Months before she died, my great Aunt Sandra took me to lunch.
Over Pad Thai she asked me to plan her funeral.
Well... not exactly her funeral.
A party.
She wasn't sick. She wasn't dying. As far as any of us knew, she had years ahead of her.
She had a simple vision. No women working in the kitchen. Everything catered. Children should have something fun to do. And everyone should leave with a gift to remember the day.
She had even accounted for the expense generously in her will.
Less than a year later, I was carrying out those instructions.
There were tacos. Bounce houses. Yard games. Snow cones. Children running everywhere. And as people left, each one carried home a decorative plate.
It did not feel like a funeral.
It felt like Sandra.
There was nobody like Sandra. She almost always wore the same pair of white capris with an elastic waist and a red button-up blouse. Her house was comfortably cluttered. So was her car.
If you visited her, you'd quickly discover the things she collected: decorative plates from places she'd visited and refrigerator magnets shaped like the states she'd explored. She was missing only a few.
Her coffee table was made from a single cross-section of an enormous tree. There was almost always a deck of cards waiting for whoever came by.
And if you played cards with Sandra… Don't expect mercy.
Sandra never married or had children of her own, but perhaps her influence spread farther because of it.
She fought for women in sports. Took nieces and nephews on adventures. Never forgot my birthday and took my children to ice cream on theirs.
When she died, she left money to every direct descendant of her parents. She also left generous gifts to organizations she believed would continue making a difference long after she was gone.
A few weeks after Sandra's celebration, I was on a coaching call with a woman.
"I can't keep up," she said. "I get the kitchen clean, and five minutes later it's a mess again. I answer my emails, and twenty more appear. I feel like I'm failing all the time."
Somewhere along the way, she'd come to believe that a successful life is a life where everything gets done.
I've had versions of that same conversation dozens of times. Sometimes it's the house. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes it's parenting. Sometimes it's relationships.
The details change.
The feeling doesn't.
People come hoping I'll teach them how to fit more into their lives - how to become more productive, more efficient, more organized. They think they're asking me how to get more done.
They're actually trying to figure out what deserves a piece of their life.
So I ask them, "What do you want your gravestone to say?"
They usually laugh.
Then I continue.
"Here lies Shawna. Her email inbox was always empty" or "Her kitchen was always spotless."
We laugh together.
Because suddenly it's obvious.
No one wants that to be the story of their life.
But then I ask one more question.
"If that's not the story you want told at the end... why is it the story you're living today?"
Then it gets quiet. Somewhere along the way, most of us begin serving a scorecard we never consciously chose. These defaults are powerful because they rarely announce themselves. We inherit them quietly - from our culture, our families, our peers, and the endless expectations around us.
In trying to be responsible, we often become distracted from what is truly important.
Stephen Covey warned that we can spend years climbing a ladder only to discover it was leaning against the wrong wall. I see the truth of that almost every day in my coaching practice.
Most people don't actually have a time-management problem.
They have an alignment problem.
Ask someone what matters most and you'll hear words like family, faith, health, generosity, peace, connection, and learning. Then quietly watch how they spend the next thirty days. Would you reach the same conclusion?
We don't become our priorities.
We become whatever we're repeatedly willing to give our lives to.
Sometimes they match. Sometimes they don't. That's not meant to create guilt. It's meant to create awareness. Because awareness gives us back our agency.
I wonder what would happen if more of us paused long enough to ask just one.
Is this worthy of a piece of my one life?
Because whether we choose it or not… We're all building the story someone will someday tell of us.
Looking back, I don't think Sandra planned a beautiful celebration of life.
She simply lived a life that made the celebration inevitable.
The party wasn't Sandra's story.
It simply revealed the one she'd been writing all along.