Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - This might be the most unusual dinner invitation you have ever received – it is certainly the strangest I have ever made! If you accept this invitation, I think you will be in for a remarkable evening of conversation.

Michael Lindner and Joel Manning have begun a new concept in Puerto Vallarta - home health care, palliative care, and hospice care services in the privacy of the patient's own home. Please join them for dinner and a conversation that people simply are not having: death and dying.

This is not meant to be a morbid conversation, but rather it is intended to be the most human of conversations. Through the sharing of our thoughts and feelings on this subject, we can more readily move through our fears, shed inhibitions, and forge a deeper understanding and connection with our loved ones. How we die is one of the most important conversations we aren't having. It is less a conversation about death and more of a conversation about living life to its fullest with the acknowledgement of our mortality.

Some of the conversation topics might include:

• Are you afraid to die? Can you explain your answer?

• Language and words are powerful. Why don't we use the words "dying" or "death" or "dead"? We prefer to use softer words such as "passing", "transition" or "no longer with us". Does this have a benefit to us?

• If you were to write your own obituary, what would it say?

• If you could write the screenplay of your death - not the funeral, but the actual death - what would it look like?

Please email me at exkhan(at)usfamily.net if you will join us at 7:00 pm on Wednesday, October 18, at Fusion Gourmet, Calle Pilitas #156 (corner of Pilitas and Amapas) in Old Town. Good news - on Wednesdays, all dinner entrees at Fusion Gourmet are 50% off!