By: Natalia Miles
At 3:33 on a Thursday afternoon, Jim Halbert took his last breath. Their sons each held one of his hands. His wife, Julie, rested hers on his knees. They let him go together.
He was fifty-one. Three weeks earlier, he had been diagnosed with cancer. No one had told the family the time would be that short.
“My soul did not break,” Julie Wright Halbert writes. “It cracked wide open.”
That sentence opens Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully (Rising Phoenix LIFE, November 4, 2026), a book that is far more than a memoir: the story of a marriage and a sacred dying, a guided practice for healing, and a companion for every reader who has stood where she stood.
Their story started in Miami, where Julie and Jim met as students at the University of Miami School of Law. What began on that campus carried them through marriage, raising their sons and a life built side by side, all the way to that Thursday afternoon.
Halbert went on to spend 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. Jim’s death took her somewhere no law school prepares you for. In the fall of 2025, she 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. She also found a new calling as a transformational soul coach. Today she volunteers as a death doula with Empath Health in Sarasota, offers her soul coaching through Rising Phoenix LIFE, the organization she founded and the imprint that publishes her book, and is a national voice for grief literacy.
What she learned at those bedsides, and in her own unraveling and rebuilding, became the book’s central conviction: how we die is shaped by how awake we are willing to be while we live. Death, in Halbert’s telling, is not the enemy of a full life. It is a doorway into one.
Most people find that kind of clarity only after catastrophe. Halbert wants readers to find it before. Live and Die Awake offers two tools she built from her own grief: the Living and Dying Awake Framework™, a path through Descent, Witnessing and Rising, and the Seven Presence Vows™.
The first vow sets the tone: I vow to return to presence. Not to stay present every moment, which Halbert is far too honest to promise, but to come back, again and again, as many times as the day requires. Presence stops being a test you fail and becomes a direction you keep choosing. But the framework is only part of what readers will find. The book also walks them through their own arc of transformational healing, and offers a clear, compassionate introduction to hospice, palliative care and the work of death doulas.
This is grief told from the inside, not from a clinical distance. Claire Bidwell Smith, author of Conscious Grieving, puts it simply: “Read it with your heart open and your hand on your own life.” Meditations, journaling prompts, and reflection pauses run through its pages, and QR codes open a companion library of 20 guided meditations, each read by Halbert herself, along with a poem read aloud. The full library goes live on November 4. The first guided meditation is free now at LiveAndDieAwake.com.
Grieving children carry their loss into the classroom, and here Halbert’s legal career becomes her leverage. Drawing on nearly thirty years in national K-12 education policy, she now 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. At home in Florida, she champions the expansion of the Blue Butterfly Grief Care Program of Empath Health Tidewell so that no grieving child has to walk through loss without language, support, and care.
Her message reaches far beyond Miami, where her story began: grief is for everyone who lives and everyone who will die. The only question, as Halbert puts it, is how awake we choose to be.
For anyone who has loved deeply, lost suddenly, is walking beside someone through a terminal illness, or has quietly sensed 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, and begin tonight with the first meditation, free at LiveAndDieAwake.com.
