Family Conversations
When you are both the executor and the family
Administering an estate while grieving, for a family who are also beneficiaries, is a combination of roles that generates most of the complaints made against executors.
Family Conversations
How to raise it, and how to keep it from going badly.
Family Conversations
The letter you leave behind
Of everything people leave, the thing most consistently valued is a letter, and it is the thing most consistently not written.
Family Conversations
Telling people that someone has died
Delivering the news is exhausting, repetitive and frequently done badly for lack of any guidance on how.
Family Conversations
Being the one who organises everything
In most families one person ends up doing the arranging, the calling and the deciding, and they are frequently the person with the least capacity to grieve.
Family Conversations
Second marriages, stepchildren and competing claims
Blended families are common and the default legal arrangements were designed for a different structure, which produces predictable and avoidable conflict.
Family Conversations
Talking to parents about money
The financial conversation is harder than the medical one, because it touches independence, inheritance and the suspicion that you are asking for your own reasons.
Family Conversations
Estrangement at the end of a life
When someone who is estranged from the family is dying, everyone involved faces decisions with no good options and a short timescale.
Family Conversations
Caring for a parent while holding everything else together
Family carers provide the overwhelming majority of care, largely unpaid and largely unnoticed, and the practical support that exists is frequently unclaimed.
Family Conversations
Talking to someone who is dying
People avoid visiting because they do not know what to say. What is wanted is almost never the right words, and the absence is what causes lasting harm.
Family Conversations
Talking to children about death
Children handle honest information far better than adults expect, and considerably worse than euphemism, which they interpret literally and find frightening.
Family Conversations
When the family disagrees
Conflict at the end of a life is usually not about the decision in front of everyone. Understanding what it is actually about is the only route through it.
Family Conversations
How to raise it: starting the conversation without a crisis
The conversation is difficult mostly because of how it usually gets started — during a health scare, at a hospital bedside, or in the middle of an argument about something else.