Something terrifying happens when you have a book contract and zero ideas for the book. It's just you, a laptop and a blindingly blank page. I'd been considering and discarding ideas for my new novel for months, but the only one that kept returning was death. Not in a morbid way, but I was 51 and the only certainty was that I'd entered my "second half". The end point was closer than the beginning. Death, for the first time, felt like a possibility.

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And it seemed a cultural shift was happening. Around the world, death was on the agenda. Conferences and magazine articles were popping up. Death talk was no longer taboo. People were training as death walkers - a type of doula who gently stewards you through dying (and its admin) and into death.

Friends hitting middle age were thinking the same way as me: How long do I have? Am I yet to do my best work? Do I need a bucket list?

But strolling through my NSW Southern Highlands village, surrounded by stunning gardens and excellent coffee shops, my hips were getting dodgier and my tinnitus more deafening. I was an ageing, sleep-deprived menopausal woman who didn't have nearly enough superannuation to retire at 60. And did I even have that long?

Could I write about all this? It felt like a risk. My book contract specified that I was to produce 80,000-100,000 words of "uplit". I knew my publisher wanted something uplifting, funny, mysterious, pathos-filled and heartwarming (by the final page the good people prevail, karma arrives for the baddies, and all is right with the world).

Could I serve up sufficient humour and heart with my death ramblings? My book deadline was fast approaching. If I wasn't thinking about death before, I was now. I'd already spent the advance.

I awoke on my 52nd birthday and reached for my phone. My #deathwalker hashtag threw me up a picture of Australia's most renowned practitioner of this oddly-named profession. She runs courses on death and created a charitable centre in Mullumbimby providing end-of-life and after-death services. This particular woman is the doyenne of Aussie........

© Canberra Times