Imagine you have only six months left to live. Where would you like to die? What would you like your family to know? How would you like to spend your last days? Watching EastEnders? Listening to your favourite music? What would you want to happen at your funeral?

The answers to these questions matter. If we respect the choices we make in life, it is even more important to honour them as life draws to a close.

And yet conversations about how people want to die are all too often closed before they are started.

"Don't be silly" is perhaps the most common response when someone says: "I'm dying".

"Have a cup of tea," is another.

When Karen Beckett was family liaison coordinator with Healthcare at Home she took part in a pilot project to help train staff in care homes who were looking after those at the end of their lives.

Her role was to encourage the homes to help the residents to think about and write down their preferences for the last stages of their lives - known as end of live plans. This meant she had to enable staff to confront, to some extent, their own fears of dying. Otherwise, how can they be alongside those who are facing it for themselves? As part of the training, Karen invited staff to imagine they only have a few months to live, to spend ten minutes sitting quietly with that thought and then write down what their dying wishes were.

The coalition Dying Matters offers a checklist of the important areas that some people leave it too late to discuss.

These are:

• The type of care someone would like towards the end of their life
• Where they would like to die
• Whether they want to be resuscitated or not
• Funeral arrangements
• Care of dependents
• Organ donation
• How they'd like to be remembered
• Whether they have any particular worries they'd like to discuss about being ill and dying
• What they'd like people to know before they die.

For the purposes of Karen's exercise, people do not have to share their writing, but they were invited to talk about how it made them feel.

Karen said sadness was the most common feeling. Guilt was another.

"People feel sad and guilty because of the number of times someone they were looking after was trying to have a conversation and they closed it off," said Karen.

"They imagine what a relief it would be to someone who was dying to be able to talk about their wishes.

"Sometimes people cry and say: 'I could have done this with my nan. I didn't know you could do this.'

"Talking about dying is not just for the professionals. It's for anybody. I'll talk to the gardener, the cleaner, the cook.

"Everybody needs to be able to talk about dying."

The hopeful thing was that once they have done the exercise, people were less fearful and better motivated and equipped to be alongside those at the end of the their lives.

Image by Lizzy Cornwell.