Come In.

You've been reading. Now it's time to begin.

This is the last post in the series on Sofreh.

And I want to be honest with you.

When I started writing these, I wasn’t sure a Persian restaurant in Brooklyn had anything to teach me about dying. About the work I do. About what it means to sit with someone at the end of their life and simply stay.

I was wrong.

nasim Alikhani opened Sofreh at 59 with no restaurant experience, a lifetime of cooking for everyone she loved, and a question she’d been willing to live inside of long enough to find an answer worth acting on.

I came to this work through a different door.

With time being present with dying people and their families. Hospice rooms. Hard conversations.

The particular kind of listening that happens when someone finally says the true thing out loud, and the room gets very quiet, and you don’t look away.

All of it was preparation I couldn’t have named.

Priya Parker wrote that ‘a gathering that doesn’t change you isn’t really a gathering.’

I’ve been changed by every room I’ve sat in.

Every family I’ve accompanied.

Every cohort that showed up did the uncomfortable work and left carrying something they didn’t have before.

That’s not incidental to this work. It’s the whole point.

What Nasim understands — what I’ve come to understand alongside her, through Priya’s generous lens — is that how we host people through hard things matters as much as what we know.

The salt you don’t put on the table. The staff you feed before the guests arrive.

The point of view you hold is clear enough that the right people can find their way to you.

The temporary world you build, and what people carry back from it.

During this ‘Lessons from Sofreh’ series, I invited you into a conversation that most people spend years avoiding.

Not because avoidance is comfortable — it isn’t, as anyone who has watched a family navigate crisis without a plan can tell you — but because starting feels harder than waiting.

It isn’t.

Starting is the one thing that changes everything.

Shaka Senghor wrote that the work doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be a process. It has to be progress.

(I love this and his inspiring book, How To Be Free, so much that he’s an invited guest for my podcast in October!)

This was a process. This series was a progress. Reading it was progress.

Sitting with the questions it raised — what is my role now, who speaks for me, what do I want the people I love to know while I can still tell them — that’s progress too.

And if you’re ready to move from progress to commitment, I’d be honored to be your navigator.

Two doors. One opens in July — Starting the Conversation Workshop, sixty minutes, designed to move you from circling to starting.

One opens in August — the Legacy Leaders Guide, five sessions, small group, the deeper work.

Both are open. Neither requires perfect timing.

Come in.

— Patricia M. Sears End-of-Life Navigator | Graceful Transitions
For more information about the Starting the Conversation Workshop and the Legacy Leaders Guide, visit linktr.ee/pmsears