Go to your own wake. Then come back changed.

A wake is where the living gather around someone who has died.

In the old comic ballad “Finnegan’s Wake,” a hod carrier falls from a ladder and is laid out for his wake. Whiskey is splashed about, and he sits up in the coffin. James Joyce took that story for his last book, Finnegans Wake (1939), and dropped the apostrophe. The title is usually read two ways at once: the vigil kept over the dead, and waking up. The book even ends in the middle of a sentence that its first words finish, so it can be read as a circle: an ending that is also a return.

It is a famously difficult book, and you do not need to read it. You only need the pun: a wake is where the people who love you say what you meant to them — and you are the one person who is not there to hear it.

The same book sits behind it.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell co-wrote a guide to Finnegans Wake in 1944. He took the word “monomyth” from it and used it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): a person leaves the ordinary world, is tested, and comes back changed. George Lucas said Campbell’s ideas helped shape Star Wars. So the line from a Dublin wake ballad to a galaxy far away is real — a line of borrowed ideas, not a retelling.

A serious diagnosis — or the decision to talk about one — is a threshold.

Life before it and life after it are not the same. Most people cross alone, because no one tells them there is a way to do it on purpose.

Going to your own wake means hearing, while you can, what you would want said — and saying it.

Try it on an ordinary day, with the person who would speak for you. What would you want them to say about you? Who should be in the room? What should they never be asked to decide alone? Then let them answer back. The people who love you leave knowing what they would otherwise have had to guess. You leave knowing that they know.

This is a way to begin. It is not a treatment.

The picture may not fit you. A study of how people with cancer write about their illness online found both journey and battle metaphors in common use, and concluded that neither is automatically helpful or harmful. If “journey” grates, drop it. The questions still stand.

There is trial evidence for a related, clinician-led approach. In a 2011 randomized trial of 441 people near the end of life, dignity therapy — a guided conversation that becomes a document for the family — did not lower measured distress more than usual care did. But people who received it were significantly more likely to say it helped, that it improved their sense of dignity, and that it changed how their family saw them.

CareGoals is not dignity therapy, and we have not tested whether it does any of this. It is fifteen tap cards that ask you the questions a wake would answer, in about 20 minutes.