Niki was nine years old, in a Snoopy sweatshirt in Fort Lauderdale, when her father’s sore throat turned into esophageal cancer. He was 42. Eighteen months later he was gone. Her mother — quintessential 1950s housewife, married at 20, kids by 30, widowed by 40 — had no language for grief. Hospice did not exist. Mental health was not a conversation.
Ten years later, her mother got large cell carcinoma. Brain, liver, lung. She declined aggressive treatment and died a week shy of her 51st birthday. Niki was 21. Now it was her turn.
She moved into hospice work as a bedside clinician and sat vigilance with women going through the transition. She did that work until she was 40, then moved into project management — the structured discipline that lets you put a complicated thing on paper and finish it.
Three years ago, she and her husband realized they had not updated their wills since their kids were in high school. Their kids are in their 30s now. They are grandparents. The process should have been simple. Death has been her topic for forty years. But the documentation was a maze, and she found herself wondering why.
So she called her hospice peers. They told her what they had been telling each other for decades — people are coming into hospice six days or six weeks before death, not the six months Medicare will pay for. The conversation had not changed.
What had changed was the phones. Hers, yours, ours — full of pictures and accounts and content sitting on servers we do not own. End-of-life planning was already complicated. The digital layer made it urgent.
She built ENDevo and My Final Playbook to address the gap. Four parts — legal, financial, physical, digital — designed for the woman who wants to start her own plan and for the employer who wants to offer it as a benefit.
She calls the completed plan a love letter. Her tagline is “Live fully ~ die ready.”
