain of losing someone I love. In that regard, I'm no different from you. We stand on equal ground—we're both alive now, and we'll both die one day. 

I'm here because I believe that living in a death-denying society harms us all in ways we’re generally not aware of. And I believe in my heart that we’d all be better off if we could find the courage and curiosity to have candid and compassionate conversations about it. 

I’m here to serve you as a peer and partner in contemplating, preparing for, and managing the universal human experience that awaits us all–death. 

My aim is to empower you to cultivate a more mindful relationship with death through the practice of contemplating mortality. By encouraging you to accept and even embrace the inevitability of death, my goal is to facilitate your journey toward living a more authentic and meaningful life. 

Why? Because the number-one regret of the dying is wishing they had the courage to live a life true to themselves rather than the life that others expected of them. My personal and professional experiences with loss have confirmed this, and have shown me how talking about death can awaken us to the lives we’re truly meant to be living. 

I’m so grateful you’ve chosen to join us on this journey, and I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to respond to this email to share what brought you here and why this topic matters to you.

More soon, 

Maura