By: Jordan Jerome
When loss arrives, women are often the ones who make the calls, sit at the bedside, comfort the children and keep the household running, with little room left for their own grief. Julie Wright Halbert knows that role from the inside, and her new book asks a question many women have never been given permission to ask: what if grief could wake us up instead of wearing us down?
In 2018, her husband, Jim, was diagnosed with cancer and was gone three weeks later. He was fifty-one. At 3:33 on a Thursday afternoon, their sons each held one of his hands. Julie rested hers on his knees. They let him go together.
“My soul did not break,” she writes. “It cracked wide open.”
Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully (Rising Phoenix LIFE, November 4, 2026) is the book she wrote on the other side of that moment: a love story, a guided healing practice and a hand reaching back for every woman who has stood where she stood.
Julie and Jim met as students at the University of Miami School of Law, where their love story began. Together they built a family, and Julie built a career spanning nearly three decades as a national education attorney with the Council of the Great City Schools, helping shape K-12 (kindergarten through high school) education policy for the nation’s largest urban school districts.
When Jim died, she discovered what so many widows do: none of that expertise could tell her how to grieve, or how to begin again.
Her path forward took a turn few would expect. In the fall of 2025, Julie trained alongside her mother, Cynthia, and became certified as a death doula with Going with Grace, the end-of-life organization founded by Alua Arthur. A mother and daughter learning side by side how to accompany the dying is its own quiet lesson: mortality can draw a family closer.
Today Julie volunteers as a death doula at the bedsides of the dying with Empath Health in Sarasota, Florida, and works as a transformational soul coach through Rising Phoenix LIFE, the organization she founded. She has become a national voice for grief literacy. Seven and a half years after Jim’s death, she writes that she carries him with love and gratitude, not sorrow. It is not a claim that grief is ever finished. It is a glimpse of what years of practice can make possible.
At the heart of the book are the Living and Dying Awake Framework™, which moves through Descent, Witnessing and Rising, and the Seven Presence Vows™. The first vow may be the most generous words a woman stretched thin can hear: I vow to return to presence. It does not demand that you stay present every moment, hold it all together or grieve the “right” way. It asks only that you come back, again and again, as many times as the day requires. Presence stops being one more thing to get right and becomes a direction you keep choosing. There is much more inside: a transformational healing arc each reader can walk at her own pace, and plain-spoken guidance on hospice, palliative care and what a death doula can offer a family.
Claire Bidwell Smith, author of Conscious Grieving, offers readers this invitation: “Read it with your heart open and your hand on your own life.” Meditations, journaling prompts and reflection pauses invite readers to stop and tend their own hearts, and QR codes open a companion library of 20 guided meditations in Halbert’s own voice, along with a poem read aloud. The library opens on November 4. The first guided meditation is free now at LiveAndDieAwake.com, a gentle place to start that asks nothing of you but presence.
As a mother who spent nearly three decades shaping policy for students in the nation’s largest urban school districts, Halbert is also working to make sure no child grieves alone. She advocates nationally for bereavement programs in schools and for grieving students to receive 504 plans, the formal support plans schools create for individual students, along with other accommodations. In Florida, she champions the expansion of the Blue Butterfly Grief Care Program of Empath Health Tidewell, so that no grieving child walks through loss without language, support and care.
Her message is one every woman can carry: grief is for everyone who lives and everyone who will die. The only question is how awake we choose to be.
For the widow and the caregiver, the daughter walking a parent toward the end, the mother helping her children through loss, and every woman who senses there must be a more awake way to live, and a more sacred way to leave.
Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully by Julie Wright Halbert publishes November 4, 2026. Pre-order your copy on Amazon, begin with the first free meditation at LiveAndDieAwake.com, and make a little room for your own grief.
