Then we celebrated my father’s 80th birthday.
“Amazing Grace” would have been out of place. But the piping sure wasn’t. Somehow the evening combined the gravitas of a memorial service with the easy sharing of a holiday dinner. And the best part of it was that my parents were there to enjoy being the center of attention.
Talking with your parents about aging and death is one of the hardest things we will ever do. But it is better to make decisions calmly and deliberately than to do so in the middle of an emergency — or its aftermath. Talking and planning are the best tools we limited humans have to manage our mortality. The bagpipes, of course, are optional.
For some years my four brothers and I had tossed around the idea for this gathering. It just seemed sensible to get together and hear about the plans my parents had made for their later years and for their estate. (My wife dubbed it a “pre-mortem” midway through the weekend, and the label instantly stuck.)
It had been hard to get traction. My parents had done some planning, but getting us kids actively and directly involved in so many facets of their lives would mean a huge role reversal. Maybe that was why I sensed that for a long time neither of them had seemed psychologically ready for such a gathering. Meanwhile, there were other, more mundane delays. Meetings with lawyers and other advisers dragged on and on. And just assembling all the documents seemed overwhelming.
As for us kids, the role reversal wasn’t easy to embrace fully. In the first place, the decisions needed to be my parents’; the same was true of the decision to get together to discuss them. None of us wanted to seem pushy (much less grasping when it came to their estate).
Then, about a year ago, everything changed. I’m still not sure why. Maybe a new set of decisions — about finances or about health care — sent my parents over the edge. Perhaps they got weary of dealing with all of them on their own. Or possibly they became aware in a way they hadn’t been before that we were willing to help. Within days of each other, both my mother and father expressed an interest in a group meeting to discuss the whole range of issues they were facing in old age.
At that point, the decision to get together became easy. My parents wanted our support, and we wanted to give it to them. Uppermost in our minds was the thought that it was better to start navigating the waters ahead before they got turbulent and before our collective ability to navigate them started to decline. (We were in our 40s and 50s, our parents in their late 70s. Experts say it’s good to start even earlier.)
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