Telling your children
Telling your children you’ve done this
There’s a page on this site about raising it with a parent. This is the other one, for the person who has already done the work and now has to mention it.
The writing is the part people expect to be hard. Telling somebody is usually harder.
The difficulty is that anything you say sounds like news. "I’ve put my affairs in order" lands on a son like a diagnosis, and he will spend the rest of the call trying to work out what you aren’t telling him.
The announcement is the problem, not the document
A sit-down invites a reaction. You’re asking somebody to receive information, in a room arranged for receiving it. They will look for the meaning behind it whether or not there is any.
Almost everybody who tries the formal version gets asked whether they’re ill.
Say where, not what
They don’t need to read it. They need to know it exists and which shelf it is on.
That’s the whole message, and it fits in a sentence you can say while doing something else. "If anything ever happens, the green binder in the study, and Susan has a copy."
Nobody has to respond to that. There’s nothing in it to be upset by. It sits in their memory and it does its work years later.
Tell two people
One of them will be abroad, or unreachable, or the one who took it hardest and hasn’t thought about it since.
Two people who know where it is means a binder that gets found. One person means a binder that gets found only if that person is available.
They don’t both need the same amount of detail. One needs to know where it is. The other needs to know who the first one is.
Say it while something else is happening
In the car. Doing the washing up. On the way back from somewhere. The aim is to leave them room not to react.
A hand on a folder while you’re already talking about the house does more than an agenda item.
The one who won’t discuss it
Most families have one, and pushing doesn’t work. What works is telling them once, plainly, and not requiring an answer.
They heard you. People who refuse this conversation remember it in surprising detail afterwards, and the thing they usually remember is where the binder was kept.
The other side of this conversation, for somebody raising it with a parent, is on this site too. And you can read a finished binder before you spend anything: the example binder.