Talking to your parents
Talking to your parents
A page for whoever is going to bring it up
Someone has to say the first sentence. People rehearse that sentence for weeks and get it wrong anyway, which turns out not to matter much. Take this along. Read it in the car, leave it in the glovebox, forget it is there. You are not meant to work through it in order.
What this is
The things families end up wishing somebody had written down. Which bank. Which doctor. Where the papers are, and who else has a key. Their answers, in their words, on paper you can put on a shelf.
What this is not
Not a will, and no substitute for one. Nobody is grading this and there is nothing to finish today. If there is something they would rather not get into, leave it out. A gap the family knows about is easier to deal with than an answer somebody guessed at.
One way to open it
I put my own papers in order last month – it took an afternoon. Could we do yours together sometime, so I am not guessing at your bank or your doctor if you ever land in the hospital?
Ways in, topic by topic
The same openers the walkthrough uses on screen. Use them as they are, or put them in your own words. They are here for the moments when nothing comes to mind.
About them
I was filling in a form the other day and realized I don’t know your mother’s maiden name. I only ever knew her as Grandma.
Their key people
If anything ever happened, who would you want us to call first to sort out the practical side?
Who around here has your spare key these days?
If it ever came to it, who would you want looking after them?
Papers and where they live
We’ve been organizing our own papers. Do you have a will tucked away somewhere, or is that still on the list?
When you did the will, did you set up a trust as well, or just the one document?
Their accounts, names only
Are you still with the same bank you’ve always been with, or has that multiplied over the years?
Did you ever end up buying any of that Bitcoin everyone was talking about?
Does the Social Security still land on the same day every month, or have they moved it around?
Their policies
Do you still have that life policy from work, or did that end when you retired?
Home, vehicles, and keys
Do you know where the deeds to this place actually live? Ours took me two weeks to find.
Their digital life
How do you keep track of all your passwords these days, little notebook or one of those apps?
Health at a glance
What’s on the pill organizer these days? I’d love to have it written down somewhere just in case.
Did you ever tick the donor box when you renewed your license? I could never decide.
Their animals
If you two ever went on a very long cruise, who gets the dog?
How they’d like to be celebrated
You’ve been to a lot of these over the years. What do you think makes a good one?
Letters to the family
If you ever wanted to write something down for the grandchildren to have later on, I’d help you with it. No rush.
The first two weeks
If you ever ended up in the hospital for a week, who would you want us to call first to sort things out?
An afternoon is plenty. Whatever you do not get to, you will get to next time.
Where these came from
These are the openers Nestbound offers while it walks you through the questions, and the same ones it prints on a page you can take with you. They are not research findings, and nobody clinical has approved them. They are sentences that sounded like something a person would say, written by the people who made the app and tested on their own families.
These openers come out of Nestbound, which turns an afternoon of your answers into a printed binder, and the whole example binder is on this site, free to read.