I’m Lisa and Mum to 2 grown up daughters, having moved to NZ from the UK in 2001.  I live on the North Shore of Auckland with my gorgeous Kiwi husband and have worked in Recruitment for the last 30 years!  Recently I’ve also been involved in Mindfulness, Resilience and Positivity training which has been both refreshing and interesting.

I spend half of my life working out of cafes because I love the buzz and because I drink much more tea than is probably healthy!  I adore how big and how blue the NZ sky is and how close the beaches are to the city, but I miss London and pubs and having my daughters live at home!   

My Goodbye has come out of a lot of lockdown thinking.  My Dad passed away just before COVID and we were lucky to be able to see him off with a proper funeral and the many friends and family who wanted to celebrate his life.  Ironically, Dad had been incredibly organised with contact list and life policies and the like – but had left no plans around burial or cremation, church or beach or many other things.  And in the middle of grieving, and crying and death certificates and coffin choices, we had to try to figure out how Dad would have wanted to say his goodbye.  And it wasn’t fun.  

It got me thinking about what we’d think about if we were to pre-emptively plan the goodbye that we want for ourselves.  

Planning for it while we’re very alive takes the fear out of it.  Talking about all the best bits of life with a group of friends takes the work out of it – and hopefully after-planning it all now, will take some of the pain out of it for our partners and children when we do finally shuffle off this mortal coil.