Ask yourself this: What will be most important to you when the time comes to die? We know it’s a tough question, and one that patients, their families and loved ones, and their clinicians may avoid discussing. The result of putting off this conversation is that people often experience their final moments in a hospital room hooked up to machines, which isn’t what they would actually want. It needn’t go this way. A program we’re involved with at Ariadne Labs, a joint center of innovation between the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has made good progress changing the way patients and their doctors talk about death so that, in the end, patients’ wishes and their experience are aligned.