Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully

5 Star Review

Click HERE to Purchase Your Copy Today!

Editorial Book Review:

By Samantha Borcy

Julie Wright Halbert was a national education lawyer, an advocate whose cases reached the Supreme Court, when her husband Jim was diagnosed with cancer in 2018. Three weeks later, he was gone. He was fifty-one years old. What followed for her was not just grief but a reckoning with how completely unprepared most of us are for loss, how little our culture teaches us about dying, and how the avoidance of that subject costs us something essential in the way we live. Live and Die Awake: On Love, Loss, and Living Fully is the book that grew from that reckoning.

Halbert has since trained as a certified death doula, an end-of-life educator, and a transformational soul coach, and her credentials are evident on every page, not in a clinical way but in the way of someone who has thought very carefully about what actually helps people move through grief rather than around it. She has become, as she puts it, a voice for grief literacy, a term that captures something important: the idea that grieving is a skill, something that can be learned and practiced, something that our silence around death has left most of us without.

The book is organized to function as an active experience rather than a passive read. Guided meditations and reflection pauses invite readers to bring their own losses into the conversation, making Live and Die Awake less a memoir than a companion for the journey that grief requires. Halbert writes with the warmth and directness of someone who has sat with people in their hardest moments, and she brings to the subject both the precision of a legal mind and the tenderness of someone who has been there.

The central argument is as simple as it is demanding: that learning to face death honestly is not morbid but liberating, and that the people who live most fully are the ones who have stopped pretending that the end is not coming. This is a book for anyone navigating loss, and also for anyone who loves someone they will one day lose, which is everyone.

About the Author

Julie Wright Halbert

Julie Wright Halbert, Esq., is a transformational speaker, end-of-life educator, grief literacy advocate, and founder of Rising Phoenix LIFE. Through her work, she helps individuals, organizations, and communities navigate loss, life transitions, and healing with greater presence, courage, compassion, and love.

After the death of her husband, Jim, Julie was forced to rebuild her life, identity, and understanding of what it means to love, grieve, and live fully. That journey became the foundation of her work and her mission to help others transform loss into deeper meaning, connection, and purpose.

A certified transformational soul coach, trained death doula through Going with Grace, and volunteer with Empath Health Tidewell, Julie speaks on grief literacy, resilience, end-of-life awareness, conscious living, and transformation through loss.

Before founding Rising Phoenix LIFE, Julie spent nearly three decades as a legislative counsel and national education-policy attorney. Today, she brings that same depth, integrity, and commitment to service to the deeply human work of grieving, healing, and living awake.

Julie is the mother of two beloved sons, Jacob and William. Through Live and Die Awake, she invites readers to discover how love endures and how grief can become a doorway to living fully.