(SeaPRwire) –   In 2007, my father was in Bridgetown, Barbados, dying of intestinal cancer. It had long been his plan to die in Barbados; although he resided in Poughkeepsie, NY, he wished to be in a beautiful setting with my mother and his dearest friends.

Following a difficult flight from New York City, an oxygen tank occupying the seat beside him, my father inquired, “Can I finally let go?”

“That is the reason we are here,” my mother responded. “To let go.”

They likely held different interpretations of the question and its answer. He was seeking her consent to die. He was 55.

For my father, letting go meant returning to a place he had vacationed in recent years, the home of a close friend. He settled into a familiar, comfortable chair, upholstered in green and white with a soft, low saddle. It was well-worn, its springs deeply compressed.

On the second night of his visit, my dad called my cell phone, which was rare. I was in the midst of finals week during my first year of graduate school for architecture. I was hurrying between class and dinner, but I picked up.

“Hey, are you having fun?” I asked, refusing to accept that he was dying. “I’ll see you after my final, when you return.”

“I love you, Michael,” he replied faintly. “I am proud of you.”

Then my phone battery died before I could reply, and I had to rush home to charge it. He never answered my return calls. He was gone by the next day.

I had learned that architecture involved the creation and design of structures. My father, however, revealed that architecture is animated by the stories we tell and the memories of significant events that occur within the buildings we share. Thus, architecture functions more as an action than an object, shaping us. It is a dynamic force.

This may be why my mother later reflected that, all things considered, my father had “built a beautiful death.” He had also built a beautiful life.

On his final day, May 17, 2007, he whispered to my mother, “You are surrounded by your closest friends. You will be taken care of.” He then drifted into a sleepy haze in his chair, drifting in and out of consciousness. His friends moved him to his bed, where he passed away a few hours later. This was his last room.

Seventeen years later, when I visited that home and sat in the same chair, I contemplated his death. Was the space where he died a kind of self-medication? A form of palliative care?

Palliative care physician B.J. Miller would argue that it was. He confirmed to me that aesthetics and sensory input are therapeutic for patients, often as crucial as medical interventions as life ebbs. Upon hearing my father’s story, Miller termed his pursuit the search for “the last room.” It is an outcome not everyone can attain, but achieving it constitutes a beautiful death.

“What would it look like,” he asked me, “if we could design the last room exactly as we wish?” Could we establish centers that offer people the choice to die with dignity and closure? Of all the architectural concepts I had encountered, this was among the most original—and most beautiful.

Miller explained that hospice care typically presents one choice: to die in a hospital or at home. Homes can be emotionally complicated and heavy, while hospitals are often sterile and impersonal.

Palliative care facilities and hospices are not widely available in many communities. Although thoughtful examples exist, most are confined spaces that frequently mirror the clinical environments families hoped to avoid.

But what if a different set of choices existed? Why couldn’t we design centers where our final place to live or die is a conscious decision, allowing us to select the spaces, services, and conditions we desire before departing? This would provide immense calm for patients and support them as they approach whatever lies beyond. The mere availability of such choices would grant them peace.

When confronting death, patients often favor aesthetic choices over purely rational or scientific ones. Modern medical settings are “anaesthetic,” lacking in design. Miller characterizes them as “more numbing—deadening—than invigorating.”

When executed well, palliative medicine and hospice can serve as a bridge between the sterile, utilitarian spaces of a hospital and the soft, comforting familiarity of home. In this intermediate space, the choices of end-of-life patients demonstrate the powerful role of perception, aesthetics, and sensory input in mitigating suffering. Many seek a sense of “wholeness” that only aesthetic experiences can deliver.

Despite his early diagnosis and death, my father was fortunate to choose his pathway out of this life. Dying at home or in a hospital was not his preference. After a grueling two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer, he selected a home overlooking the sea in Barbados—a place where he knew he could release his spirit, distant from his usual life and from my siblings and me, encircled by his wife and best friends. It was a beautiful location where he could depart from the world with ease.

The last room is not merely a space we might design, but also a series of choices we could be given to contemplate a more fully lived life. It is about having the agency to select the locations, sounds, tastes, sights, and sensations that offer the greatest peace and wholeness.

Discussing death in this manner helps us build a vocabulary—a set of understandings and expectations about the built environments and sensory experiences we desire throughout our lives, not solely at the end.

In this sense, confronting mortality is our cue to start truly living today.

This excerpt was adapted from Our World in Ten Buildings by Michael P. Murphy with permission from One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.