Saturday, November 2, 2024

Don’t avoid the end-of-life talk with your aging parents. Here’s how to start the conversation

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Even though it’s an inevitability for every person on the planet, most Americans don’t like to talk about their own death. Only 22% of people in the U.S. have documented their end-of-life wishes, according to a study by VITAS Healthcare. That means that for the other 78%, it’s up to loved ones to muddle through the myriad of necessary decisions in the event of terminal illness and death.

Treating death as a taboo topic is ingrained behavior for many Americans, says Lisa Pahl, LCSW. Pahl, a hospice social worker whose intimate view of the death process in her work led to the development of The Death Deck, a game specifically created to help ease the discomfort around death discussions.

The deck’s multiple-choice and open-ended questions explore all kinds of death-related subjects, such as who you’d like to write your obituary, how often you think about death, and whether you’d choose to live forever, if given the choice.

“We aren’t typically exposed to open conversations about death and dying—that’s just how many of us are raised,” says Pahl. “People will often say things like, ‘Oh, don’t talk about that. It’s too morbid. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.’ So, we started the deck to try to help people have this conversation in a more lighthearted way. We came at it with the idea that if we can just get people to answer a couple of questions, then the conversation has begun.”

When it comes to having these types of talks with family members, Pahl has spent a lot of time thinking about how to approach it: What is important to find out? When is the right time to do it? How do you start? Ultimately, she says, the most important thing is to try.

“Avoiding the topic doesn’t keep death from happening,” Pahl says. “When I provide bereavement support to families in the months that follow a death, there’s a lot of second guessing that happens, most often because there weren’t conversations about what the dying person would want in those final days. Having those conversations proactively can actually bring you closer and strengthen relationships.”

Here’s how to get started.

Before you sit down with your parents, partner, or other important loved one, take stock of what details would be helpful to know in the event of their end-of-life care or death. At the most basic level, they need advanced directives (the legal document that outlines your wishes for medical care if you’re unable to communicate them yourself), a living will and trust, and durable power of attorney, as well as access to account passwords. But beyond these big preparations, there are other questions to consider, such as:

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